A couple of years ago they relied on Dropbox for having a online web vault. At some point Dropbox no longer allowed to use the public folder as a web server and the answer from 1Password basically was "if you want an online vault buy a subscription from us".
I had paid well over $150 by buying all their apps and they were forcing me to throw that investment down the drain because they didn’t want to spend a couple of cents a year on hosting my vault themselves.
There was a long discussion in the forum. I moved to LastPass. The UI is not as good but it does the job and it’s free now.
You bought a product with no ongoing maintenance costs. Then demanded that they give you a free additional product with ongoing maintenance costs.
The fact that you bought their product in the past does not entitle you to demand that they build and maintain a free web hosting service. If that's your attitude, then I'm sure they're happy that you're no longer their customer.
How much ongoing maintenance have you paid for with that $150? Is it really zero? What if the app stops working the day after you purchase it?
I mean the apps seemed overpriced in the first place, and due to their decision to change their business model they decided not to provide ongoing support in a way that one might have expected they would based on what the product seemed to be and how their business seemed to operate when you purchased the product. They don't technically or legally owe you anything but nonetheless I would not want to buy anything from them after that.
The idea that they should be happy to lose a happy paying customer is absurd, is that how to build a successful business?
The actual feature AgileBits offered was the ability to construct an HTML version of your vault. They advertised using this with Dropbox to actually make it accessible, but the web hosting part was entirely Dropbox's feature. If you didn't use Dropbox, then the web hosting part never worked to begin with.
I genuinely do not understand how Dropbox removing a feature gets people mad at AgileBits instead of mad at Dropbox. Why does Dropbox get a pass for this?
>Then demanded that they give you a free additional product with ongoing maintenance costs.
That's patently false. The paid version of 1Password came with "Free updates" as listed on their site. Updates were bundled into the life of the product - if *they weren't, nobody would've ever bought it at the prices they were charging.
>Historically, AgileBits has been very generous with upgrades. Your purchase entitles you to free updates until the next major version upgrade. That means if you buy a license for version 2 of a product, you will get all 2.x releases for free, but upgrading to version 3 might require another purchase.
Free updates. Not brand new free products. "Free updates" does not mean "if Dropbox removes a feature we'll do a ton of work to replicate that feature and give it to you for free".
Like I said, there was a long discussion on their forum examining all this.
AgileBits advertised the online web vault as a feature of 1Password when I bought the software. This can be demonstrated by looking at previous versions of their website on the internet time machine. They were in obligation to provide a solution for that.
The fact that they could have spent cents per paying customer to fix this and they didn't, or that they didn't even offer some form of transition from paying customers to the subscription service is just the cherry on the cake.
I had paid well over $150 by buying all their apps and they were forcing me to throw that investment down the drain because they didn’t want to spend a couple of cents a year on hosting my vault themselves.
There was a long discussion in the forum. I moved to LastPass. The UI is not as good but it does the job and it’s free now.