What justifies the huge subscription price increase?

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.

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.

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).

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!

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

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?

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.

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.

Wow that's a massive price hike, if they dropped the RedBull sponsorship they could probably keep their customers happy with a modest rise, 33% is way too much, think they will lose a lot of customers through this.

A 20% jump in a single year is difficult to justify in today's environment. Recent U.S. inflation has been in the low single digits (for example, CPI rose 2.9% from Dec 2023 to Dec 2024, and 2025 CPI is shown at 2.6% in Federal Reserve CPI tables), which makes a 20% subscription hike feel disproportionate and punitive to existing customers.

It's also out of step with comparable password-manager pricing. For example, Bitwarden Families is $47.88/year for up to six users, and LastPass Families is listed at $4/month billed annually (i.e., $48/year). Even acknowledging feature differences, moving 1Password Families to $71.88/year widens the gap dramatically for a category that is increasingly commoditized.