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"1Password Has Raised $620M" Ah fuck. They now need to grow at any cost to earn all that money back. And they'll throw their users under the bus, if they have

"1Password Has Raised $620M" Ah fuck. They now need to grow at any cost to earn all that money back. And they'll throw their users under the bus, if they have to, because it's either grow like a unicorn or go bust. Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same?

dominotw 5y ago
refer to the famous dropbox comment on HN. 1password is just more usable for most people.
edf13 5y ago
> How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? One of the comments on the post is that they have 600+ staff? Why??
Trias11 5y ago
>> And they'll throw their users under the bus You cannot really throw users under the bus in highly competitive and lucrative space. It's not that difficult to export full data from 1password and move on.
gruez 5y ago
>How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? sales/marketing
- waynesonfire 5y ago
  Good call, residential users are solid maybe they're going after the corporation use case?
Semaphor 5y ago
1Password has the cloud, so maybe a better comparison would be bitwarden, not free (to use their hosted service) but FLOSS. Everything else stands, though ;)
- the_duke 5y ago
  Bitwarden is free for personal accounts.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  The cloud part of a password manager can easily be handled by any file sync service, which are free and indistinguishable in quality from 1password.
  - a5aAqU 5y ago
    Maybe for technical people.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Generally agree but there are important edges where that breaks down: shared vaults, one time access, posthominis access, etc.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Well played! It's like Dropbox all over again.
    - deleted 5y ago
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- abeppu 5y ago
  But 1Password previously had the option to _not_ use their cloud, and they deliberately killed it to push people onto their subscription offering. So I think in the context of a conversation about how financial conditions will force changes which change the customer experience, I think it's entirely fair to compare them to a non-cloud option.
chrisma0 5y ago
Big fan of KeePassXC (https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc). Works wonderfully on MacOS. I guess 1Password is a bit snazzier, but I'm really not sure what you would use $620M for in a password manager... Maybe they'll go the Keybase route and integrate some crypto?! (https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-stellar-launch https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-stellar-launch)
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  > Maybe they'll go the Keybase route and integrate some crypto?! Well, congratulations, you just proposed a scenario that would make me consider leaving 1Password after all. :) Seriously, I am somewhat concerned at this level of VC money injection; I'm not intrinsically against venture capital or such, but investors (obviously) want a return on their investment and it's hard to imagine how you get a return on that much investment with just a password manager, even one that's a subscription service. (I am also not intrinsically against crypto and wouldn't really abandon a service just because they do something that involves it, but most blockchain technology continues to feel like a solution in search of a problem. That's another discussion, though…)
scblock 5y ago
Exactly. Once you raise a bunch of VC money you've sold your actual business to vampires. From now on it's grow at any cost. Add bloat, feature creep, unrelated projects, cost increases, and probably user data mining and sales on top of it. How was their rather expensive subscription fee and large subscriber base not sufficient to continue operating profitably?
- cactusmatt 5y ago
  I don't know. Greed? I've been following the 1Password Saga for a while (long time user), and how they responded to the electron pushback seemed like they lost their initial vision and what made them "in touch" with their users like me.
  - nathanganser 5y ago
    What was the electron pushback? Link?
    - cactusmatt 5y ago
      With 1Password 8, they shared news that they were moving from native (mac) apps to an Electron UI/frontend with a Rust backend. They did an AMA on Reddit, but didn't show up for a while and got hammered by their users. Their refrain, until Dave Teare showed up, was "but it will be on Rust and the backend will be faster" and didn't acknowledge why users might be upset with the move from Native to Electron apps. https://www.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/p2dmpt/all_aboard_1password_8_for_mac_is_now_in_early/ https://www.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/p2dmpt/all_aboar...
      - Spivak 5y ago
        I think it was a mistake to even involve the online community. Of course nerds want you to build a high-quality native experience on every platform because they are heavily invested in their platform of choice. Listening to these kinds of users at all will drive your business to ruin. Honestly building on "tech stack power users hate" is probably the easiest way to fire all your worst, most needy, users.
colesantiago 5y ago
They were profitably bootstrapped for years and then chose the VC route, no clue why but perhaps the founders wanted a huge pay package. Then things went downhill.
devwastaken 5y ago
Yep, this will go the same way as LastPass sadly. This kind of company must have a steady positive revenue stream from it's customers. If not, it is not reliable. They will not be paying this back any time soon. Fine by me, 1password was too expensive to begin with. Sad to see they're wasting it.
baryphonic 5y ago
> Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. Because 1Password is easy enough to use that my wife and I can share a family plan without her getting frustrated. If one of us has a login the other needs, we can easily share it. When I evaluated KeePass, the Wife-Acceptance Factor (WAF) was not there, though maybe it's improved.
- textcortex 5y ago
  I think VCs are also making their decisions based on that “WAF” factor.
- bradwood 5y ago
  I had the exact same experience... So I upgraded my wife.
- deleted 5y ago
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- api 5y ago
  Nerds continue to fail to grasp the value of UI/UX. This has always been why FOSS and similar solutions have failed to compete in the market in spite of being "free" and often technically superior. UI/UX is everything. Apple became the most valuable company in history on the back of UI/UX alone. Their tech is decent but not that much better than anyone else's, but their stuff is at least marginally easier to use and that's worth more than the GDP of quite a few countries combined. The importance of user experience is only growing as the world becomes more and more time poor and we move more and more into an "attention economy." Saving seconds counts. If it doesn't work instantly it's broken, period. Here's two ways I can explain it: (1) If you value your time at $100/hour and you have to spend one hour a month maintaining something "free," that free thing costs $100/month. That's fairly expensive. It only makes sense to do this if you have a lot of surplus time on your hands. (2) If you have ten million users and make a UI/UX improvement that saves them one minute a month and you value their time at an average of $50/hour, you just created about $8.3 million in value since that's the value of the time you just saved. A rule of thumb that I use is that every step required to do something halves adoption. So if you have a 10 step install process, only 1 out of 1024 people who look at your product will make it to trying it. Every developer needs to have "user experience is everything" tattooed on their forehead.
dilap 5y ago
Spot on. What's the best thing to migrate to?
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- wilkommen 5y ago
  KeePass
  - nanna 5y ago
    KeePassXC https://keepassxc.org/ https://keepassxc.org/
- npteljes 5y ago
  BitWarden has a similar feature set as far as I understand it. You can even host it yourself.
- chaorace 5y ago
  I'll vouch for BitWarden. You can self-host or use their cloud offering. The server software and all of the clients are open source. I've personally been using the cloud offering for several years now and feel quite satisfied with it. The free tier is generous, the premium tier is very affordable, and I can export my data to a self-hosted instance anytime I like.
- deleted 5y ago
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- sunsetandlabrea 5y ago
  Bitwarden for me. I've been using 1Password from around 2013 I think. I didn't buy into their subscription model so they've been gouging me with difficulties and cost in buying upgrades for a few years. Apparently they have 500 members of staff these days, and millions and millions of investor dollars. Apart from maintaining browser extensions, for my own personal use I've not noticed a single interesting feature in recent years. I moved to Bitwarden when the electron thing was announced, haven't paid any subscription yet and seem to have all the features I used before in 1Password. Bitwarden is very much recommended and I wouldn't recommend 1Password to anyone these days.
kspacewalk2 5y ago
Because cloud and enterprise. Sure, labour costs are expensive in our industry. But it's under-appreciated that once you need physical infrastructure, sales and enterprise support, that really tends to eat into your millions.
- chrisshroba 5y ago
  Please excuse my ignorance about this, but what do "cloud and enterprise" costs entail? Password managers seem to me like a pretty basic CRUD app. I'd imagine the average user has a few KB's max stored, and data transfer is presumably very small (no images/video/other binary data). And enterprise users are presumably running the infra on-prem so I'd think the main costs have to do with support. Is marketing the thing with the huge price tag, or are there other huge costs I'm not thinking of?
  - Spivak 5y ago
    I'll use a past life as an example; 150 person company -- 20ish people in engineering total: 5ish on doing infra, and 3 dev teams of 5ish working different verticals. Then you have leadership, sales, marketing, HR, finance, support, and retention. By a huge margin sales, support, and retention were the largest. B2C is marketing heavy, B2B is sales heavy. If you're both then well.. Engineering can be really lean with respect to the number of customers/clients but the rest of the business can't.
chaorace 5y ago
It really makes me wonder what kind of conversations had to happen to bring investors on-board. I don't want to give too much credit to investor types, but... surely this must have thrown up some red flags? Exactly what kind of moon-shot ideas did 1Password start tossing around to get those wallets open?
- moritonal 5y ago
  Passwords are boring, hard and important. Customers know that, so are likely willing to spend a monthly fee to feel safe. Critically, they're unlikely to swap to a different provider when there's so much setup involved. Lot of money to make with those factors.
  - abduhl 5y ago
    The data that can be obtained on users by just knowing where they choose to create logins for is also worth immense amounts of money, without even talking about how often they login.
  - chaorace 5y ago
    Sure... but "good investment" and "good VC investment" aren't exactly the same thing. 1Password isn't exactly small and it's not exactly poised to explode either. I get that there's an untapped market of non-technical users, but I am rather skeptical that advertising alone will have much success in activating it -- they'd need some innovative approach that changes the way non-technicals approach password management.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    Correct, but also a warning sign. "Boring, hard and important" should rarely, if ever, be left to private companies as an isolated thing. They need to somehow be baked into the model of the other things that use it. It's the same reason there should be no such thing as a "structural integrity" company separate from the building contractor.
- howdydoo 5y ago
  I predict we start seeing "Login with 1Password" buttons on random websites next to the google and facebook buttons. I also predict it never catches on.
wilkommen 5y ago
I use KeePassXC on my Mac and KeePassium on my iPhone and it’s so great. And it’s free. It’s some of the best free software I’ve ever used.
- torstenvl 5y ago
  I decided to go with Enpass instead of KeePass* but KeePassium for iOS gets my vote. It's faster than Strongbox, more configurable, and the developer is very responsive.
alecco 5y ago
This opens a great opportunity for an open source disruptor to scoop their paying customers. Keeping it simple. I would be happy to throw in $100 to some crowdfunding as long as there's at least one legit security dev onboard. No Crypto bros please.
- deadbunny 5y ago
  Search for Bitwarden. No crowdfunding needed.
p2t2p 5y ago
I just hope Apple's password management will finally catch up by the time 1Password goes to toilet.
fps-hero 5y ago
Could you even raise those funds If you sold every password they control on the dark web?
AlexandrB 5y ago
They previously raised $100M in 2021[1] and in my mind the rot has already set in. 1Password 8 is not OS-native and is an electron app. Local vaults are no longer supported - you must use AgileBits's cloud. And 1Password 7 shows non-dismissible ads for upgrading to 1Password 8[2]. Edit: They also inexplicably (and silently) dropped support for the 1Password iOS share sheet while directing users to the 1Password iOS Safari extension (which only works if you use AgileBits cloud and does not work with local vaults)[3]. Edit2: Missed another $200M raise in 2019[4]. That puts them at nearly $1B in VC funding now. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/1password-raises-100m-at-a-2b-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/1password-raises-100m-at-a... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/qjb4l4/theres_now_a_nondismissable_ad_in_standalone/ https://old.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/qjb4l4/theres_no... [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/pxpdcd/ios_share_sheet_extension_removal/ https://old.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/pxpdcd/ios_share... [4] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/fourteen-years-after-launching-1password-takes-first-funding-a-200m-series-a/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/fourteen-years-after-launc...
- johncalvinyoung 5y ago
  Basically all of the above makes me very sad. But it's still useful enough that I'll still be paying, but they are drawing down that goodwill.
- cced 5y ago
  You also cannot attach pictures to ios secrets without the new subscriptions.
- Graziano_M 5y ago
  I'm hanging on to 1password 6 for as long as I can. I can't use the browser plugin on firefox anymore, so I have to copy&paste my passwords in, but at least I have my vault stored locally. I also paid something like $70 and had the rug pulled from under me when they wanted to start charging monthly on top of that. It's not that I expect support forever for software I paid once for, but I think that the monthly, no local vault is worse than what they offered in 1password 6. I am OK with having to manually copy in passwords.
pier25 5y ago
> And they'll throw their users under the bus Just as they did when all the snafu with Dropbox and the switch to a subscription based service. Before the subscription service, I had spent hundreds buying all their apps for me and my family. 1P wasn't cheap but it was worth it. They used the users' Dropbox to host the web based vault. Obviously one day Dropbox decided it was not ok to use the public folders to host websites. It really was a shitstorm in 1P's forums and they handled it very badly. 1P could have spent pennies hosting the vaults on S3 or something but they decided to tell their paying customers to switch to the subscription if they wanted a web based vault. They didn't even have the decency to offer a free year to the subscription or something.
- throwaway64643 5y ago
  3 buck per month? Family sharing for 5 buck? Nah, this is the typical bait&switch strategy (same as Netflix). It is cheap now. But it won't be cheap in the future.
hodgesrm 5y ago
Alternative view: I'm glad to see 1Password obtain abundant financial backing. I use 1Password personally and at my employer. It's really good. I won't switch as long as they keep it that way. Seems as if they have enough money to do that regardless of what happens in the market. p.s., How is this really different from going public? I'm sure they considered that option. Either way you are answerable to investors.
- xmorse 5y ago
  What about being profitable? If you need 620M to keep the company alive what will happen next time?
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Fire all developers and rest on your laurels for many, many years? But of course they can’t do that because VC, right?
  - hodgesrm 5y ago
    It's not enough to be profitable (which they claimed to be in 2021). But even if they are profitable, it's unlikely they generate a lot of cash. For a secure future you also want a nice pot of cash to be able to make investments and to weather dips in the market.
    - deleted 5y ago
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  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm much more worried about their future now than I was 5 years ago. Having to justify a $6B valuation for a password manager means making risky moves into new markets that may not pan out. If things don't go well, AgileBits will be sold for parts. Perhaps to the same kinds of vultures who own LastPass and TravisCI.
- loeg 5y ago
  This isn't sustainable financing -- it's growth financing that they will eventually need profitability to make good on the investment (or drive them into the ground). I also use 1password at work and home, and I'd rather they figure out how to operate profitably without the VC-necessitated hypergrowth.
maxwell86 5y ago
> I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. So you can't imagine how owning the passwords of all services of dozens of millions of users, both private users and corporate accounts, could be valuable?
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  > So you can't imagine how owning the passwords... Emphasis mine. That's the thing that bugs me about 1Password's recent moves. They don't own my passwords and I don't want them to own them. They're my passwords, and I want to store them how I want. Not be at the whims of 1Password's business strategy.
  - maxwell86 5y ago
    I think from a stakeholder pov, just the fact that they are the gatekeeper to your passwords make it valuable. Imagine if the chinese government could buy all its stock through a third party company, and sit on the board, install a "party affine" CEO without morals, etc. Just a single silent software update can upload everyone's master key un-encrypted to the cloud, and decrypt everyone's passwords, attach them to email and corporate ids, etc. without anybody noticing. How valuable does that make 1Password?
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city41 5y ago
> How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? Can't you say the same about Linux vs Windows, Gimp vs Photoshop, PostgreSQL vs Oracle, Godot vs Unity, etc?
kar1181 5y ago
This was my first thought. "Oh no".
staticassertion 5y ago
The cost of a password manager is effectively 0 dollars for a company, so if they charge "more" than others it makes no difference.
EGreg 5y ago
Why is it that whenever intrinsic, usual operations of capitalism are described (which happen 99% of the time) such as… 1) whenever VCs invest in shares of a project 2) they tend to subsidize money-losing unit economics to “reduce friction” resulting in attempts to lock-in people and monetize their attention later 3) when the VCs later dump it on the public, the company has to now answer to wall street shareholders and its executives are heavily pressured to have quarterly earnings calls 4) they must find ways to extract rents forever because whoever bought at the top (the majority) wants to see their shares go higher, even at the expense of the public interest 5) whereas cryptocurrency could be about collective ownership, if there is no separate shareholder class then the network participants ARE collectively owning the means of production (basically, textbook socialism) Whenever something like this is stated, anarcho-capitalists and right wing libertarians say: Oh, there is NOTHING wrong with capitalism. That’s not REAL capitalism. That is corporatism / cronyism. (Some go further and quote Mises/Say/Praxeology: “only individuals can act, organizations can’t act.”) Then about collective ownership of the means of production / distribution / the network they say… “That’s not REAL SOCIALISM. Socialism is when you use central government and planning and has led to so much misery and famine…” So, a mainstream application of capitalism isn’t “real” capitalism because laissez faire capitalism doesn’t require the State. But credit unions, housing cooperatives, democratically run universities and now cryptocurrency DAOs are not “real” socialism because socialism requires the State? There is a huge double-standard here, and I would encourage ancaps to answer the following questions: Why not use mainstream dictionaries and encyclopedias for definitions? Why not admit libertarian socialism exists Why not compare the results of democracy vs top down ownership in organizations on both the participants and the public good Also, we can move beyond Libertarian Capitalism vs Libertarian Socialism discussions, to simply ask how to best structure decision making in a project. You can have cryptocurrency run top-down where people work on stuff to survive, and the parent company must make profits. Or you can remove the profit motive and have wikipedia, open source, science, etc. But then you’d need to subsidize people’s maslow’s needs with a UBI. See for example how your very news and media is affected by the profit motive… compare something like WikiNews vs CNN and Fox. Where are the movements to do something about it? Here is one example I am working on myself: https://rational.app https://rational.app
- 5y ago
barkingcat 5y ago
"KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time." This is not a benefit. Within the next 2 years, be wary of a log4j level exploit within Keepassxc. If a software isn't being supported by a steady source of income, it really quickly can get behind in security and tech debt. After all the discussion on here about how we can support open source projects, why is it still a badge of honour to say that a software has no support and is functioning on life support by "volunteers in their free time"? I'd suggest any users of KeePassXC take their money and put it where it counts: find the organization that develops KeePassXC and give them the $60 a year that it costs to buy a commercial password manager like 1password. If KeePassXC has all the features you need, it's worth paying them for it.
- pydry 5y ago
  LastPass was bought for $100 million and had some security howlers. "pass", on the other hand, has no funding and no security vulnerabilities. I'm pretty sure it's more secure to use apps engineered with a deliberately tight scope that arent lavishly funded than egged-up VC bloated monstrosities. You wanna bet that building in electron is gonna keep 1password more safe? I wouldnt. The attack surface on that thing is gonna be huge.
- senko 5y ago
  > "KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time." > This is not a benefit. Parent never claimed this, they were questioning why 1p would possibly need 620m for developing roughly the same value.
- ahtihn 5y ago
  Closed source products are really well known for investing in security and keeping tech debt to a minimum. This is why no commercial closed source product depended on something like log4j without thouroughly auditing it first. Oh wait...
momenti 5y ago
It's so valuable because knowing lots of people's passwords is useful for mass surveillance, cyber attacks, industrial espionage etc.
thewarrior 5y ago
Coming soon - 1Password stories
hogrider 5y ago
Because central bank shenanigans made the whole economy a sham.
xfz 5y ago
> Ah fuck. They now need to grow at any cost to earn all that money back. And they'll throw their users under the bus, if they have to, because it's either grow like a unicorn or go bust. Agreed, an outbreak of featuritis is almost guaranteed. The core product works well for the job intended, but I don't want to be bothered with an expanding scope and the inevitable spam promoting the features that I don't really need.
- Joeri 5y ago
  The move to an electron client was a clear indication they intend to add lots of features. If they were more or less feature complete they would have not bothered with an electron rewrite.
NoThisIsMe 5y ago
I think BitWarden is a better comparison -- it's SaaS (and thereby dead simple to get set up w/ cloud sync), but it's reasonably priced with a solid free tier, and open source to boot.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
It's more like they need 3750 years of $80k salary and 100 years of ~2.5 million salary for a dozen execs and board members.
john_moscow 5y ago
>How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? It will go to all-expense-paid trips, consultancy fees and other things you need to eventually get acquired for $10B+ by one of the big players. Or maybe, they will pivot, spend $300M on advertisement, so every grandma gets to know the brand name, and will then do an IPO, presenting it as the next opportunity of lifetime to the unsophisticated public. This is how you make money in the post-2008 world. The actual old-school profitability has been out of the picture for quite a while now.
- ojr 5y ago
  So correct but also post-2008 underrepresented founders need profits more than ever because they don't fit the narrative, applications like Canva being female-led and Calendly having a black male CEO are examples.
malwrar 5y ago
Don’t forget that this isn’t used by just individuals—businesses use it too to share credentials for things like the corporate Twitter account, internal systems, etc. I’m willing to bet that further investment there could help back up that valuation.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Realistically their B2C accounts are a sales funnel for their B2B. Because I was familiar with it for my own use, my employer uses it and they make much more money that way. Because they also let you get free family accounts if your company uses it, they presumably then rope in a lot of individuals for personal use who then become incentivised to want their next employer to use 1password too.
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natch 5y ago
They already threw their users under the bus once by changing to an insanely money-grabbing subscription model. But yes, agree with everything you said.
HikeThe46 5y ago
The individual user is extra revenue to them. Their business is B2B. Because my company uses 1password for business I also use it for home and they get an extra $60/year from my household because I need to already use it for work.
- chrisburgin 5y ago
  If your company is using 1Password Business you can get your family account for free. https://support.1password.com/link-family/ https://support.1password.com/link-family/
ajmurmann 5y ago
1Password, like Evernote, to me is a canonical example of an app that's actually "done" and ideally would enter a sustain mode.
ronnier 5y ago
Just switch to self hosting bitwarden. Stop using "the cloud" as much as possible.
aceazzameen 5y ago
Oh no, my thoughts exactly. My wife and I were just talking about setting up 1Password to switch from LastPass. It looks like BitWarden might be the best option if only for longevity.
fortuna86 5y ago
I guess my offline standalone license now has its days numbered. Sad.
mizzao 5y ago
Whatever, maybe they'll introduce some super discounted plan so I can finally switch over from LastPass before they also succumb to growth shittiness.
jonathankoren 5y ago
>And they'll throw their users under the bus They already through their consumer users under the bus when they switched to a subscription business. I haven’t upgraded since v6, and I plan to avoid it as long as I can.
jiveturkey 5y ago
> They now need to grow at any cost Dude, that ship sailed at their last (and first) raise. It took a little while for the shoe to drop, which was about 6 months ago.
amelius 5y ago
> How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? This is once again just a case of investors hoping to make a pile of money so big they can corner a market. Sadly, they have no idea how cornering a market works (or doesn't work) in the case of digital products like this.
tlogan 5y ago
The are going to focus on the enterprise market. Good for them but this also means that they will make things worse for small businesses and personal users. Intentionally or non-intentionally but it will happen. But that is nature of the beast.
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dominotw 5y ago

refer to the famous dropbox comment on HN. 1password is just more usable for most people.

edf13 5y ago

> How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? One of the comments on the post is that they have 600+ staff? Why??

Trias11 5y ago

>> And they'll throw their users under the bus You cannot really throw users under the bus in highly competitive and lucrative space. It's not that difficult to export full data from 1password and move on.

gruez 5y ago

>How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? sales/marketing

waynesonfire 5y ago
Good call, residential users are solid maybe they're going after the corporation use case?

Semaphor 5y ago

1Password has the cloud, so maybe a better comparison would be bitwarden, not free (to use their hosted service) but FLOSS. Everything else stands, though ;)

the_duke 5y ago
Bitwarden is free for personal accounts.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
The cloud part of a password manager can easily be handled by any file sync service, which are free and indistinguishable in quality from 1password.
- a5aAqU 5y ago
  Maybe for technical people.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Generally agree but there are important edges where that breaks down: shared vaults, one time access, posthominis access, etc.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Well played! It's like Dropbox all over again.
  - deleted 5y ago
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abeppu 5y ago
But 1Password previously had the option to _not_ use their cloud, and they deliberately killed it to push people onto their subscription offering. So I think in the context of a conversation about how financial conditions will force changes which change the customer experience, I think it's entirely fair to compare them to a non-cloud option.

chrisma0 5y ago

Big fan of KeePassXC (https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc). Works wonderfully on MacOS. I guess 1Password is a bit snazzier, but I'm really not sure what you would use $620M for in a password manager... Maybe they'll go the Keybase route and integrate some crypto?! (https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-stellar-launch https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-stellar-launch)

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
> Maybe they'll go the Keybase route and integrate some crypto?! Well, congratulations, you just proposed a scenario that would make me consider leaving 1Password after all. :) Seriously, I am somewhat concerned at this level of VC money injection; I'm not intrinsically against venture capital or such, but investors (obviously) want a return on their investment and it's hard to imagine how you get a return on that much investment with just a password manager, even one that's a subscription service. (I am also not intrinsically against crypto and wouldn't really abandon a service just because they do something that involves it, but most blockchain technology continues to feel like a solution in search of a problem. That's another discussion, though…)

scblock 5y ago

Exactly. Once you raise a bunch of VC money you've sold your actual business to vampires. From now on it's grow at any cost. Add bloat, feature creep, unrelated projects, cost increases, and probably user data mining and sales on top of it. How was their rather expensive subscription fee and large subscriber base not sufficient to continue operating profitably?

cactusmatt 5y ago
I don't know. Greed? I've been following the 1Password Saga for a while (long time user), and how they responded to the electron pushback seemed like they lost their initial vision and what made them "in touch" with their users like me.
- nathanganser 5y ago
  What was the electron pushback? Link?
  - cactusmatt 5y ago
    With 1Password 8, they shared news that they were moving from native (mac) apps to an Electron UI/frontend with a Rust backend. They did an AMA on Reddit, but didn't show up for a while and got hammered by their users. Their refrain, until Dave Teare showed up, was "but it will be on Rust and the backend will be faster" and didn't acknowledge why users might be upset with the move from Native to Electron apps. https://www.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/p2dmpt/all_aboard_1password_8_for_mac_is_now_in_early/ https://www.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/p2dmpt/all_aboar...
    - Spivak 5y ago
      I think it was a mistake to even involve the online community. Of course nerds want you to build a high-quality native experience on every platform because they are heavily invested in their platform of choice. Listening to these kinds of users at all will drive your business to ruin. Honestly building on "tech stack power users hate" is probably the easiest way to fire all your worst, most needy, users.

colesantiago 5y ago

They were profitably bootstrapped for years and then chose the VC route, no clue why but perhaps the founders wanted a huge pay package. Then things went downhill.

devwastaken 5y ago

Yep, this will go the same way as LastPass sadly. This kind of company must have a steady positive revenue stream from it's customers. If not, it is not reliable. They will not be paying this back any time soon. Fine by me, 1password was too expensive to begin with. Sad to see they're wasting it.

baryphonic 5y ago

> Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. Because 1Password is easy enough to use that my wife and I can share a family plan without her getting frustrated. If one of us has a login the other needs, we can easily share it. When I evaluated KeePass, the Wife-Acceptance Factor (WAF) was not there, though maybe it's improved.

textcortex 5y ago
I think VCs are also making their decisions based on that “WAF” factor.
bradwood 5y ago
I had the exact same experience... So I upgraded my wife.
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api 5y ago
Nerds continue to fail to grasp the value of UI/UX. This has always been why FOSS and similar solutions have failed to compete in the market in spite of being "free" and often technically superior. UI/UX is everything. Apple became the most valuable company in history on the back of UI/UX alone. Their tech is decent but not that much better than anyone else's, but their stuff is at least marginally easier to use and that's worth more than the GDP of quite a few countries combined. The importance of user experience is only growing as the world becomes more and more time poor and we move more and more into an "attention economy." Saving seconds counts. If it doesn't work instantly it's broken, period. Here's two ways I can explain it: (1) If you value your time at $100/hour and you have to spend one hour a month maintaining something "free," that free thing costs $100/month. That's fairly expensive. It only makes sense to do this if you have a lot of surplus time on your hands. (2) If you have ten million users and make a UI/UX improvement that saves them one minute a month and you value their time at an average of $50/hour, you just created about $8.3 million in value since that's the value of the time you just saved. A rule of thumb that I use is that every step required to do something halves adoption. So if you have a 10 step install process, only 1 out of 1024 people who look at your product will make it to trying it. Every developer needs to have "user experience is everything" tattooed on their forehead.

dilap 5y ago

Spot on. What's the best thing to migrate to?

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
wilkommen 5y ago
KeePass
- nanna 5y ago
  KeePassXC https://keepassxc.org/ https://keepassxc.org/
npteljes 5y ago
BitWarden has a similar feature set as far as I understand it. You can even host it yourself.
chaorace 5y ago
I'll vouch for BitWarden. You can self-host or use their cloud offering. The server software and all of the clients are open source. I've personally been using the cloud offering for several years now and feel quite satisfied with it. The free tier is generous, the premium tier is very affordable, and I can export my data to a self-hosted instance anytime I like.
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sunsetandlabrea 5y ago
Bitwarden for me. I've been using 1Password from around 2013 I think. I didn't buy into their subscription model so they've been gouging me with difficulties and cost in buying upgrades for a few years. Apparently they have 500 members of staff these days, and millions and millions of investor dollars. Apart from maintaining browser extensions, for my own personal use I've not noticed a single interesting feature in recent years. I moved to Bitwarden when the electron thing was announced, haven't paid any subscription yet and seem to have all the features I used before in 1Password. Bitwarden is very much recommended and I wouldn't recommend 1Password to anyone these days.

kspacewalk2 5y ago

Because cloud and enterprise. Sure, labour costs are expensive in our industry. But it's under-appreciated that once you need physical infrastructure, sales and enterprise support, that really tends to eat into your millions.

chrisshroba 5y ago
Please excuse my ignorance about this, but what do "cloud and enterprise" costs entail? Password managers seem to me like a pretty basic CRUD app. I'd imagine the average user has a few KB's max stored, and data transfer is presumably very small (no images/video/other binary data). And enterprise users are presumably running the infra on-prem so I'd think the main costs have to do with support. Is marketing the thing with the huge price tag, or are there other huge costs I'm not thinking of?
- Spivak 5y ago
  I'll use a past life as an example; 150 person company -- 20ish people in engineering total: 5ish on doing infra, and 3 dev teams of 5ish working different verticals. Then you have leadership, sales, marketing, HR, finance, support, and retention. By a huge margin sales, support, and retention were the largest. B2C is marketing heavy, B2B is sales heavy. If you're both then well.. Engineering can be really lean with respect to the number of customers/clients but the rest of the business can't.

chaorace 5y ago

It really makes me wonder what kind of conversations had to happen to bring investors on-board. I don't want to give too much credit to investor types, but... surely this must have thrown up some red flags? Exactly what kind of moon-shot ideas did 1Password start tossing around to get those wallets open?

moritonal 5y ago
Passwords are boring, hard and important. Customers know that, so are likely willing to spend a monthly fee to feel safe. Critically, they're unlikely to swap to a different provider when there's so much setup involved. Lot of money to make with those factors.
- abduhl 5y ago
  The data that can be obtained on users by just knowing where they choose to create logins for is also worth immense amounts of money, without even talking about how often they login.
- chaorace 5y ago
  Sure... but "good investment" and "good VC investment" aren't exactly the same thing. 1Password isn't exactly small and it's not exactly poised to explode either. I get that there's an untapped market of non-technical users, but I am rather skeptical that advertising alone will have much success in activating it -- they'd need some innovative approach that changes the way non-technicals approach password management.
- jrm4 5y ago
  Correct, but also a warning sign. "Boring, hard and important" should rarely, if ever, be left to private companies as an isolated thing. They need to somehow be baked into the model of the other things that use it. It's the same reason there should be no such thing as a "structural integrity" company separate from the building contractor.
howdydoo 5y ago
I predict we start seeing "Login with 1Password" buttons on random websites next to the google and facebook buttons. I also predict it never catches on.

wilkommen 5y ago

I use KeePassXC on my Mac and KeePassium on my iPhone and it’s so great. And it’s free. It’s some of the best free software I’ve ever used.

torstenvl 5y ago
I decided to go with Enpass instead of KeePass* but KeePassium for iOS gets my vote. It's faster than Strongbox, more configurable, and the developer is very responsive.

alecco 5y ago

This opens a great opportunity for an open source disruptor to scoop their paying customers. Keeping it simple. I would be happy to throw in $100 to some crowdfunding as long as there's at least one legit security dev onboard. No Crypto bros please.

deadbunny 5y ago
Search for Bitwarden. No crowdfunding needed.

p2t2p 5y ago

I just hope Apple's password management will finally catch up by the time 1Password goes to toilet.

fps-hero 5y ago

Could you even raise those funds If you sold every password they control on the dark web?

AlexandrB 5y ago

They previously raised $100M in 2021[1] and in my mind the rot has already set in. 1Password 8 is not OS-native and is an electron app. Local vaults are no longer supported - you must use AgileBits's cloud. And 1Password 7 shows non-dismissible ads for upgrading to 1Password 8[2]. Edit: They also inexplicably (and silently) dropped support for the 1Password iOS share sheet while directing users to the 1Password iOS Safari extension (which only works if you use AgileBits cloud and does not work with local vaults)[3]. Edit2: Missed another $200M raise in 2019[4]. That puts them at nearly $1B in VC funding now. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/1password-raises-100m-at-a-2b-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/1password-raises-100m-at-a... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/qjb4l4/theres_now_a_nondismissable_ad_in_standalone/ https://old.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/qjb4l4/theres_no... [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/pxpdcd/ios_share_sheet_extension_removal/ https://old.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/pxpdcd/ios_share... [4] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/fourteen-years-after-launching-1password-takes-first-funding-a-200m-series-a/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/fourteen-years-after-launc...

johncalvinyoung 5y ago
Basically all of the above makes me very sad. But it's still useful enough that I'll still be paying, but they are drawing down that goodwill.
cced 5y ago
You also cannot attach pictures to ios secrets without the new subscriptions.
Graziano_M 5y ago
I'm hanging on to 1password 6 for as long as I can. I can't use the browser plugin on firefox anymore, so I have to copy&paste my passwords in, but at least I have my vault stored locally. I also paid something like $70 and had the rug pulled from under me when they wanted to start charging monthly on top of that. It's not that I expect support forever for software I paid once for, but I think that the monthly, no local vault is worse than what they offered in 1password 6. I am OK with having to manually copy in passwords.

pier25 5y ago

> And they'll throw their users under the bus Just as they did when all the snafu with Dropbox and the switch to a subscription based service. Before the subscription service, I had spent hundreds buying all their apps for me and my family. 1P wasn't cheap but it was worth it. They used the users' Dropbox to host the web based vault. Obviously one day Dropbox decided it was not ok to use the public folders to host websites. It really was a shitstorm in 1P's forums and they handled it very badly. 1P could have spent pennies hosting the vaults on S3 or something but they decided to tell their paying customers to switch to the subscription if they wanted a web based vault. They didn't even have the decency to offer a free year to the subscription or something.

throwaway64643 5y ago
3 buck per month? Family sharing for 5 buck? Nah, this is the typical bait&switch strategy (same as Netflix). It is cheap now. But it won't be cheap in the future.

hodgesrm 5y ago

Alternative view: I'm glad to see 1Password obtain abundant financial backing. I use 1Password personally and at my employer. It's really good. I won't switch as long as they keep it that way. Seems as if they have enough money to do that regardless of what happens in the market. p.s., How is this really different from going public? I'm sure they considered that option. Either way you are answerable to investors.

xmorse 5y ago
What about being profitable? If you need 620M to keep the company alive what will happen next time?
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Fire all developers and rest on your laurels for many, many years? But of course they can’t do that because VC, right?
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  It's not enough to be profitable (which they claimed to be in 2021). But even if they are profitable, it's unlikely they generate a lot of cash. For a secure future you also want a nice pot of cash to be able to make investments and to weather dips in the market.
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- AlexandrB 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm much more worried about their future now than I was 5 years ago. Having to justify a $6B valuation for a password manager means making risky moves into new markets that may not pan out. If things don't go well, AgileBits will be sold for parts. Perhaps to the same kinds of vultures who own LastPass and TravisCI.
loeg 5y ago
This isn't sustainable financing -- it's growth financing that they will eventually need profitability to make good on the investment (or drive them into the ground). I also use 1password at work and home, and I'd rather they figure out how to operate profitably without the VC-necessitated hypergrowth.

maxwell86 5y ago

> I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. So you can't imagine how owning the passwords of all services of dozens of millions of users, both private users and corporate accounts, could be valuable?

AlexandrB 5y ago
> So you can't imagine how owning the passwords... Emphasis mine. That's the thing that bugs me about 1Password's recent moves. They don't own my passwords and I don't want them to own them. They're my passwords, and I want to store them how I want. Not be at the whims of 1Password's business strategy.
- maxwell86 5y ago
  I think from a stakeholder pov, just the fact that they are the gatekeeper to your passwords make it valuable. Imagine if the chinese government could buy all its stock through a third party company, and sit on the board, install a "party affine" CEO without morals, etc. Just a single silent software update can upload everyone's master key un-encrypted to the cloud, and decrypt everyone's passwords, attach them to email and corporate ids, etc. without anybody noticing. How valuable does that make 1Password?

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city41 5y ago

> How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? Can't you say the same about Linux vs Windows, Gimp vs Photoshop, PostgreSQL vs Oracle, Godot vs Unity, etc?

kar1181 5y ago

This was my first thought. "Oh no".

staticassertion 5y ago

The cost of a password manager is effectively 0 dollars for a company, so if they charge "more" than others it makes no difference.

EGreg 5y ago

Why is it that whenever intrinsic, usual operations of capitalism are described (which happen 99% of the time) such as… 1) whenever VCs invest in shares of a project 2) they tend to subsidize money-losing unit economics to “reduce friction” resulting in attempts to lock-in people and monetize their attention later 3) when the VCs later dump it on the public, the company has to now answer to wall street shareholders and its executives are heavily pressured to have quarterly earnings calls 4) they must find ways to extract rents forever because whoever bought at the top (the majority) wants to see their shares go higher, even at the expense of the public interest 5) whereas cryptocurrency could be about collective ownership, if there is no separate shareholder class then the network participants ARE collectively owning the means of production (basically, textbook socialism) Whenever something like this is stated, anarcho-capitalists and right wing libertarians say: Oh, there is NOTHING wrong with capitalism. That’s not REAL capitalism. That is corporatism / cronyism. (Some go further and quote Mises/Say/Praxeology: “only individuals can act, organizations can’t act.”) Then about collective ownership of the means of production / distribution / the network they say… “That’s not REAL SOCIALISM. Socialism is when you use central government and planning and has led to so much misery and famine…” So, a mainstream application of capitalism isn’t “real” capitalism because laissez faire capitalism doesn’t require the State. But credit unions, housing cooperatives, democratically run universities and now cryptocurrency DAOs are not “real” socialism because socialism requires the State? There is a huge double-standard here, and I would encourage ancaps to answer the following questions: Why not use mainstream dictionaries and encyclopedias for definitions? Why not admit libertarian socialism exists Why not compare the results of democracy vs top down ownership in organizations on both the participants and the public good Also, we can move beyond Libertarian Capitalism vs Libertarian Socialism discussions, to simply ask how to best structure decision making in a project. You can have cryptocurrency run top-down where people work on stuff to survive, and the parent company must make profits. Or you can remove the profit motive and have wikipedia, open source, science, etc. But then you’d need to subsidize people’s maslow’s needs with a UBI. See for example how your very news and media is affected by the profit motive… compare something like WikiNews vs CNN and Fox. Where are the movements to do something about it? Here is one example I am working on myself: https://rational.app https://rational.app

5y ago

barkingcat 5y ago

"KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time." This is not a benefit. Within the next 2 years, be wary of a log4j level exploit within Keepassxc. If a software isn't being supported by a steady source of income, it really quickly can get behind in security and tech debt. After all the discussion on here about how we can support open source projects, why is it still a badge of honour to say that a software has no support and is functioning on life support by "volunteers in their free time"? I'd suggest any users of KeePassXC take their money and put it where it counts: find the organization that develops KeePassXC and give them the $60 a year that it costs to buy a commercial password manager like 1password. If KeePassXC has all the features you need, it's worth paying them for it.

pydry 5y ago
LastPass was bought for $100 million and had some security howlers. "pass", on the other hand, has no funding and no security vulnerabilities. I'm pretty sure it's more secure to use apps engineered with a deliberately tight scope that arent lavishly funded than egged-up VC bloated monstrosities. You wanna bet that building in electron is gonna keep 1password more safe? I wouldnt. The attack surface on that thing is gonna be huge.
senko 5y ago
> "KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time." > This is not a benefit. Parent never claimed this, they were questioning why 1p would possibly need 620m for developing roughly the same value.
ahtihn 5y ago
Closed source products are really well known for investing in security and keeping tech debt to a minimum. This is why no commercial closed source product depended on something like log4j without thouroughly auditing it first. Oh wait...

momenti 5y ago

It's so valuable because knowing lots of people's passwords is useful for mass surveillance, cyber attacks, industrial espionage etc.

thewarrior 5y ago

Coming soon - 1Password stories

hogrider 5y ago

Because central bank shenanigans made the whole economy a sham.

xfz 5y ago

> Ah fuck. They now need to grow at any cost to earn all that money back. And they'll throw their users under the bus, if they have to, because it's either grow like a unicorn or go bust. Agreed, an outbreak of featuritis is almost guaranteed. The core product works well for the job intended, but I don't want to be bothered with an expanding scope and the inevitable spam promoting the features that I don't really need.

Joeri 5y ago
The move to an electron client was a clear indication they intend to add lots of features. If they were more or less feature complete they would have not bothered with an electron rewrite.

NoThisIsMe 5y ago

I think BitWarden is a better comparison -- it's SaaS (and thereby dead simple to get set up w/ cloud sync), but it's reasonably priced with a solid free tier, and open source to boot.

qbasic_forever 5y ago

It's more like they need 3750 years of $80k salary and 100 years of ~2.5 million salary for a dozen execs and board members.

john_moscow 5y ago

>How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? It will go to all-expense-paid trips, consultancy fees and other things you need to eventually get acquired for $10B+ by one of the big players. Or maybe, they will pivot, spend $300M on advertisement, so every grandma gets to know the brand name, and will then do an IPO, presenting it as the next opportunity of lifetime to the unsophisticated public. This is how you make money in the post-2008 world. The actual old-school profitability has been out of the picture for quite a while now.

ojr 5y ago
So correct but also post-2008 underrepresented founders need profits more than ever because they don't fit the narrative, applications like Canva being female-led and Calendly having a black male CEO are examples.

malwrar 5y ago

Don’t forget that this isn’t used by just individuals—businesses use it too to share credentials for things like the corporate Twitter account, internal systems, etc. I’m willing to bet that further investment there could help back up that valuation.

vidarh 5y ago
Realistically their B2C accounts are a sales funnel for their B2B. Because I was familiar with it for my own use, my employer uses it and they make much more money that way. Because they also let you get free family accounts if your company uses it, they presumably then rope in a lot of individuals for personal use who then become incentivised to want their next employer to use 1password too.

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natch 5y ago

They already threw their users under the bus once by changing to an insanely money-grabbing subscription model. But yes, agree with everything you said.

HikeThe46 5y ago

The individual user is extra revenue to them. Their business is B2B. Because my company uses 1password for business I also use it for home and they get an extra $60/year from my household because I need to already use it for work.

chrisburgin 5y ago
If your company is using 1Password Business you can get your family account for free. https://support.1password.com/link-family/ https://support.1password.com/link-family/

ajmurmann 5y ago

1Password, like Evernote, to me is a canonical example of an app that's actually "done" and ideally would enter a sustain mode.

ronnier 5y ago

Just switch to self hosting bitwarden. Stop using "the cloud" as much as possible.

aceazzameen 5y ago

Oh no, my thoughts exactly. My wife and I were just talking about setting up 1Password to switch from LastPass. It looks like BitWarden might be the best option if only for longevity.

fortuna86 5y ago

I guess my offline standalone license now has its days numbered. Sad.

mizzao 5y ago

Whatever, maybe they'll introduce some super discounted plan so I can finally switch over from LastPass before they also succumb to growth shittiness.

jonathankoren 5y ago

>And they'll throw their users under the bus They already through their consumer users under the bus when they switched to a subscription business. I haven’t upgraded since v6, and I plan to avoid it as long as I can.

jiveturkey 5y ago

> They now need to grow at any cost Dude, that ship sailed at their last (and first) raise. It took a little while for the shoe to drop, which was about 6 months ago.

amelius 5y ago

> How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same? This is once again just a case of investors hoping to make a pile of money so big they can corner a market. Sadly, they have no idea how cornering a market works (or doesn't work) in the case of digital products like this.

tlogan 5y ago

The are going to focus on the enterprise market. Good for them but this also means that they will make things worse for small businesses and personal users. Intentionally or non-intentionally but it will happen. But that is nature of the beast.

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