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Comment by kup0 | Hacker News Reader

I am a 1PW subscription user and am happy with the product (however, seeing they are moving to Electron means that is very subject to change...)

but

Saying that "customers voted with their wallet" and chose subscriptions is disingenous

Ever since they've had subscriptions they've made the standalone license page extremely difficult to find on their site. They really didn't give regular users a "choice"- they dark-patterned them into thinking subscriptions were the only option

As forthcoming / down-to-earth as these posts from the company seem- they are full of spin. Their impossible-to-find standalone license page is a topic they seem to be avoiding.

Edit to add this small addendum: It just really bothers me on an emotional level to constantly run into this juxtaposition as a user of software/hardware: liking a product but being extremely disappointed in the company offering it.

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I fully agree. Been a standalone user for years and a coworker asked me recently how I got the standalone license because he didn’t think it existed anymore.

Even with me knowing it exists, I wasn’t able to find it on their site to send him. (Hint: you have to upgrade within the app, but only if you downloaded from their website, and only if no 1p account or trial is present)

Add other dark patterns like the extension being 1PX only by default and doesn't work with standalone. You have to cram through their website to find the legacy extension and even that isn’t straight forward. They tried very hard to hide all info of a standalone existing.

(Personal annoyance: locking new features like the redesigned autofill overlay to the subscription-only version even though the Safari extension fully supports it for standalone, but not the others.)

Agreed! Also a standalone user for years. (have about 400 passwords and security Qs in 5 vaults). Can even live with subscription (its just forking out a few bucks more), can even live with electron - at least a Linux client will be avaialable rightaway, but why no local store, Dropbox sync was working perfectly !

Yes I also ran into the legacy extension issue. The site was confusing as hell, and it seemed purposely so

> Saying that "customers voted with their wallet" and chose subscriptions is disingenous

Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable price for the 1Password service if it wasn't a step down in value from what I had before.

I have a slightly older version of 1Password and it works fine for my purposes. I've been holding off on the subscription transition because I would derive zero value from switching to subscription but I'd gain a monthly payment I didn't have before.

But the thing that irks me is the PR speak that is trying to spin the subscription change as something we, the customer voted for, when they've gone out of their way to force everyone into subscriptions and hide the standalone version. I know the standalone version of 1Password 7 exists, but I tried to find the price yesterday and gave up after a few minutes of poking around.

"We didn't choose this, you chose this!" is so distastefully dishonest that I have zero desire to engage with this company any more. Once my standalone license of 1Password 6 stops working, I'm upgrading to a competing product.

It's not dishonest. When they launched the service at 1password.com, you could choose which one you wanted when you downloaded and purchased. When they say "you chose this", they're referring to the time when that was on their site and people overwhelmingly chose the subscription. They posted this on the forums after the first year and made a pretty big deal about it and now everyone is acting like they did this in secret. It's in the release notes, it was on the site, and it was in the forums. I think they may have even emailed it to people at one point (I've been a user since v3). To say they're being dishonest is not true.

> they're referring to the time when that was on their site and people overwhelmingly chose the subscription

No, it's still misleading. People like me, who already had a working version at the time the subscription was rolled out, simply chose to do nothing or switch to a competing service. People who didn't want subscriptions saw the writing on the wall and started migrating to other products.

To suggest that their userbase wanted to voluntarily give up their paid-for software that was working just fine and swap it out for a subscription service just to get feature parity is silly. As you said, they made it clear that subscription was the way of the future and that anyone who didn't want a subscription product should look elsewhere, so we did. Let's not act surprised when their only remaining customers were those who wanted a subscription version.

> It's in the release notes, it was on the site, and it was in the forums. I think they may have even emailed it to people at one point (I've been a user since v3)

I don't see where anyone was claiming it was done in secret. It has been discussed at every step of the way on social sites like HN for years.

The secret part is that they've gone to great lengths to bury the standalone version 7 link on their website, and now they're claiming that not many people buy it. Of course they don't, because it's virtually impossible to find or even know that it exists unless someone passes you the link.

I think it depends on how they got 97%. They hide the standard version on the website, but the specific picture they show in-app[0] is pretty clear about the license option, so if it's 97% of people choosing the subscription via that screen i'd believe them.

0: https://com-agilebits-users.s3.amazonaws.com/dave/1password7...

I purchased a 1Password license years ago. I knew when I bought it that major version upgrades were not included and my feeling was that I would rather have a subscription so I could just seamlessly upgrade when new versions arrived.

Ever since they released the subscription option my upgrades have been very smooth and the features and improvements keep coming and I don't have to actively go and upgrade/purchase a license for a new version.

I don't know how to feel about switching to electron. I have many applications that are electron based and the quality is generally high but some do cause significant memory pressure on my macbook air.

As a standalone user that uses dropbox sync. I have had 0 problems upgrading from 3.x all the way to 7.x.

I disagree. When the subscription service came out, they very clearly offered both options side by side and the boxes were the exact same size, had the exact same button to proceed, and the same coloring. You were given a choice.

Starting with 1Password 7's beta, they "hid" the standalone option on the site and then removed it completely and only allowed for purchasing standalone versions through the app itself but that was announced prior to them doing it.

Maybe it was a timing thing, but I strictly remember it being different than how you describe here

The only way I even know a standalone option existed at the time that I moved to 1PW was because of reviews/comments on other sites that then led me to support pages that said "oh yeah, if you still want that version, smirk smirk, then use this special link"

There are screenshots and an archive on archive.org that shows it's not different to how I'm describing it.

It was hidden long before the 1P7 beta.

The iron law of software products: like the product -> dislike the company offering it -> dislike the product.

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