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It's slightly shocking how angry people get about companies going from one-time purchase to subscription. Like many software companies, 1Password made a busine

It's slightly shocking how angry people get about companies going from one-time purchase to subscription. Like many software companies, 1Password made a business decision to focus on a subscription product. This strikes me as reasonable and naturally aligned with the customer expectation that this software be supported in perpetuity as OSes and browsers evolve over time. $5/month is not a crazy price to pay for a critical piece of software you use every day—to the contrary I kind of feel like it's the minimum price for a consumer software product to be sustainable. I don't want my password manager to be cutting corners because they can't afford to invest properly in the product. As far as deprecating the bring-your-own-sync approach, I understand this is legit flexibility that some customers want, and I'm glad there is a competitor that does a good job of it. Personally though, after many years of using 1Password + Dropbox, I must say I've had a lot fewer sync problems since migrating over to 1Password for Families. If I had a broad sync strategy maybe I would feel otherwise, but I don't—to the contrary, I'm moving away from Dropbox because of the shenanigans they are pulling with my OS internals, and maintaining a VPS or even an AWS account with S3 is a significant burden that I don't take lightly. As a product engineer, a single integrated sync is easier to provide guarantees, and prevents a lot of problems caused by third parties with no recourse to debug.

deleted 5y ago
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steveklabnik 5y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot about Adobe lately, specifically. I've been getting into video editing as a hobby, and the fact that I could use Premier for $20/month rather than the single time purchase of $800 or whatever it used to be is the difference between me being able to use it or not. And yeah, maybe in 40 months I would be spending more money, but there's no guarantee I wouldn't be spending money to upgrade at that point... and then once I started wanting to add in After Effects, Audition and Photoshop, $60/month for literally every Adobe product compared to what, like, $2400 for those four? And if I use any more things from the suite, it's still the same price. I was talking about this with someone the other day, and was like "Imagine telling 12 year old me that I would own a legal license of Photoshop because of how inexpensive it is." (I am also a happily paying customer of 1password; I strongly prefer the cloud offering...) And that's beyond the fact that, in some sense, this aligns the business needs closer to mine. It is easier and in some sense, more fair, for me to pay for the software while I use it, and not when I don't. On the business side, it's nicer too. It pretty much feels like a win-win all around, except for certain circumstances. But in the happy path, it's basically almost entirely strictly better. I feel weird being on this side of this argument these days, but it is what it is.
- merb 5y ago
  well I am (or rather my company) is a paying customer aswell. they offering is really cheap and you get tons of family accounts for free. but I think a subscription model always depends on the use case, I mean it's probably impossible to pay for everything (considering that every software that we would use, will be using a subscription) I'm on a mac and lots of small tools are priced like 4-5 € which means I only need to buy a new version ones apple updates his os.
- def_true_false 5y ago
  I thought it was an open secret that people who were just trying out the Adobe tools (and other software with similar pricing) didn't really pay the sticker price?
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    Maybe? I dunno, it's been a very long time since I cared about using any of them, and it's cheap enough now (and I like, have a real job and stuff, I'm not a kid and/or in college) that doing anything else would have taken more time than it's worth.
- jseliger 5y ago
  the fact that I could use Premier for $20/month rather than the single time purchase of $800 or whatever it used to be Or you can buy DaVinci Resolve for $295 and get a lifetime license. And they make a Linux version.
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    > Or you can buy DaVinci Resolve for $295 and get a lifetime license. I make good money, and so dropping $20 on something for a new hobby is something I do without thinking, but $295 is something I have to consider. And I'm a software developer who makes a decent salary. It's more than 10x the cost. It takes fifteen months before that breaks even. > And they make a Linux version. I'm not a Linux user, so this isn't something I particularly care about these days. Something I didn't talk about in the original post: I did try a few $0 editing programs at first, and I know that DaVinci Resolve stacks up pretty okay here, but one of the main reasons I went with Premire is how easy it is to get help with virtually everything, given how widely it's used. As someone who is at the "I don't even know what I don't know" stage, that's a real advantage. This isn't part of the whole "monthly fee SaaS vs one-time license" aspect of things, but it did factor into my overall decision.

deleted 5y ago

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steveklabnik 5y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot about Adobe lately, specifically. I've been getting into video editing as a hobby, and the fact that I could use Premier for $20/month rather than the single time purchase of $800 or whatever it used to be is the difference between me being able to use it or not. And yeah, maybe in 40 months I would be spending more money, but there's no guarantee I wouldn't be spending money to upgrade at that point... and then once I started wanting to add in After Effects, Audition and Photoshop, $60/month for literally every Adobe product compared to what, like, $2400 for those four? And if I use any more things from the suite, it's still the same price. I was talking about this with someone the other day, and was like "Imagine telling 12 year old me that I would own a legal license of Photoshop because of how inexpensive it is." (I am also a happily paying customer of 1password; I strongly prefer the cloud offering...) And that's beyond the fact that, in some sense, this aligns the business needs closer to mine. It is easier and in some sense, more fair, for me to pay for the software while I use it, and not when I don't. On the business side, it's nicer too. It pretty much feels like a win-win all around, except for certain circumstances. But in the happy path, it's basically almost entirely strictly better. I feel weird being on this side of this argument these days, but it is what it is.

merb 5y ago
well I am (or rather my company) is a paying customer aswell. they offering is really cheap and you get tons of family accounts for free. but I think a subscription model always depends on the use case, I mean it's probably impossible to pay for everything (considering that every software that we would use, will be using a subscription) I'm on a mac and lots of small tools are priced like 4-5 € which means I only need to buy a new version ones apple updates his os.
def_true_false 5y ago
I thought it was an open secret that people who were just trying out the Adobe tools (and other software with similar pricing) didn't really pay the sticker price?
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  Maybe? I dunno, it's been a very long time since I cared about using any of them, and it's cheap enough now (and I like, have a real job and stuff, I'm not a kid and/or in college) that doing anything else would have taken more time than it's worth.
jseliger 5y ago
the fact that I could use Premier for $20/month rather than the single time purchase of $800 or whatever it used to be Or you can buy DaVinci Resolve for $295 and get a lifetime license. And they make a Linux version.
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  > Or you can buy DaVinci Resolve for $295 and get a lifetime license. I make good money, and so dropping $20 on something for a new hobby is something I do without thinking, but $295 is something I have to consider. And I'm a software developer who makes a decent salary. It's more than 10x the cost. It takes fifteen months before that breaks even. > And they make a Linux version. I'm not a Linux user, so this isn't something I particularly care about these days. Something I didn't talk about in the original post: I did try a few $0 editing programs at first, and I know that DaVinci Resolve stacks up pretty okay here, but one of the main reasons I went with Premire is how easy it is to get help with virtually everything, given how widely it's used. As someone who is at the "I don't even know what I don't know" stage, that's a real advantage. This isn't part of the whole "monthly fee SaaS vs one-time license" aspect of things, but it did factor into my overall decision.