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People thinking this is an absurd amount of money are sleeping on how 1Password is quietly positioning itself to become the ground truth storage solution for co

• theptip 5y ago
  I think you are on the money here. I hadn’t spotted this but they have a k8s plugin for example: https://github.com/1Password/onepassword-operator https://github.com/1Password/onepassword-operator This solves the “restart pods when my secret is updated” issue which suggests to me that they are not just paying lip service with these integrations.
  • Fiahil 5y ago
    They probably should merge with https://github.com/external-secrets/kubernetes-external-secrets https://github.com/external-secrets/kubernetes-external-secr...
• koboll 5y ago
  Pretty typical for people here to be zoomed-in on the b2c side of a business because that's what they use, and fail to see the b2b side, the underwater mass of the iceberg.
  • jtbayly 5y ago
    Yeah, we’ll, it sucks to pay for an app that is perfect and then have them ruin it because of their b2b aspirations. And raising money like this is just another link in the chain pulling them down into the pit of insanity that ruins the most-beloved password manager ever.
  • wlesieutre 5y ago
    I think people can see that this is targeting businesses, but they're not happy about that because they're non-business customers. It doesn't bode well for the future direction of what has up to now been a good consumer-focused product. Like how Dropbox has gone from "a folder that synchronizes your files" to "an electron app for having discussion threads about files" because that's what business customers want.
    • yccs27 5y ago
      Hopefully the consumer marketshare has some influence on business decisions, which might make it worthwile for them to keep non-business customers. This kind of strategy certainly works for some professional software, which is often even free for students.
      • wlesieutre 5y ago
        I suspect 1Password sees features like iCloud Keychain coming and is trying to grow into other markets because a "good enough" built-in password manager will significantly decrease their value proposition in the consumer space. Not great if you like their product as a consumer, but 1Password's biggest feature differentiator right now is better family sharing than iOS provides. That could easily change in a future iOS version, and then it's suddenly a lot harder for 1Password to grow by selling a $60/year password manager subscription. Enterprise features on the other hand, that's not something that OS vendors are likely to ship. While I don't like the newer versions of Dropbox as much as the old ones, I can understand how pressure from iCloud and OneDrive pushed them toward enterprise features over consumer users.
        • indymike 5y ago
          > Enterprise features on the other hand, that's not something that OS vendors are likely to ship. Maybe not on Mac, but MS will probably try.
          • wlesieutre 5y ago
  • jrockway 5y ago
    I think it's a little weird. I have used 1password at two jobs, and thought it was great, so I bought it for myself. They want money to sync my passwords between my Windows desktop and my iPhone. Seems reasonable to me. I program computers for a living and people pay me. I guess there was a free self-hosted type thing at one point in the past? That was before I ever heard of the product, so I'm not that upset that it's no longer advertised heavily or whatever. I do have one complaint. They do have k8s secret management, which I would like to use for my personal cluster, but it's just too expensive for that. Very weird to show it in the UI and then when you try to use it, quote you an insanely high price. (I just use sealed-secrets instead. If my cluster blows up, it will be a very irritating weekend rotating all the secrets. But good to do, so meh.)
    • ubalatte 5y ago
      "Very weird to show it in the UI and then when you try to use it, quote you an insanely high price." How much did they quote? (if you're able to share)
      • jrockway 5y ago
        Oh, it's on their website. It's $30/month for "25 vault access credits". I have no idea what consumes a vault access credit, but didn't want to pay $30/month for a personal project. (At my last job, I wrote something to rotate the passwords on our network equipment everyday. I just exec'd the 1password linux binary, and that was free. Why should I pay to integrate it with k8s?)
    • highwind 5y ago
      I used to use 1Password when they just sold the application at a fixed price and I handle all the synchronization between machines. That option is no longer available. I'm one of the users who left because of this.
      • cj 5y ago
        They used to offer synchronization via Dropbox. Is that still an option?
  • alanh 5y ago
    I think this underscores some (but not all!) of the negative reaction to "Zendesk plans to buy (the company behind) SurveyMonkey" — the latter of which has developed significant revenue streams from specific B2B products
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    I was going to say something about “just use pgp and rsync”
    • bigiain 5y ago
      Browser and mobile app auto fill are really key features for a password manager.
  • drtz 5y ago
    There's a chance that a push toward enterprise may even result in a feature a lot of us more savvy individual customers would love to see as well: self-hosting.
  • sjtindell 5y ago
    True but if anyone could even casually be aware of and use terms like b2c and b2b it’s people on this forum right.
• kmac_ 5y ago
  Well, Hashicorp stands on many legs and they don't have much competition in many areas as theirs solutions are pretty unique...
  • rco8786 5y ago
    Their solutions are unique but the problems they are solving are not, they are in direct overlap with where 1P is going.
    • sleepybrett 5y ago
      I've watched three different teams fail to get vault up and running in any kind of a sustainable way. If they could solve that problem and add a desktop client they could crush 1password in this space. Probably wouldn't hurt that tons of software engineers are absolutely pissed at their moves in the consumer space recently.
      • ma2011ma 5y ago
        sleepybrett; which three are you talking about? and how?
      • atonse 5y ago
        As a (paying) Hashicorp customer, my #1 problem is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of talent out there that actually knows how to use these tools and is deeply experienced in them. And they are all critical pieces of infrastructure. I am very nervous to run a business critical site and store all its secrets in Vault, service discovery in Consul, and containers in Nomad (even though I really like all 3 and they've worked well so far) because we've had a couple of catastrophic cluster crashes where none of us had a clue how to recover without downtime and data loss. (Fortunately they happened in QA but it has delayed our production rollout of this infrastructure) And I still don't have access to an "expert" – apart from one vendor who seems to know it inside out but is extremely expensive. So there isn't much of a choice. So then there are two things I can do: become that expert and add that to our business offerings, or abandon the stack since it's too risky to be stuck with it. I don't want to make the mistake I made with Ember.js (nobody really knows it, it's beyond dead outside of a half dozen fortune 500 companies). I don't think that'll happen with Vault etc cuz they really are great products and ideas. But it is a concern. Hashicorp must know this, which is why they are betting big on HCP. I'd gladly pay for the uptime of these components to be their problem. And I am paying.
• kolbe 5y ago
  I don't think anyone here is calling it a bad investment for the investors. We're calling it a bad event for the users.
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  It's still hard for me to fathom this valuation. For example, all the major clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) have a Secrets Manager as simply one feature. I looked into 1Password secrets when they announced it but couldn't find any reason to use it over a cloud Secrets Manager.
  • mdaniel 5y ago
    For the same reason one might choose Hashicorp Vault versus the major cloud: cross-cloud, likely a richer feature set, almost certainly faster release cycles, and (for AWS specifically) no stupid "pay per request" billing to try and reason about. I'd guess it can make local development scenarios better, too
• Matl 5y ago
  They have been doing some pretty unfriendly moves towards their long-term customers, like making sure the new 1Password cannot be used without 'the cloud' like the old one could be. I have no doubt raising more VC money will only accelerate such trends. In fact I've decided to move off of 1Password to BitWarden, since at least one can realistically self-host it. That being said, it's not exactly easy to migrate from the latest 1Password so I wrote my own little utility to do it[1]. I think we need more competition to VC backed products in general, just imagine what would happen if the building blocks of say a GNU/Linux system we take for granted today would've been built with the mindset that investors are going to want a return on their investment. I am not saying there's anything wrong with that in principle, but am not sure I want to surrender my passwords to these kinds of incentives. 1 - https://github.com/MatejLach/1password-linux-to-bitwarden https://github.com/MatejLach/1password-linux-to-bitwarden
  • Groxx 5y ago
    This is exactly why I've switched from strongly recommending them, to strongly recommending against them. Plus their cloud security UX is horrendously confusing for everyone I've showed it to. Whoever is driving their cloud push has probably made the most profitable business decision, but has absolutely no idea how to make a sane product.
    • slenk 5y ago
      Yeah I have been slowly trying to push away from 1pass as our corporate secrets overlord. 1pass is marketing towards business but screwing over their original community
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    Yeah I don’t know how to feel about this. I still have a license that allows me to use it with a local vault. But I really want to get the family subscription. The Premium BitWarden plan is much cheaper than 1Password but the the Family plan doesn’t get you as much of a discount and my parents are on iPhones. Edit: Dave Teare, the 1Password guy claims that when they were still offering standalone licences in 2018, people picked subscriptions over perpetual licences at more than a 30:1 ratio. Of course, they only showed the monthly price vs the perpetual price. But I’d hope people understand what subscription means.
• mrkramer 5y ago
  >People thinking this is an absurd amount of money Yea it is absurd compared to how much money Google and Facebook raised back in the day.
  • beaned 5y ago
    The money isn't worth nearly as much as it was then.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  It's a leap people make. I wouldn't call it reasonable. There is no way Hashicorp generates 11 billion worth of value. The only reason they get so much cash is the big players are inflating value so they can gobble up as much cash as they can before the market comes to its senses and everything comes crashing down like in 2008.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• drdaeman 5y ago
  To be honest, I've just started using that (just set up a brand-new infra, started to provision users and thought it's a good idea to hook it up to a good password manager) and I found their Secrets Automation is (IMHO) barely usable for now. One can create most basic records but that's about it. I realize they don't owe me anything, but - honestly - just from the notoriety of the brand I've had higher expectations. I hope that's just because they don't have enough people and currently their efforts are stretched quite thin. $620M is huge amount of money, so hopefully they get new hires and would be able to deliver.
• Spooky23 5y ago
  Enterprise stuff is slowly moving away from the use cases that require solutions like 1Password, and since they are neither FIPS 140-2 validated or have FedRAMP ATOs, they have alot of work to do. They also have the issue of all of the crypto nerds going nuts when they start getting their FIPS stuff done.
• lvl100 5y ago
  I like 1Password but I’d never trust them for corporate “secret” management.
• democracy 5y ago
  Atm maybe, but since GCP/AWS provide their own solutions I don't really see 1P or Vault that much valuable - it's a pretty primitive solution with no lock-in or some hard-to-replicate technology.
• mike_d 5y ago
  > 1Password is quietly positioning itself to become the ground truth storage solution for corporate secret management I think it is the exact opposite. They saw what Dashlane did with a few million bucks and some radio/TV ads and want to throw the same sort of gasoline on the fire. I expect they will have their own VPN, browser, credit monitoring, etc. tie in before they have real enterprise features. They don't have FedRAMP, no HSM intergration, and it can't run in GovCloud. Not to mention it is super clunky to use compared to LastPass and others.
  • RayVR 5y ago
    your opinion that it's more clunky than lastpass is really interesting to me. It runs completely counter to 99.9% of comments I've seen on HN. Personally, I have no experience with lastpass. Just wanted to point out this anomaly.
    • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      FWIW, I have set up many, many non-technical users on an enterprise 1Password account. To those who haven't used a password manager there is a really big learning curve and I've seen tons of struggling. I think a lot of it is the separate "vaults" concept can be easy to fuck up. I've had multiple instances where users have accidentally saved individual credentials in a shared vault because they didn't realize they weren't saving to their private vault. Perhaps it's just the enterprise use cases that can confuse people, I'm guessing if you're just using it as 1 person with a single private vault there are fewer issues.
    • bfung 5y ago
      Lastpass incidents are so (in)famous, it’s on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LastPass https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LastPass 2011 2015 2016 2017 2019 2021 Those are just the famous ones. After 2014, their plugins and UX were so bad, I switched my team(s) to 1Password and never looked back.
      • RayVR 5y ago
        This is the sentiment I've seen many times on HN.
• t-writescode 5y ago
  Personally, I found SecretServer to be a better system of secrets management than 1Password, especially with regard to sharing and organizing secrets. The "all or nothing folder" model that 1Password has has always been very frustrating to me.