On the other hand they've been moving to a subscription model, starting a slow deprecation of the standalone product. Towards this end they've introduced the $5 / month family plan and killed the Mac-only option, while raising the price of the Mac+Windows option. At this point it's worth noting that the Windows client is old and buggy. They did this, as I said, to raise attractiveness of the $5 / month family plan, being the oldest trick in the book: setting an anchor for comparisons.
First of all I find $5 / month to be expensive. Yes, that may be the price of 2 coffees, but if you pay that kind of money for any service/app used, pretty soon you're talking about real money. I also like to own things and I hate renting things, being a terrible tenant. I cannot justify a rent of $60 per year for services/apps unless they are investments producing money. Something like 1Password keeps me safe, but it doesn't make me more productive when programming and it's not helping me with sales either. I can justify subscriptions for Dropbox or IntelliJ IDEA or for keeping my domain active, but not for password storage.
I guess what really bothers me is that 1Password is moving away from the things that made me pick it in the first place: standalone app, Dropbox/Wifi sync, Everywhere interface. I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault, to introduce GDrive/OneDrive sync as an option, to fix their Windows client and maybe to introduce a Linux client. Their new Windows client that's the successor to the old one is a "modern Windows" app distributed through the Windows store, which means I won't even be able to keep running 1Password through Wine.
But there's another reason I prefer standalone apps. With the family/business plans they promise a web interface and they promise that after you are dead your wife or children will be able to access your vault. Of course, if I'm dead, the subscription would end because nobody would realize that they need to renew it in time, so that's an odd point to make. But skipping over that, this means that the vault is now stored on their servers and they have access to it and to your one password whenever you login. If you thought the Dropbox sync was insecure, think again.
So unfortunately they took the bait and decided to spend resources on a subscription model, which is exactly what makes me run away. In the grand scheme of things I guess it makes sense and I hope it works out for them. But along with DRM, trusted computing and the overall trend of bait and switch, I find it to be quite treacherous.
> I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault
I realize this may only partially help you, but onepasswordpy (https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy) has support for both Agilekeychain and the OpVault, if you find yourself on a system that isn't Mac or Windows, or otherwise is a PitA to get to your keychain/vault.
In fairness(?) to Agilebits, the 1Password Anywhere really was just the most bare-bones possible, as it didn't support any of the encrypted items except Login; so no Passwords, Secure Notes, no attachments on anything. Maybe they just figured it wasn't worth the hassle to flesh it out, and then with opvault it became a lower priority than it was before.
I work for AgileBits, the people behind the linked blog post and 1Password :) Just fair warning at the start.
You're right, we did combine our Mac and Windows options together. The primary reason for this was to make it easier. It's far easier to have a single purchase option on our store page than to have multiple. We went from 3 (Mac, Windows, Mac+Windows) to 1 (Mac+Windows).
An important note though, the price went down for this combo not up, it was previously $70 USD and is now $65 USD.
The $5/mo we advertise for Families is if you pay monthly. There's an option to pay yearly and that saves you money, which comes out to $48/year instead of $60, so $4/mo instead of $5/mo. Users who signed up early during our special launch special also got $10 in credit, making the first year a total of $38 if paid yearly.
I wouldn't say we're moving away from what made you like us in the beginning. We still offer our standalone apps, we still offer Dropbox, iCloud and wifi sync (and we're continually improving them). In fact, we just added OPVault support to our Android application, which should further confirm that these options aren't disappearing. OPVault is not used for our Teams or Family options. Teams and Families are in addition to what we already offered and it gives us some new options for making 1Password better that we couldn't do with the standalone option.
One of our most common customer support inquiries is why they are asked for a license on their desktop after downloading the iOS app. We can better solve this by having a subscription option since it includes everything and reduces the user's cost to try it out. Once you change all of your passwords to passwords you don't know, the need to have those passwords on all devices becomes even more important. Making those apps available on all devices as easily as possible is a big deal. Users on hacker news are unlikely to struggle with this but average users still do. I have to explain these things to my parents regularly.
The problem with doing an "Everywhere" interface for OPVault is that it was only ever going to be Read-Only. With the Teams and Family implementation we were able to make it capable of reading and writing. We're sad to not see an 1PasswordEverywhere for OPVault but the Teams/Families interface is significantly better than anything we could've done with 1PasswordAnywhere.
Another really important distinction is that if you stop paying for a Team or Family account that account simply goes into read-only state. This means if you were to die your wife or children will still be able to access your account if you haven't paid. We really tried to do the right thing here and not lock users out of their data.
For Windows, which I've saved for last here, is that we're well aware that you want more from our Windows app. We hear our users loud and clear and we're doing our best to help improve things there. It may take some time to get there but we have things happening behind the scenes here.
I can't comment on any Linux client but this is something I personally would like to see and we've had a lot of requests for it so I keep crossing my fingers that we'll get to this. Linux is one of the reasons I'm really excited that Swift is open source because it's possible that we might be able to share some of this across platforms. There are times I really want 1Password command line integration and while I primarily use a Mac I realize this type of thing could be shared.
I hope that helps answer some of your concerns. I'm just an iOS developer and customer support person here at AgileBits but we do listen and we try our best to help our users as best they can. If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to keep an eye on things here.
First of all I find $5 / month to be expensive. Yes, that may be the price of 2 coffees, but if you pay that kind of money for any service/app used, pretty soon you're talking about real money. I also like to own things and I hate renting things, being a terrible tenant. I cannot justify a rent of $60 per year for services/apps unless they are investments producing money. Something like 1Password keeps me safe, but it doesn't make me more productive when programming and it's not helping me with sales either. I can justify subscriptions for Dropbox or IntelliJ IDEA or for keeping my domain active, but not for password storage.
I guess what really bothers me is that 1Password is moving away from the things that made me pick it in the first place: standalone app, Dropbox/Wifi sync, Everywhere interface. I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault, to introduce GDrive/OneDrive sync as an option, to fix their Windows client and maybe to introduce a Linux client. Their new Windows client that's the successor to the old one is a "modern Windows" app distributed through the Windows store, which means I won't even be able to keep running 1Password through Wine.
But there's another reason I prefer standalone apps. With the family/business plans they promise a web interface and they promise that after you are dead your wife or children will be able to access your vault. Of course, if I'm dead, the subscription would end because nobody would realize that they need to renew it in time, so that's an odd point to make. But skipping over that, this means that the vault is now stored on their servers and they have access to it and to your one password whenever you login. If you thought the Dropbox sync was insecure, think again.
So unfortunately they took the bait and decided to spend resources on a subscription model, which is exactly what makes me run away. In the grand scheme of things I guess it makes sense and I hope it works out for them. But along with DRM, trusted computing and the overall trend of bait and switch, I find it to be quite treacherous.