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dvmierlo
February 24, 2026
Question

What justifies the huge subscription price increase?

  • February 24, 2026
  • 68 replies
  • 7038 views

Today I received an email from 1Password with the message of a price increase.

Current price: €31.80 EUR / year
New price: €43.80 EUR / year

This is an enormous price. Can someone from 1Password honestly and without any sales pitch justify this huge price increase? After years of a loyal paying 1Password user, this really makes me look around of alternative options.

68 replies

February 25, 2026

I can understand price rises are the norm, and 1p has been quite good in the past by not raising prices for years and years, but to suddenly increase by so much is a bit of a kick in the teeth.

its not huge in grand scale of things but I don’t think I can justify paying the new prices for what I use 1p for, I hardly use most of the features 1p offers.
I will likely explore other managers going forward now.

February 25, 2026

1Password user since 2015. Also not very pleased with the 20% increase.
I kept using it until now for the fact that:
The Account Key seems very secure.
Some features not available in others. (sections, tags, linking items)
User interface looks better.
It is a big pain to move. More so when the whole family is finally convinced using a password manager. They won't be happy when I ask them to switch.

But what I also don't like is that nothing is done with very usefull feature requests. Years of people asking usefull features and nothing happens.
Also when you read the blogs, it is always about features of the Business and Enterprice edition.
I can't think of a new feature that has been added for years that was usefull for me.

I'm feeling that the sponsorship of Redbull F1 team needs to be compensated. And that board members demand more revenue. I used to have the feeling that 1Password was motivated to create a great product. And now it seems only important to generate more revenue.

snozdop
February 25, 2026

As I'm sure we've all seen in the price hike email, one of the new features 1Password has supposedly invested significantly in, to justify the increase is "AI-powered item naming".

I've searched my 1Password apps, the 1Password website, blog, even this forum, and cannot find this feature anywhere, nor anyone asking for such a feature. I want to turn it off, opt-out or whatever.

Where is it? Or are they lying?

1P_Blake
Community Manager
February 26, 2026

Hey @snozdop! You can find our response to this here.

February 25, 2026

I echo almost everyone else's comments. I will be cancelling when renewal time comes. Now I need to investigate alternatives.

February 25, 2026

Way to go 1password.  Customer for well over a decade, and I'm now going to change to a different password manager.  You sent out an email informing me of the price increase, and asked me to reply if I had any questions.  Each time I replied with questions you sent me the exact same generic price increase email, and each time it asked me to respond if I had further questions.  What a PR disaster!

Tom
February 25, 2026

While disliking the communication about it - aside from the price increase itself - as others said, they have kept it low for the longest time. Soliciting another password manager is something you should always look out for, people talking big on BitWarden, having used both the paid and community versions, I'm not impressed. While I'd rather have our old beloved 'sync it yourself' 1password back, monthly fees are the norm nowadays (try taking any video or audio cloud account from your kids). What you should be evaluating though, is the core of the alternatives as strong as what you are leaving + what price would you be willing to pay less for more risk. Note that most candidates for alternatives do not have the 'oops, I didn't write down recovery keys or printed my emergency kit'. Convenient, sure, also for brute forcing. While everything has a weak link, making sure you have the right stack of things has worked out for 1password since day 1. For those that were with me with the earliest inceptions on our phones ... would we have (back then) paid more than what we did to get a longer free-for-life service? I doubt it, but we wouldn't use said old version nowadays without sometimes unavoidable OTP/MFA and passkeys. Would those options work without a cloud and monthly-recurring backing, sure, but how would the company responsible for said enhancements have (kept) hiring the people to do so.

So while I'm very much against price increases and 'troublesome' (to understate it) communication, I think we should look at it in the correct light. Also note that your (up to now) selected password manager isn't a US product but a Canadian one. Not to get political here, but the dumpster fire that all (not just a single country or nation) parties started with tariffs works in fantastic ways, even on something as simple as having to rent hosting for your service.

So basically two ways ... try and find something as secure as 1password, preferably without recurring costs. Or convince AgileBits of another model (which in all likelihood no company would do nowadays as the monthly recurring income ensures a profitable stream to keep your product up to date).

February 25, 2026

Yes, for myself, I could not justify switching to an alternative password manager in order to save about USD$1 per month.  For all its numerous limitations, 1Password is still the "gold standard" for password managers today, in my opinion (e.g., see this recent research).

When the problem is managing and protecting something as important as the collection of all your digital assets, I want the very best solution available, at any cost.

snozdop
February 25, 2026

The email attempting to justify the reason for the 20-33% increase doesn't make any sense.

They say they've "invested significantly in new features", but most of the new features are aimed at corporate users, or are incremental improvements to existing features they had for years. That's exactly what your subscription pays for them to do - gradually improve and invest more using the additional income additional users provide.

Without putting prices up, 1Password annual recurring revenue (ARR)  has increased dramatically:

2019: ~$60 million ARR
2021: $120 million–$150 million ARR
2022: $200 million+ ARR
2023: $250 million+ ARR
2024: ~$318 million ARR
Nov 2025: >$400 million ARR

When they took the first $200M of venture capital money 6 years ago Dave Teare promised it wouldn't change 1Password, and said they had "no need" for the money. So why do they need more now, when they're richer than ever?

Yes, there are costs to store our data on their servers, but for them, that gets cheaper per customer over time as their customer-base expands. If, for example, each server can host 10,000 users data, as the number of customers on that server goes up, the cost per customer goes down. Economies of scale. They're still paying the same server costs regardless of how many are stored on there. Plus, server costs go down over time, not up! For my web design business I get higher spec servers, with more storage and speed for the same or less money than I was paying 5 years ago. I can pass that saving on to my customers or add extras for the same price.

They're not being honest with us. It'd be nice for an honest explanation.

March 8, 2026

I'm pretty convinced that they're moving to a model primarily for businesses. Nothing in the email justifies that amount of an increase, and your analysis proves it. I'll be moving on.

February 25, 2026

I am a launch special customer for a family subscription, and the email announcing the pricing change said that my “current rate” was $59.88 and not the $48 that I actually pay. So my thought was “hmm, maybe since they misquoted my price it doesn’t affect launch special customers and I got this email by mistake.”

So I replied to the email, as it advised me to do if I had any questions. Hours later I get an autoreply that did not answer my question. And was just a rehash of the original email. Cool, fine, I’m guessing support is overwhelmed. It says “reply to this email and a member of our team would be happy to help further.”

That has not happened. I’ve replied two more times and have received the same autoreply a total of three times now. So instead I come here in the hopes that a human will see it: are launch special customers affected by the pricing change? Will there be an increase but still some sort of discount over the new regular rate or are we really looking at a 50% increase? If the original email or the autoreply had correctly told me my price, I’d already have my answer -  but it didn’t, so I’m holding out hope.

1P_Blake
Community Manager
February 26, 2026

Hey @EvanG! When we send large email updates, we get a flood of replies, including out-of-office auto-responses. The first automated message just confirms we received yours and helps us manage that spike. It’s not meant to be the final answer.

If you've already replied once to the initial auto-response, you're in the queue for our team to respond to you. Continuing to send additional follow-up replies will push you further back in queue, so try to refrain from doing that. With the current volume, replies are taking a bit longer than usual, but the team is working through everything and will get back to you.

I am a launch special customer for a family subscription, and the email announcing the pricing change said that my “current rate” was $59.88 and not the $48 that I actually pay. So my thought was “hmm, maybe since they misquoted my price it doesn’t affect launch special customers and I got this email by mistake.”

This is precisely what happened. The original pricing update email was sent to you in error. We've just sent an additional email out following-up about this as well.

If you’re on the Families Launch Special plan, nothing is changing and your price stays the same.

February 25, 2026

Q: What justifies the huge subscription price increase?
A: INFLATION + 8 years WITHOUT increasing prices. That's what.

Increase your price by 2-3% every year and customers complain: "Another price hike! I'm outta here!"

Increase your price by the same aggregate amount after many years and customers complain: "That's a huge price hike! I'm outta here!"

No company can afford to keep its prices the same in spite of EVERYTHING that goes into making its products costing more. This should have been at the core of the communication, but I doubt it would have changed the knee-jerk reactions.

FWIW, I'm on a 1Password trial, considering PAYING MORE than I do for Bitwarden. I prefer 1Password due to its implementation of the Secret Key, its more family-friendly sharing model, and (IMHO) its much better UI.

BTW, anyone jumping to Bitwarden because they feel 1Password is too beholden to investors... keep in mind that Bitwaden is also being fueled by big $$$ now. Since they have to support a free tier expect MORE price increases there. There are also popular feature requests at the Bitwarden forum that have been ignored for YEARS:

https://community.bitwarden.com/t/add-essential-keyboard-shortcuts-navigation/76

February 25, 2026

I think the issue isn’t that prices increase — most customers understand that costs rise over time and that companies can’t keep prices frozen forever.

The real problem is how those increases are handled.

A 2–3% adjustment every year roughly follows inflation and feels predictable and fair. Customers can mentally and financially adapt to gradual changes. But keeping prices unchanged for many years and then introducing a sudden 20%+ increase creates a shock effect. People don’t compare it to cumulative inflation over a decade — they compare it to what they paid yesterday.

So while a large increase after many years may be mathematically justified by inflation, it is not perceived as equivalent by customers. From a customer perspective, it feels less like normal cost adjustment and more like a sudden correction or revenue grab.

In the end, it remains an individual decision whether to accept such a change or not. For my part, I’ve already made that decision.

February 25, 2026

I don't disagree. The response -- however illogical -- is to be expected... it's human nature. I just wanted to point out the unpopular truth about the original question.

I wonder how many of the complainers will ever think about how much they AVOIDED paying over the past 8 years because the price stayed artificially low? Had the price gradually increased, they'd have been paying more for every one of those past years and still ended up at the new price.

February 25, 2026

Hello there,

So I've been a 1Password customer for about 2 years now on an Individual plan and decided to upgrade to the Families package to invite my partner to use 1Password as well, to my shock the price was quite a bit higher than I expected at $71.88. This was on January 14th, 2026, prior to any emails or notices about a price increase.

I sent an email back then about what I thought was a crazy price for a subscription to a password manager and I got a stupid template response and that was it.

Then yesterday, we all got that price increase email and to my shock the price I paid in January is not the price that I should have paid when the price increase is not taking effect until March 26, 2026.

I've responded to the email as they suggested and I've received 3 automated template responses.

It's absolutely abhorrent and ridiculous that you are asking us to pay you more yet I cannot even get any tangible human support or help.

I'll probably be considering requesting a refund or doing a charge back via my credit card if I don't get a reply for a refund after all this.

For a Canadian, Toronto based company I am absolutely embarrassed at how this company is treating its customers.

1P_Blake
Community Manager
February 26, 2026

Hey @Tokyokiller! When we send large email updates, we get a flood of replies, including out-of-office auto-responses. The first automated message just confirms we received yours and helps us manage that spike. It’s not meant to be the final answer.

If you've already replied once to the initial auto-response, you're in the queue for our team to respond to you. Continuing to send additional follow-up replies will push you further back in queue, so try to refrain from doing that.

With the current volume, replies are taking a bit longer than usual, but the team is working through everything and will get back to you.

April 6, 2026

Thank you for your reply and education on your ticketing system, you may want to adjust your auto responder to educate customers who are reaching out instead of guessing why there are no responses and receiving a very frustrating auto responder over and over. I say this as a Support Manager for a technology company.

The response I eventually got was quite disappointing to say the least, and as a former Apple employee and a Canadian I am 100% done supporting AgileBits because of the constant non-consumer friendly decisions the company has taken over the past 5+ years.