1Password Hiked Its Prices. Here’s Where I’m Headed Instead.

I’ve been a 1Password customer for a long time. I got a free licence for a few years to review and ended up paying substantial annual fees (€38 per year) to keep it. Not because it was sticky, but because it was easily the best password manager on the market. I’ve seen a few renewal hikes over the years, but when today’s notice landed with a price increase of over 33% for Euro customers, I knew I’d be writing this article. 1Password is hiking prices to just shy of €50, and customers (including me) are angry.

This isn’t the slow creep of a couple of euro every few years that you quietly accept. This is the kind of jump that makes you stop and actually think about what you’re paying for.

The F1 Problem

The number on its own would be annoying enough. But the context makes it worse.

At the same time that long-term customers are absorbing a significant price hike, 1Password logos are appearing on Formula 1 cars. That’s not cheap. Revolut are sponsoring an F1 team, but my monthly subscription hasn’t increased for that. And there’s no meaningful grandfathering or loyalty pricing for the people who were evangelising the product when it was small and relatively unknown.

What stings isn’t just the price. It’s the disconnect. You helped build the brand by recommending it to friends, family, and colleagues. In return, you get the same renewal notice as everyone else, except now it costs noticeably more. As a customer relationship story, that’s a difficult one to feel good about.

To make it worse, the email included a list of improvements to justify the decision. Among them: “AI-powered item naming.” Nobody asked for that. The HN thread that appeared within hours of the email going out was merciless about it, and fairly so. If you’re going to ask loyal customers to absorb a 33% price jump, the justification list probably shouldn’t lead with features that read like they came from a product brainstorm nobody vetoed.

EU customers got an extra twist: some received a version of the email requiring them to actively consent to the new price at my.1password.com/billing, or face automatic cancellation at their next renewal. That’s almost certainly driven by EU consumer protection law rather than any great act of consideration on 1Password’s part. But it does mean EU subscribers have a clean, no-friction exit if they want one.

To be clear: this isn’t an argument that 1Password shouldn’t spend money on marketing or product development. It’s about the optics of how you treat the customers who were there before the F1 deal and the VC money.

1Password Is Still Very Good

Credit where it’s due. 1Password remains one of the best-designed password managers available. The apps are polished across every platform, the security model is solid, and for families especially, the sharing and recovery flows are genuinely thoughtful. For security software, that UX quality actually matters. Friction leads to mistakes, and 1Password tends to reduce friction.

I’m not leaving because 1Password went bad. I’m leaving because the value equation shifted enough that I’m willing to do the work of finding something else. And I’m writing this because 1Password was already a tough enough sell to consumers who can’t fathom why paying that much for a password manager is worth it. That 33% jump is aggressive in any market, let alone one where switching is relatively easy. Choosing the right alternative, though, is not.

Where I’m Actually Headed: Bitwarden

The short-term answer to which password manager I’m switching to is that I don’t know for certain. But my first lead is Bitwarden, for two reasons.

First, I’m on a self-hosting journey. I have a home server, and I’ve been replacing subscriptions with self-hosted solutions where it makes sense. It’s not the answer for everyone, but it’s a genuinely compelling option for people in that position. Open source, transparent codebase, and you can run your own instance if you want full control over your vault. No price hike because someone signed a sponsorship deal.

Second, price. Even if self-hosting doesn’t work out, Bitwarden’s official cloud costs roughly half what 1Password charges and is consistently well-regarded. I’m hedging my bets, and Bitwarden has enough going for it to hold my attention either way.

If you want to go even further down the self-hosted route, the HN thread surfaced Vaultwarden, a lightweight Bitwarden-compatible server that’s easier to run than the full official stack. Some people in that thread had their migration done in under an hour.

But I’d be dishonest if I glossed over the trade-offs, because they’re real and most people will find them either confusing or genuinely off-putting.

If your Bitwarden instance only lives on your home network, you lose access the moment you’re travelling. If you expose it to the internet, you’re now running the security and uptime story yourself: DNS, TLS certificates, firewalls, backups, patching. A self-hosted password vault is an attractive target, and a misconfigured one is worse than trusting a well-run commercial cloud. For most people, that’s a non-starter, and that’s a completely reasonable position.

So my current approach is pragmatic rather than ideological. I have a month to get self-hosted Bitwarden working like I expect it to work. Otherwise I fallback to Bitwarden premium at a fraction of 1Password’s cost. One additional grace I have is that at the lower price I felt 1Password fairly priced. My renewal is two days before the price hike, meaning I could also stick this out for one year if I don’t work out self-hosting.

But what other options are there?

On LastPass: Just Don’t

Pay for 1Password. Don’t venture this way. I used to use LastPass but was terrified at where the company went. The string of security incidents, the way vault data was obtained in breaches, and the handling of those incidents in terms of both communication and technical response eroded confidence in a way that’s hard to recover from. For a product where you’re trusting someone with access to everything, that trust matters more than the feature list. LastPass doesn’t make my list of alternatives worth considering.

Six 1Password Alternatives Worth Considering

Bitwarden (cloud) is the obvious first stop after 1Password. Open source, audited, end-to-end encrypted, and priced very reasonably with a generous free tier for individuals. The UI isn’t quite as polished as 1Password’s, and onboarding less technical family members takes a bit more patience. But for most people, it’s more than good enough. If I weren’t interested in self-hosting, this is where I’d land without much deliberation.

Bitwarden (self-hosted, or Vaultwarden) is the same product running on your own hardware or a VPS. Full control, no dependency on a third party, and your costs are hosting rather than subscription fees. The trade-off is that you become the admin: uptime, backups, patching, and monitoring are your problem. If that sounds exciting rather than exhausting, it’s a genuinely compelling setup. Vaultwarden is worth a look if you want a lighter-weight deployment.

Dashlane is probably the closest thing to a 1Password spiritual successor in terms of consumer polish. It bundles extras like VPN and dark web monitoring, which either adds value or adds noise depending on whether you actually want those features. It’s not cheap, so you’re not escaping higher pricing so much as choosing a different vendor.

NordPass, from the NordVPN stable, is intentionally simple. Clean interface, modern encryption, and a “set and forget” experience for people who don’t want to spend time in settings menus. Less feature-rich than Keeper or Bitwarden for power users, but a solid choice if simplicity is the priority. There’s just something about Nord’s aggressive advertising that I don’t like.

Proton Pass is another premium, but cheaper alternative to 1Password. Proton has a well-established reputation built on Proton Mail and Proton VPN, so the trust credentials are solid and well-known to a privacy-conscious audience.

Proton Pass supports passwords, passkeys, TOTP (two-factor codes), and has decent browser extensions and mobile apps. It’s newer than the others so it doesn’t have the same depth of features as 1Password or Bitwarden yet, but it’s improving quickly.

All three of these options, Dashlane, NordPass and Proton Pass, have one massive bonus in today’s political climate; they are non-US solutions – based out of France, Lithuania and Switzerland respectively. If you want to keep your vault in EU hands entirely, Dashlane and NordPass are the cloud options with European roots.

Keeper makes more sense if you’re thinking beyond personal use. The granular sharing, audit logs, and file storage features are strong for small businesses and teams. The interface can feel a bit busy compared to 1Password, and the add-ons push the price up if you want the full feature set.

Enpass is worth a look if you want local-first storage without running a full self-hosted stack. It syncs through your own cloud provider (iCloud, Dropbox, and similar), and depending on your platform there are one-time purchase options rather than perpetual subscriptions. The sync story is a bit less slick than the premium options, but the pricing model alone makes it interesting for a certain kind of user.

The Bottom Line

A price hike doesn’t make 1Password a bad product. It just forces an honest question: is this still the right product for me at this price? A 33% hike is just ridiculous. But I can already see a lot of online chatter saying 1Password is worth the extra money.

The apps are genuinely excellent, and for families who want something reliable and low-maintenance, 1Password is hard to beat even at the new price. But for long-term customers who feel the value equation has shifted, and who are tired of paying loyalty pricing to a product that doesn’t offer any in return, there are solid alternatives on the other side. I hope this helped clarify what they look like.

Password Manager Price Comparison