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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.
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?
But, is the "competition versus 1Password" really an "apples-to-apples" comparison? Unlike apples, password managers are not interchangable commodities.
In my opinion, the security architecture of 1Password is superior to the competition. Even though the quality of the latter may be "good enough" for many, I am risk adverse when it comes to protecting the collection of my digital assets and do not believe that the money saved by using a competitive product compensates for the associated additional risk (however small it might be).
It certainly is an individual decision, in which each person needs to weight the perceived value of 1Password against its cost. However, it may be worthwhile to reflect on Benjamin Franklin's comment: “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”
