LastPass costs $36 per year. Operating on the principle of being the customer and not the product, that seems very reasonable for a secure way to store and share the keys to my digital life.
That said, it does make it a little bit harder for me to onboard my friends and family when they ask. One of the selling points has always been "Yes, you can use it on your phone and laptop" and "no, it doesn't cost anything".
I agree with other comments that in the current market, Lastpass is not worth it at $36/y. The way they increased the price is arguably more annoying than the price tag.
I happily paid for Lastpass at $12/y. Logmein raised price and I switched to free. Logmein limited free capabilities and I will switch to Bitwarden or 1Password and pay them. I'm not staying with Lastpass to get the rug pulled out under me the third time.
I switched to Bitwarden in early 2019. The migration was really easy, and I was surprised to find that it was accurate, too. Bitwarden has its flaws, but I'm happy with it.
LastPass is a commodity. There are many free or open-source alternatives that are as reliable and as secure as LastPass that provide similar functionality. It's hard to justify even the small price for a commodity service unless you provide the best possible solution, and sometimes even that is not enough.
I switched from LastPass premium that costed 15$ per year a few years ago to Bitwarden because LastPass could recognize password fields on all web pages, while free Bitwarden just works everywhere.
The functionality is a commodity but what about the UX? MP3 players were fairly common when the iPod came out but the iPod crushed all the competition? Why because the UX was simply better.
Without a doubt the password manager with the best UX is 1Password. Last year ago I got my tech-averse partner to set it up on her phone, the entire process took about 10 minutes and then it was done. She's never asked for me help or support, once she got things working its simply continued to work.
I've since setup it up across my family and my pre-teen child is also using it without a hitch.
From a holistic perspective I love that I can manage multiple vaults. Everyone has a private personal vault that is only available to them and we have a bunch of shared vaults for things like xbox and netflix passwords.
I've never used BitWarden so I cant comment on the UX but $60 a year for 1password is well worth it. I can rest easy knowing that everyone in my family has good password hygiene.
I was a paid Lastpass user who switched to Bitwarden a few years back because of the UX/functionality issues Lastpass had been developing. I've heard 1password has better UX; I'd describe Bitwarden's UX as similar to the Lastpass of 5-7 years ago.
I transitioned to 1Password after many years of LastPass and have been quite pleased.
I continue to harbor some concerns about the emergency workflows (what happens in case of death or disablement) but otherwise it's just been solid. LastPass felt, on the other hand, like it was increasingly neglected.
They had self hosted sync with the old vault format. They removed it when they switched to the new vault format. Dropbox always worked. Now they push their own service.
No, it didn't. I don't remember the details, but the local sync (starting a sync server on the phone) did not work for me with a normal home network, and Dropbox didn't work across all devices, either.
> Without a doubt the password manager with the best UX is 1Password.
I would agree for the macOS and iOS versions but the Windows version could get some polish. The default title and menu bars still hang around, the font choice isn’t that great, and all in all it feels less nice to use.
>Without a doubt the password manager with the best UX is 1Password
My experience is about 1 year old, but I have to disagree, as a paid 1Password user, my browser plugins and mobile client would fail to fill in the forms I used at least 50% of the time. That's horrible UX, but I agree, their UI looks nice.
I've been debating making this switch myself. How time consuming was the transition? Did you have to do much manual data entry or does bitwarden have the ability to reliably import lastpass data?
The most annoying thing for me is that Bitwarden doesn't have support for all of the extra "credential types" that LastPass has. They are still imported, but everything that isn't supported is imported as a secure note.
So far the only issues I have had logging in anywhere has been logging into my firefox account (in a new browser), and home assistant.
Bitwarden is more reliable at importing data exported from Lastpass than Lastpass is at exporting your data. Export bugs happen, but their forum and /r/lastpass are always quick to come up with workarounds for Lastpass bugs.
Shared passwords aren't included in the Lastpass export, at least at the time I last exported from Lastpass.
The only functionality I do miss from Lastpass is the option to generate the short pronounceable strings I use to create usernames, like the one I'm using now.
I used to subscribe, then the service was acquired and the price doubled so I stopped subscribing and relied on the free tier. With this announcement I think it's time to move on (probably to Bitwarden)
It’s ridiculously expensive. I get Office 365 with 1TB of storage for €6 per month. Office is just as secure as lastpass. I bought Enpass(wouldn’t recommend as they moved to a subscription model) and store everything on OneDrive. Paying $3 per month to store tiny text files is crazy.
I often see comments like this one that misunderstand value for how something is achieved.
Value is decided by the market according to the utility of the service. I happily pay $22 per year for Pinboard to keep a few bookmarks with tags. That's also storing "tiny text files" but I could not care less. I could even implement something similar myself. And yet, I find the value it provides worth paying.
Another, more extreme example. I am part of a $5000 business program. Last week, I got a single piece of advice that I consider already paid for the entire program. The delivery was 20 minutes long. It was not even something original invented by the lecturer, but it can be found in some books. And again, I don't care. The value is in the impact, not in how the advice that was discovered or delivered.
Conglomerates that do B2C for money will always beat upstarts as their customer unit average cost will be lower and per unit attributable revenue will be higher.
If the only thing that a customer cares about is paying the minimum amount, the customer should not be surprised that their choices would be limited to conglomerates.
Independent restaurants are a lot more expensive than national chains and make a lot less money than the national chains. If one's only goal is to feed oneself in a restaurant, one is better off going to chain one.
Fine but that’s not the parent’s point. You shouldn’t buy from local stores, local restaurants, or small shops because of some notion that you’re sticking it to large companies. You do when, for you, their products and services they offer have better value for you.
If you choose a worse or more expensive product because it’s from a small business then you’re only making yourself worse off.
> Fine but that’s not the parent’s point. You shouldn’t buy from local stores, local restaurants, or small shops because of some notion that you’re sticking it to large companies. You do when, for you, their products and services they offer have better value for you.
That's not correct: the part of the value that you get from buying from local small businesses rather than conglomerates is that you are not buying from a conglomerate, even if the local product could be considered inferior by some measure.
That's true for people who try to politicize every aspect of their lives, but this is a toxic attitude and, as the grandparent post said, you are only hurting yourself.
> misunderstand value for how something is achieved.
I find this line of reasoning offensive as it assumes that people who genuinely disagree with me don’t understand.
I think it’s more likely that people understand and genuinely disagree. It’s dismissive to just not respond to someone’s values and rationing and I think leads to less discussion and thus more disagreement.
It’s very likely that people place different values on things and I think to have conversation we have to get to common ground and then build from there. If different people miss the meat of an argument then I think it’s not as interesting or useful.
I mean the value prop is the software functionality, not the storage. You think lastpass/1password are funding their development with a markup on storage?
I can get the argument that it’s not worth $36 but not because of storage costs.
I was a happy user of that workflow until I started working for an organization that blocked Dropbox but not any of the browser plugin based password managers.
Also while free, arguably the UX is not very good especially on mobile, unless Keepass integrates the way Lastpass, 1Password, et al do. I cannot imagine convincing any of my non-tech friends to go this route.
Interestingly this is basically how 1Password did password sync for years - not a Keepass database, but a 1Password folder structure stored within Dropbox saving a bunch of little text files. They added other synced storage options over time before turning up their own cloud service, but third party sync was where they started.
I kinda feel like the price point for these things is set wrong, though. What you want is a higher price point which gets you /everything/. I pay $1200 per year for bandwidth. If I needed to pay a couple hundred bucks more for access to everything (online newspapers, LastPass, online office suites, etc.), I'd gladly do so.
LastPass should have 250 million customers, not 25 million, each paying $3.60 each, not $36. Most should be inactive, as part of some kind of subscription bundle.
Kinda like a more democratic, decentralized version of Prime.
From posts here, though, Bitwarden seems more reasonable. I trust open source more, and it's cheaper.
It was definitely starting to feel a little pricey for how terrible their UI is and how little interest they seemed to have in fixing it. What really got me to switch to Bitwarden though was how it started "recommending" that I change my master password with a modal popup every single time I unlocked my account.
On the flip side they offered very little value in premium compared to free (for me) so there was no reason to upgrade even when I wanted to pay (I did pay for 2FA but TBH o could live without it)
That said, it does make it a little bit harder for me to onboard my friends and family when they ask. One of the selling points has always been "Yes, you can use it on your phone and laptop" and "no, it doesn't cost anything".