> I personally wouldn't pay an ongoing fee for a password manager.
I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app.
You use it daily on many platforms. If you don’t, either you repeat your passwords or are using some other bad practices.
Proper password manager saves your time and probably keeps all of your services more secure.
> I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app.
My bed is the best investment in the sense that I spend 1/3 of my life there. That doesn't mean it would be a good idea to pay 1/3 of my income towards a bed and mattress subscription.
Healthy competition from many suppliers means that I can buy a bed for a one-time, materials cost + profit margin price instead of purely value-based pricing, and spend the surplus elsewhere.
The bed is a great example.
Saying that investment should go linear with a time spent is a bit of a harsh generalization.
Instead, you certainly want to get a good enough bed.
However, at some point, you get diminishing gains when investing more into it, and it does not matter anymore.
Usually, good enough is the point to which healthy competition leads—an affordable price and with a not too high-profit margin.
Similarly, with password managers, are free alternatives good enough?
The initial comment implied that it is not worth paying at all, but I think the good enough is not met with current free alternatives, at least for non-tech people.
To be honest, free version of BitWarden might be the best you can get at the moment and it is enough for the majority.
But you have to pay for better two-factor security.
I agree that everyone should use a password manager. But that doesn't mean you need to subscribe to one, rather than buy one outright or use the (rather capable ones) that platforms already ship with. 1Password could have run a good stable company. Instead they took $1B in venture capital, and now need to desperately grow an monetize their user base to justify their $7B valuation.
It's easy to see why some things need to be subscription-based; e.g. the value is actually in some kind of constantly updated content; or providing ongoing service actually has a significant cost to the supplier, e.g. in bandwidth, compute resources, operations. Neither of those is the case for password managers. (Or at least, should not be the case.)
> 1Password could have run a good stable company. Instead they took $1B in venture capital, and now need to desperately grow an monetize their user base to justify their $7B valuation.
That is their greedy business decision, and it should not reflect to every one of the password managers. If it costs too much, change service.
However, there is a reason why you would pay for the password manager. They have the highest security requirement from the every app.
Their auto-fill properties should not fill to scam websites.
They should support every possible machine, like BitWarden for example does, even CLI is there.
They should be accessible at any time.
Their data can’t be leaked with bad memory managment.
Their UX should be designed in a way that everyone graps the idea of good password, and can keep using them.
Too often people stop using them, because they are too difficult or clumsy to use.
> I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app.
I agree but I think the point being made is that there are free password managers that do the job just as well. I use keepassxc on the desktop, it has autofill, it's backed up in my Google Drive, I have an Android app that works pretty well too.
I've never really felt a need to pay for a password manager, my current solution works well enough.
I've used Bitwarden at Lastpass and Keypass in the past and found all of them much worse at their sync and ability to integrate with websites or OS to paste my passwords, not to mention how many of them required either a subscription to them or to Dropbox or the like to keep your passwords synced across devices.
I also don't understand paying for this when both Apple and Chrome have one, and you can even use the chrome one instead of apple for most things on the iPhone
I’ve had this thought a few times, but am pretty entrenched in 1Password with hundreds of logins. I’m curious if you know about a good migration tool to get these into the Apple password manager?
I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app. You use it daily on many platforms. If you don’t, either you repeat your passwords or are using some other bad practices. Proper password manager saves your time and probably keeps all of your services more secure.