It would be. Fortunately, 1Password doesn’t do that [1].
You’re paying for an important piece of software to be maintained.
> I'm sure 1Password doesn't care one iota about loosing individual users with attitudes like this
Probably not. Emphasis on attitude.
We can have upgrades and working software that gets updates without monthly fees to do it. I also do not need their cloud and only features. They intentionally removed the local vaults specifically to force you to use their cloud. That was the last straw for me.
No, the last twenty years has show us that we can't.
If you want developers to perform ongoing work on their products, you need to accept a model where there's ongoing pay for that work.
Before they switched to subscriptions, it still worked like that: 1Password 4, 1Password 5, 1Password 6 - I paid money each time a new version came out. Sometimes I paid the same day of the release and upgraded immediately. Other times, I may have waited a little bit longer and continued with the version that I had.
Nobody's asking for a free lunch.
Where did I or OP say this?
> can have upgrades and working software that gets updates without monthly fees to do it
It’s a bad financial model.
> intentionally removed the local vaults
This is a valid disagreement.
If I am required to pay you monthly for a product there becomes less and less reason for the owner of said product to improve the product. With the hassle that comes with switching password managers (even for myself, I provide three families with this product (my parents, my sisters family)) there is a lot of friction involved with leaving a product that is stagnant that I am paying monthly for.
I was much happier with 1password when i was able to evaluate their new major version, see if any features of it were compelling to me and my extended family and make a decision wether or not it was worth the asking price. Generally speaking a major version wouldn't get huge changes over it's lifetime, maybe some bugfixes, maybe some ui improvements around it's new features (could also be considered bugfixes), any security issues that cropped up. At that point their development staff was more focused on brand new features for the next major version.
I think what we ran into, partially, with 1password is them running out of ideas for their next major version. A password manager, to a consumer, is not a super complicated product that requires a bunch features, a lot of the work is in the encryption and security which isn't really consumer facing.
