Development costs money and that's fine, but I don't like it when companies act like their pricing is based on the cost of providing a service, and the service is "syncs a single sub-megabyte file between a few devices". You can get that service a thousandfold for free. (And even if they give you more space, that's a worthless addon to almost all customers.)

In particular, the reason it's annoying to sync keepass is because of how the program is designed. There are other managers in that ecosystem that let you log in to google/microsoft/dropbox/anything and then you're done. It all syncs perfectly from then on. It's a development problem, not a need for a dedicated service tied to a specific password manager.

And when I'm considering development cost I'm going to look at things on a 5 or 10 year timeline. I think that's a reasonable length to expect a software purchase to last. On that timescale, Bitwarden is okay but 1Password is not at all a good price.

I use BitWarden and I prefer having the open source and self hosted options for using BitWarden. 1Password does not have those. Despite that, I've been strongly advocating for it at work because it easily has the most polished and refined UI/UX of all the managers I've tried.

Exactly, secrets management is a really critical need that 1Password meets for me, and I'd much rather they charge me an honest price than sell out to advertisers. These things require upkeep (not just defending against everyone trying to break in, but also keeping current on the latest technologies like passkeys), so I find the yearly price of admission is totally reasonable for 1Password's quality and importance.

> I don't get the hand-wringing when it comes to reasonably priced services. Development and infrastructure costs money.

I have no problem paying for software. But in this case I’d far prefer a one-off purchase. The only reason there are ongoing infrastructure costs are because I’m being forced into using the company’s cloud service. I already pay for infrastructure in the form of my own cloud storage. I want to pay, once, for software that will use that infrastructure.

More generally, while I might see the value in paying $45 a year for a password service a lot of non-tech folks don’t. They’re happy using the same password everywhere they go (until they aren’t, of course), making them pay a few months-worth of Netflix to use software they’re already not inclined to use means they just won’t do it.

> I don't get the hand-wringing when it comes to reasonably priced services.

For me, it has nothing to do with the price and everything to do with the fact that I don't want a service dependency for my most critical passwords. I want them to be available no matter what. The product should be standalone. And this isn't a hypothetical concern, either: my employer is contractually mandated to disallow cloud-based password managers, so I must use standalone ones (yes, this is a stupid policy, but one that I'm bound by).

And on top of that, 1Password 5 was an excellent product and it is just steadily getting worse, in my opinion.

I'm with you: I'm happy to pay a recurring fee for a good service, usability, and dependability.

I've been a 1password customer for as long as I can recall, and it feels weird dumping my subscription to save a few bucks when it's been such a great service at a fair price the whole time. Why I'd keep it around if the OS solves the same problems, I don't know … just saying it feels weird.