This entire assumption that I'm a freeloader is absolute bullshit. I've bought and paid for my copies of 1Password and have even purchased it for others. You can take that freeloader name calling and shove it right back in the place you found it. I'm quite frankly tired of it.
We can have upgrades and working software that gets updates without monthly fees to do it. I also do not need their cloud and only features. They intentionally removed the local vaults specifically to force you to use their cloud. That was the last straw for me.
> you need to accept a model where there's ongoing pay for that work
Before they switched to subscriptions, it still worked like that: 1Password 4, 1Password 5, 1Password 6 - I paid money each time a new version came out. Sometimes I paid the same day of the release and upgraded immediately. Other times, I may have waited a little bit longer and continued with the version that I had.
They had a model that was ongoing pay for their work. 1password was healthy and happy providing flat fees for major version updates, which were every couple of years. Then some VCs wanted to see more profit so suddenly it's all online, subscription, drop the native clients, and a pivot to enterprise. It got enshittified.
Subscriptions may be a 'good financial model' for the business, but are rarely a good financial model for the consumer.
If I am required to pay you monthly for a product there becomes less and less reason for the owner of said product to improve the product. With the hassle that comes with switching password managers (even for myself, I provide three families with this product (my parents, my sisters family)) there is a lot of friction involved with leaving a product that is stagnant that I am paying monthly for.
I was much happier with 1password when i was able to evaluate their new major version, see if any features of it were compelling to me and my extended family and make a decision wether or not it was worth the asking price. Generally speaking a major version wouldn't get huge changes over it's lifetime, maybe some bugfixes, maybe some ui improvements around it's new features (could also be considered bugfixes), any security issues that cropped up. At that point their development staff was more focused on brand new features for the next major version.
I think what we ran into, partially, with 1password is them running out of ideas for their next major version. A password manager, to a consumer, is not a super complicated product that requires a bunch features, a lot of the work is in the encryption and security which isn't really consumer facing.
We can have upgrades and working software that gets updates without monthly fees to do it. I also do not need their cloud and only features. They intentionally removed the local vaults specifically to force you to use their cloud. That was the last straw for me.