1Password pricing increasing up to 33% in March

146 points by otterley ↗ HN
Just got an email from 1Password:

Since 2005, 1Password has been on a mission to make security simple, reliable, and accessible for everyone. As the way people work and live online has evolved, so has 1Password.

More recently, we’ve invested significantly in new features that make 1Password even more powerful and effortless to use, helping protect what matters most to you, including:

* Automatic saving of logins and payment details

* Enhanced Watchtower alerts

* Faster, more secure device setup

* AI-powered item naming

* Expanded recovery options

* Proactive phishing prevention

While 1Password has grown substantially in value and capability, our pricing has remained largely unchanged for many years. To continue investing in innovation and the world-class security you expect, we’re updating pricing for Family plans, starting March 27, 2026.

Current vs New Pricing:

* Current price: $59.88 USD / year

* New price: $71.88 USD / year

The new price will take effect at your next renewal, provided it’s on or after March 27, 2026. Those occurring prior to March 27, 2026, will continue at the current pricing until your next renewal.

[Note: this is for family plans; individual plan price increases even higher, percentage-wise!]

103 comments

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That's for family plans. For individual plans it is increasing as

> Current vs New Pricing: Current price: $35.88 USD / year New price: $47.88 USD / year

You left out the most bizarre part of the email:

> Action needed: Please go to my.1password.com/billing to register your approval. If you do not provide consent by your next renewal date on or after March 27, 2026, your subscription will automatically be cancelled at time of your next renewal

Apparently you get auto-cancelled if you don't manually accept the price increase?

Wasn't mentioned on mine, either (Ohio, United States). My subscription is through in-app purchase, so I'm assuming that'll go through Apple's usual "your subscription price is increasing" flow.
Got the same. Kind of a bummer to see “AI powered item naming”. Who needs this shit? Hope the price increase is not to cover their useless AI spendings. Otherwise I’m happy with 1Password.
The 33% increase (47.88/35.88) for the "features" I don't need is too much. I will be switching to Bitwarden.

I think if they increased the prices by 5% or something like that, I'd said fine, that >30% is simply not justified.

I don't mind the increase per-se, but the "improvements" they advertise to justify it are laughable. Not to mention that 1Password 8 has been a major downgrade across the board.
Anyone have suggestions for a good alternative?

I've been using 1Password (family version to share some subset within the family) for more than 10 years now, but I have to say the user experience has degraded quite a bit. Anyone have a better overall alternative? (Doesn't necessarily have to be cheaper.)

I've used 1PWD for at least as long as you, and when renewal comes around (EDIT: oops, guess I never "upgraded" to subscription plan) I'm going to cancel and just stick with Apple's Passwords app (née Keychain Access). First "cloud!", subscriptions, now 33% price increases for the hell of it, I'm outta here, 1PWD. (Though in looking just now, we never upgraded to v8.0, so I guess I'm already outta here.)

I only suggest Passwords because if you've used 1PWD for that long, odds are good you're on Apple HW/OS. It does everything we need in our household, including shared creds. One of these days I'll get off me arse and export the 1PWD stuff (IIRC, 1PWD->Apple PWDs is doable). Right now we use 1PWD as R/O, and all new stuff goes in Passwords.

Using Enpass, migrated from 1Password when in need of a Linux client some 10years ago. As early user I was grandfathered into a free lifetime account and eventually was required to pay a discounted lifetime fee $70 through Apple, which I’m fine with, it’s Indian developers need to pay their rent too.

Enpass has all features I need, on all platforms including iOS. It syncs using the api of one of the free storage providers, WebDAV or even over WiFi. Having some 600 entries and a few attachments (copy of ID Cards etc) and never had any performance issues. Nor issues with subdomains. Regular updates, most recently added PRF (Pseudo-Random Function) for passkeys. It lacks a command line client, which I can live with. Nor does it support the fingerprint reader on Linux, instead has a pin option for quick unlocking.

Bitwarden. You can host a free instance with Vaultwarden.
This will finally push me to self host an alternative, not even an hour of work until everything is merged.
Enshittification strikes again. For a normal user, the software seems to be getting worse and more cumbersome, and the company seems to continue focusing solely on pushing business- and enterprise-centric features that I have no use for. They'd do well to offer a non-pro type subscription for users who don't want all of that. Instead, though, I and a lot of others will simply be canceling.
yeah, honestly i'm baffled... don't they have a whole team for marketing and communications? it's a slap in a customer's face... i've been on this subscription for 9 years, and now with enshittification, scott galloway, rutger bregman and cory doctorow all shouting off the roofs to cancel US-based subscriptions it's like no one on their public comms team is reading the room; like at all.

and on top of that they added this joke of a list of features supposed to justify the decision... as if i had previously been asked about if i'd want "AI-powered item naming. wow, what a shitshow.

They're Canadian:

> © 2025 1Password. All rights reserved. 4711 Yonge St, 10th Floor, Toronto Ontario, M2N 6K8, Canada

Though I don't know if they host all their servers in Canada or not.

They have a Canadian-hosted version at 1password.ca
Most will just absorb the price.

Fee will move to something like Bitwarden and keepass

That has to be the lamest use of “AI” to justify price increases.
The email I got with individual plan went from $35.88 USD / year to $47.88 USD

The new price then is $4/month. From $3/month. (So still 33% increase, similar to family plan in OP].

I found it very cheap before, which is part of what encouraged me to get it in the first place, vs trying to do something free. Would I have signed up for it originally at this price? I don't know. But it's not enough to make me switch to a competitor now, or try to find a way to do password management for free -- so they predicted succesfully for me that they'd keep me as a customer. Even though annoyed.

Definitely can't go back to having no password management. (I also use it for TOTP and passkey).

If I was on all Apple/iOS, I'd probably just use iCloud. But I need multi-OS-vendor support.

What one actually needs these days is not something one can get a reasonable UX for free for. (unless you only need apple OS's maybe? Or only chrome?). There's really no alternative. I think they realized that, and that they were leaving money on the table. I got 1Passowrd originaly when I needed TOTP, and wanted something that was multi-device and secure, and certainly didn't want to host it myself. I don't know what else I'd use.

I use passwordsafe https://pwsafe.org/

Sync the file to Dropbox. Available on all my devices. 2fa protection in password safe - yubi + password.

This is probably not the most secure system in the world but I've been using it for 10+ years. And it's free.

I'm building an alternative called Lockstep: KeePass-like local-first password vault but with build sync https://github.com/lockstepvault-hq/lockstep

Sync requires a server, however server does not see any secret data, it is only used to relay encrypted hash-chained ops log between devices. It's intended to be self-hosting friendly - server is single binary backed by SQLite.

It's project is early-alfa, CLI app, Keepass import and sever/sync work for the most part, there is MacOS app in progress and plans for a iOS app and a browser extension.

Not ready for production and it's not audited.

I'm currently using KeepassXC/Keepasium with Syncting, but I want a better solution - something that supports trouble-free sync natively and allows me to own the system

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Have you tried StrongBox? It uses standard KeePass vaults and covers the Apple platforms, sync the file with whatever you like and use any KeePass client for Android, Windows, and others. Strongbox is $25/year, but has a trial. If I remember correctly, the Windows and Android clients I chose are both free (of cost).

Note: no affiliation with the developer, I just discovered it from a post similar to this, having never heard of it, and thought your needs sounded similar to mine.

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Wasn’t software cost going to 0 thanks to AI? How they justify 33% increase?
By what you're saying, the cost of AI sounds like a good argument.
Even if the cost of software is truly going down (which is debatable), what makes you think the savings will be passed down to you?
Cost to companies may go down to zero but the price to consumers can still go up.
There is no reason for this increase except the fact that they know people are too lazy to migrate away.

Most of the listed features don't make any sense as core value propositions (wtf is AI-powered item naming)

There is no reason for this increase except the fact that they know people are too lazy to migrate away.

They're not wrong. I'm a geeky guy with a tech resume as long as your arm, and I'd really rather do something else beside research how to export 1PWD data to something else, then import to $TOOL_OF_CHOICE. I'm sure it's not all that hard, and maybe that's part of the problem: it's monkey work, not an interesting technical challenge, right up there with "clean the gutters".

Below are a few valid reason to increase the price a software company charge their customer.

1. R&D 2. Increase salary 3. Increase OpEx

I just wrote up my migration plan. This is going to be very painful.

Step 1 is deleting accounts I don’t use anymore. I did 2 of them today. One required an email, another required a phone call. Both were rather painful, but at least I was able to get them done within the day. I have 320 accounts left to go through.

I have been wanting to reign in my digital footprint, so I guess this is a good excuse, it’s just very difficult. Last year I tried to delete a PSN account (I have 2 of them). I waited on hold with Sony for 45 minutes for them to just hang up on me. I also got caught in captcha hell a few times.

I also have to be willing to let things ago. I found an old Zinio account. I assumed the company would be dead (digital magazines), but they are still going, my account still works, and I have dozens of magazines in there I purchased 15 years ago when the iPad launched. Do I keep it around just incase, or let it go… there are going to be a lot of things like this. I almost feel like I need to take time off work to deal with this.

Migrate to what exactly? And what happens when the thing you migrate to also increase prices?
Exactly. Every other software is either:

1) Temporarily not yet enshittified, at a discount rate to get market share

2) Actually just shit / pure vendor lock in

The merry-go-round is tiring

Their extension has not been working well
Just cancelled my subscription, which was due for renewal a few days after the change takes effect. I can live with vaults being read-only while I find a (self-hosted) alternative.
It's a shame that the free/cheap password managers that regular people would use (like those by Apple, Google) seem unwilling to loosen their platform lock-in, and others like 1Password mainly target business use and are too expensive for the average joe to bother. So decades and dozens of new auth standards later we are still in a place where people use the same password on all accounts and write it down on post-its.

The industry has collectively spent untold billions/trillions on cybersecurity over the years, while the best way to actually secure access would be to have a free, preinstalled, interoperable password manager that "just works".

> It's a shame that the free/cheap password managers that regular people would use (like those by Apple, Google) seem unwilling to loosen their platform lock-in, and others like 1Password mainly target business use and are too expensive for the average joe to bother. So decades and dozens of new auth standards later we are still in a place where people use the same password on all accounts and write it down on post-its.

Bitwarden is free and easy to use.

This is useful enough for a family of 4 with teenagers who have a lot of logins that I don't mind the price. I'm not going to deal with self-hosting to save $1/month. My time is worth more than that.
This is in preparation for their IPO when the market is attractive.
Wow, add AI nobody wanted or needed and pull a gmail and say this justifies raising the price. Exceptionally uncool.

Apple plays the long game and has been improving the password app substantially. I've noticed.

I feel like I am really struggling to see the issue here with pricing, it is still a very cheap subscription and it does what we need it to do. And they were one of the ones that came out better in that recent security analysis of password managers. I see a lot of people upset here and I don’t get it.

Did they need to increase the price? Honestly I don’t know, without seeing their financials it is hard to say. But I would much rather they be able to be sustainable.

It likely doesn’t help that they are facing more and more free competition from Google and Apple. I know I have been considering a switch to Apple Passwords after the recent changes to it. I doubt this will excelerate it or anything because I will still want somewhere as a secondary area incase I loose access to my apple account.

If everyone goes to their subscriptions and cancels today maybe they'll get the message.

I've done it, and will spend the rest of the current renewal figuring out how well Apple Passwords works, I guess.

I'd like to sync everything but realistically I just need to extract any 2FA I have left in 1p; everything else can be password reset when the time cometh.

I love the product but this is a really aggressive price update and makes me concerned they’ll try to gouge me in years to come.
They’ve added a lot of ‘functionality’ but I use none of it. In December I migrated everything out and into Apple’s native Password manager, and cancelled my subscription to 1Password. Just in time, apparently. Subscription models need to die.