> Saying that "customers voted with their wallet" and chose subscriptions is disingenous
Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable price for the 1Password service if it wasn't a step down in value from what I had before.
I have a slightly older version of 1Password and it works fine for my purposes. I've been holding off on the subscription transition because I would derive zero value from switching to subscription but I'd gain a monthly payment I didn't have before.
But the thing that irks me is the PR speak that is trying to spin the subscription change as something we, the customer voted for, when they've gone out of their way to force everyone into subscriptions and hide the standalone version. I know the standalone version of 1Password 7 exists, but I tried to find the price yesterday and gave up after a few minutes of poking around.
"We didn't choose this, you chose this!" is so distastefully dishonest that I have zero desire to engage with this company any more. Once my standalone license of 1Password 6 stops working, I'm upgrading to a competing product.
It's not dishonest. When they launched the service at 1password.com, you could choose which one you wanted when you downloaded and purchased. When they say "you chose this", they're referring to the time when that was on their site and people overwhelmingly chose the subscription. They posted this on the forums after the first year and made a pretty big deal about it and now everyone is acting like they did this in secret. It's in the release notes, it was on the site, and it was in the forums. I think they may have even emailed it to people at one point (I've been a user since v3). To say they're being dishonest is not true.
> they're referring to the time when that was on their site and people overwhelmingly chose the subscription
No, it's still misleading. People like me, who already had a working version at the time the subscription was rolled out, simply chose to do nothing or switch to a competing service. People who didn't want subscriptions saw the writing on the wall and started migrating to other products.
To suggest that their userbase wanted to voluntarily give up their paid-for software that was working just fine and swap it out for a subscription service just to get feature parity is silly. As you said, they made it clear that subscription was the way of the future and that anyone who didn't want a subscription product should look elsewhere, so we did. Let's not act surprised when their only remaining customers were those who wanted a subscription version.
> It's in the release notes, it was on the site, and it was in the forums. I think they may have even emailed it to people at one point (I've been a user since v3)
I don't see where anyone was claiming it was done in secret. It has been discussed at every step of the way on social sites like HN for years.
The secret part is that they've gone to great lengths to bury the standalone version 7 link on their website, and now they're claiming that not many people buy it. Of course they don't, because it's virtually impossible to find or even know that it exists unless someone passes you the link.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable price for the 1Password service if it wasn't a step down in value from what I had before.
I have a slightly older version of 1Password and it works fine for my purposes. I've been holding off on the subscription transition because I would derive zero value from switching to subscription but I'd gain a monthly payment I didn't have before.
But the thing that irks me is the PR speak that is trying to spin the subscription change as something we, the customer voted for, when they've gone out of their way to force everyone into subscriptions and hide the standalone version. I know the standalone version of 1Password 7 exists, but I tried to find the price yesterday and gave up after a few minutes of poking around.
"We didn't choose this, you chose this!" is so distastefully dishonest that I have zero desire to engage with this company any more. Once my standalone license of 1Password 6 stops working, I'm upgrading to a competing product.