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What justifies the huge subscription price increase?
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...
Hey everyone! We hear the concerns about AI, especially when it comes to privacy and security. That’s completely fair. We want to clarify and be very transparent about how this specific feature actually works.
We use AI internally to help create and maintain a reference list of common websites, things like primary URLs, login URLs, and human-readable names. This work happens entirely on our own systems, not on your device. That information is compiled into a static database. When you create a new login item in the browser extension, 1Password simply checks that database and applies the appropriate readable name. For example, it might label a login “American Airlines” instead of “aa.com” or “AA.” That’s what the AI-powered item naming feature (launched in 2024) actually is, essentially a smart lookup table that makes saved items clearer and easier to find.
Importantly, this doesn’t access or analyze your vault, your data stays end-to-end encrypted, nothing from your vault is sent to any AI systems, and no external AI services or large language models are involved.
We know AI raises important questions, especially when it comes to security and privacy. Our approach is intentionally limited and privacy-respecting, designed to improve usability without ever touching your vault data.
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
You'd hear less complaining if either you or they had done a decent job of justifying the why.
Infrastructure costs a fraction of what it did a decade ago.
Most of the feature dev work I see in the changelog is (in my mind, at least) targeted at Enterprise users. I've got to go back to 2024 to find a notable change for regular users -- how much extra per month would you pay to sign in with a QR code?
Meanwhile, a bug breaking logins that's been annoying me for a few years now remains open and, from the last update I saw, unassigned.
It's an extra $10/year. It's not the money, it's what have you done for me lately?
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.
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.
I'll bite. It comes down to competition. If everyone charges $72.00 (for a family plan as an example), then your point is valid. They are nearly double their closest competitor and there are certainly "free" alternatives out there that are darned close to 1Password's offering. So this isn't about inflation. It's about competitiveness, and 1password, IMHO, has very little of that, especially at this price point. This is basic economics called a demand curve. If I buy go to a grocery store and buy an apple for $5, but everyone else sells and apple for $1, guess who loses business?
