AgileBits’ attitude and the messaging around 1Password was always off-putting, enough for me to seek out less popular alternatives. That they’ve announced Series A funding after 14 successfully self-funded years, serves only to confirm my worst suspicions.

@paulrobertlloyd Why does a product that charges its customer want to see Series A funding? Feature creep?

But curious what about their attitude and messaging you didn't like?

@pratik It doesn’t bode well, does it? In terms of messaging, I felt the early design of the product was problematic in many areas, but they were always incredibly opinionated and defensive about it. Sometimes companies have personalities that just rub me up the wrong way!

@pratik me too! I even pay for an account for proper vault sharing, but am worried about them as a business so looking for alternatives. 😕

@gerwitz Why can't we keep things we like?

@pratik @paulrobertlloyd I’m a littl wary of this announcement myself. If things change negatively, I’ll probably switch to Lastpass

@paulrobertlloyd @pratik They always rubbed me the wrong way, too; 1Password was often implicated in whatever the top non-Flash crasher was in Camino at a given point in time, and they persisted in insisting these crashes were not related to anything they were doing, despite the fact they were mucking around in our internals and oftentimes the nature of the stack trace showed exactly what they were doing wrong. We did finally get them to fix one big crash, but never anything after that.

Beyond that, I never quite understood the utility (to quote Steve Jobs, “it’s a feature, not a product”) when the OS already had a Keychain, and then a syncable iCloud Keychain. When they finally added a Windows version for that subset of Mac users who also were Windows users, then I could see some utility for that subset…. But for me, the value has never clicked.

A successful product-revenue-supported company taking VC money seems really strange, and the “scaling extremely quickly” language the VC used in the TechCrunch article that @florian linked seems worrisome. (I likewise worry every time I hear Automattic has taken more VC money…but at least WordPress itself is open-source, so there’s the possibility of forking if Automattic’s revenue requirements ever become so onerous).

@paulrobertlloyd I’m kinda glad I bought a license for the current version instead of doing their app subscription. Might start looking for an alternative now, not sure what else is out there though, I know I don’t want LastPass.

@paulrobertlloyd I've used 1Password for so long now, it is integrated into my workflow. But I read this article and don't really get a sense of what they will use the extra funding for. It reads to me in a very general way, a lot of superlatives. I almost jumped ship a few years ago, but this time I will more seriously look for an alternative. What do you use? LastPass is a first thought, or maybe I should just go with Apple’s built in iCloud Keychain? // @pratik @smokey

@crossingthethreshold I’ve used a variety of Mac-only password managers in the past (Wallet, pwSafe) but currently using a combination of iCloud Keychain and Secrets. Secrets is beautifully designed and includes handy features like generating two-factor authentication codes and importing databases from 1Password and LastPass. I like it!

@paulrobertlloyd I'm familiar with pwSafe, at least earlier versions as my wife uses it. But I will now take a look at Secrets. Thank you.