Serious question - how come free is a requirement for a password manager? Everyone's gotta eat, including the maintainers of password managers.
Tech has generous TC, lots of high-end laptops and phones worth thousands, AI & cloud spend, and yet the only acceptable price for secrets management is $0 it seems at times.
I’ve been a paying user for years, but the free tier change announcement is a sign of the enshittification to come.
It means the old guard is moving away and potentially starting initiatives not in the best interest of the user. In the worst case scenario they will sell my data or introduce stupid changes that risk security.
Passwords are critical, losing them because you forget to pay or run out of money would be a disaster. I suspect they would still provide access in read only mode to non-paying users so it wouldn’t be a disaster if they didn’t offer a free version but I think it’s pretty easy to see why someone thinks it should always have a free offering.
They promised an "always free" option. People committed to the service based on that.
Many companies offer a free tier and a paid tier and are willing to incur the cost of users who will never convert. If a company doesn't actually intend to keep it "always free" they shouldn't make the promise in the first place