Tell HN: 1Password6 is dead on Chrome 99. Indefinite license is finite
I happen to like my indefinite license for 1password6 but Chrome has made a change in version 99 that renders the 1password plugin dead. Support says I need to upgrade to 7.
I've asked 1password legal to buy me out of my license as they may be in breach. They do have some language about breaking changes made by Apple - https://web.archive.org/web/20140902010520/https://agilebits.com/home/licenses. I haven't found the exact license but have requested it. We'll see. They did push this indefinite license thing and half a decade falls marginally short of indefinite.
53 comments
[ 13.4 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadThere's nothing I'm doing in 1password now that I couldn't do 5 years ago. Yet I've had multiple cycles of pain and had to pay for upgrades I didn't want.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that they haven’t improved your life but not to the idea they haven’t improved the core use cases at all. It’s a tremendously better product for me than it was 5 years ago.
It utterly infuriates me - things like UX feedback are often replied to with "but this is great for me!" by their support staff, rather than actually acknowledging that they might actually have made something with faults.
Mix in other things like their public reasoning for abandoning standalone licenses (users didn't buy them!), while handily failing to mention that they entirely manufactured the disparity by making them so obscure to find that you basically needed to email in to do so, and I have lost all respect I had for the company, it's staff and it's founders.
They're just another random scummy SaaS company that wants big enterprise deal money now, anything special about them is just nostalgia.
I do not understand, they made a business error for how they financially planned things it looks like. It sucks but we are talking very little money for something that is mission critical and we all use daily…
Why is this so important to you?
We got hosed when they started charging "a lot", and then not sharing the product that we helped finance to build when we bought our indefinite license.
Can you explain? If you buy version 6, then they bring out version 7, wouldn't you buy it again or switch to SAAS?
They did!
What did go wrong here was that their earliest adopters got screwed by the change in direction of the business. They are right to be angry, if you say "pay us $X to support you for the rest of time", then people should expect that their $X pays for support for the rest of time. That was the deal, and you can't alter the deal and expect people to be pleased. It is possible to structure the finances to support this pricing; set $X to how much money you'd invest in the stock market or a savings account such that the yearly interest covers the yearly support cost. Clearly, that didn't happen, or they want the interest for themselves instead of support, and that upsets the devoted early adopters who loved the product and the company. That is exactly the group of people you don't want to make mad, and that's the failing here.
(Side note, I wanted to do some actual math on the pricing here. Say you hate SaaS and want an unlimited license for something. You can just do the financial hacks yourself! If a product costs $100 per month, that's $1200 per year. To get $1200 per year out of a savings account, just deposit... $145,000 at 0.7% APY. I guess this is why people don't actually do the "unlimited license" thing ;)
I think it's a super easy misstep for any startup to make. Realize your business model doesn't work, pivot, and leave the early adopters in the dust. Most of the time, because you're growing so fast, it doesn't matter. But you will see rants like this on HN, and they could be avoided with a transition plan. ("We'll give you the SaaS version for free forever!") Just depends on how much you care.
Remember how much "techies" liked Google back in the day? The sentiment on HN is a lot different today. That's what happens as you grow; you lose touch with the early users. Sometimes your vision might be better than them, and you don't need them. But nobody wants to be told by someone they love, "I don't need you anymore".
My guess is they made a mistake, and financially you can't build a business from that. So they moved to a SAAS model and now things are good. It sounds like they honored their commitment to version 6, and they are seeing 7 as a new product.
[Quote] On March 15th 2022, Google released Chrome 99, which introduced a new code signing certificate. Because of this change, 1Password 6 for Mac no longer works in Chrome 99 or later.
While your license for 1Password 6 for Mac hasn't expired (and never will), the last major update to that version was in May 2018. It's no longer being actively developed and will only receive critical security updates in the future.
To continue using Chrome with 1Password on your Mac, you'll need to upgrade to a 1Password membership account. With a 1Password membership, you won't have to worry about dealing with licensing and you can easily use 1Password on all your devices. You can use the account to sync your devices automatically - third-party services like Dropbox and iCloud are no longer required. Simply sign into your 1Password membership account and all of your 1Password data is there. You can learn more here. [/Quote]
I used to love how simple it was, how well everything seemed to be "integrated". These days, what a usability nightmare that 1password has become. Sometimes simple stuff like editing a password, will pop you into browser tabs, removing your focus from whatever webpage you are working on. When you go to fill out a password, god forbid you aren't logged in and you get 2-3 popups and your focus leaves whatever your working on to enter a password in a different prompt.
Its gotten to the point where I have started to consider alternatives.
But with that said I don't have any of these issues. I find 1password comes up when I need it and goes away when I'm done.
I do find 1password's Android integration is excellent. That I am a fan of.
They marketed it using the word "Indefinite" to differentiate it from subscriptions.
This was an indefinite LTS in my mind that lasted just 5 years.
[Quote] While the license itself will never expire, system updates from Apple could cause certain aspects of some software to stop working. For example, the Safari 5 upgrade stopped 1Password 2 from working correctly and required an updated version of 1Password. [/Quote]
This wasn't an Apple change. But I get your point. FWIW they are still offering critical security updates according to support, just not fixing it when it ceases to work on Chrome.
Technically, your license for 1Password 6 is still valid and still works with 1Password 6 on browsers that still support 1Password 6. Eg. I don't necessarily decry Microsoft because Microsoft Word 6 for Carbon doesn't run on macOS Monterey -- Word 6 still runs on the OS versions it was designed to work on.
As far as I can see in this case, AgileBits hasn't hoodwinked you or revoked your 1Password version 6 license, here. I think, after a certain point, it's unreasonable to expect AgileBits to keep updating old versions to support modern operating systems.
Edit: I see OP's point. After OP's reply below, I went back to look at my original 1Password license and it was described as "lifetime", as well.
People will disagree. But for me it feels like at least the life time of a car.
For most perpetual software licenses I have seen that can be purchased with a single one-off payment, you get a perpetual license for to a single version of the software, which specifically does not include free updates to the latest version.
> feels like at least the life time of a car.
I'll push the car licensing analogy down the road to a slightly ridiculous destination:
Suppose you purchase a diesel powered car, the purchase price includes a lifetime license to use the car (it sounds insane to need to explicitly state this, such is the wonderful world of software licensing) and let's say the purchase price even includes a lifetime warranty for manufacturing defects.
In one year's time, the government introduces new regulation to outlaw diesel cars and require all cars to be converted to run on electricity.
Under the terms of your lifetime license and warranty for your car, would you expect the car manufacturer to convert your diesel powered car to run on electricity?
That is, what if the problem is not that the licensed software product itself has changed but that the surrounding software ecosystem around the software product has changed?
edit: to me it would matter a lot if 1Password6 was sold to you as a software _product_ or an ongoing _service_. If 1Password6 is sold as a software product, then I would have no expectation of free patches or upgrades if it no longer integrated with newer versions of other software owned and changed by other companies. If, on the other hand, 1Password6 sold you a lifetime's subscription to an ongoing service with some guarantees about a minimum level of non-brokenness & availability, then you might reasonably expect them to continue to offer a service that works, no matter if dependencies of their service change. I would be very surprised if they did the latter --- committing to the liability and ongoing costs of offering an ongoing service indefinitely for a single one-off price is usually insane from a business perspective.
For people thinking that they shouldn't have to support new OS's, I think that's bullshit. they are still in business. they have ample product that can work in modern os's. they have a business because we early adopters were made a promise and we agreed, that's why we paid $60-$100 to begin with. Then less than a couple years into we got fucked and told "we're no longer building that product that has been upgraded 6 times, just this identical one over here that cost a monthly subscription".
They are thiefs, and they should go bankrupt imho.
This represents an involuntary migration of customers who purchased a license to 1Password6 to REQUIRE them to upgrade to 1Passwords SaaS offering -- evidently through no fault of 1Password, since it's actually on Google for changing how the signing of the binaries changed.
I've added my email to the list of messages sent over to 1password.
DON'T BE RUDE in your email to them - I'm sure that they're frustrated with the change as well, but you also have to admit that they have a business to run.
a price break, and this unfortunate turn of events, might just be that final tipping point where I finally upgrade to get features that I don't want. :(
Have you forgotten the problems getting people off windows xp and IE6?
You are free to run your licensed version on an old version of Chrome for as long as you want. If you want an upgraded version that runs in newer versions of Chrome, you need a new license.
You still have a valid license for 1Password and the app still works and your passwords are still accessible, no?
As my "lifetime" 1Password license no longer functions on the updated version of Chrome (which was one of the features of the program purchased), please refund the original amount paid. This can be done via a snail-mailed check to the address below. I will expect to receive the refund within two weeks from the date of this email. Failure to accommodate this request will result in my contacting the attorney general in my state.