1Password is one of the best ways to store and manage all of your passwords, and now it wants to start working for entire families. It's launching a new subscription plan today called 1Password for Families, which will allow family members to have individual 1Password accounts as well a series of shared passwords synced between them. The idea is that everyone can save their own private passwords, while something like a Netflix password could be shared across the family or a bank password could be shared between parents. The app is also able to store and share credit card numbers, notes, and other small bits of personal info.
More and more developers are shifting to subscriptions
The subscription will be available for $5 per month for a family of five, with additional people added at $1 per month. It's a lot cheaper than 1Password's business solution, which runs $5 per person, though it's more expensive than buying the app outright — a $50 purchase lets you use 1Password on six computers throughout a household. But there are benefits to the subscription that parents may like. They'll be able to restore a child's access to their account should they lose their password to 1Password itself. They can also choose to share passwords but prevent kids from editing them, ensuring that they won't be accidentally changed or deleted. The family plan also handles password syncing on its own, rather than requiring you to use an outside service like Dropbox.
Though 1Password is making yet another service only available by subscription, it says that — for now, at least — nothing is changing about the way it sells apps outright to individuals. Even so, this announcement speaks to the continued shift by software developers over to subscription models as a way to both lower the entry price of their apps and to continue making money off of them over years and years of use. Adobe moved nearly all of its apps to a subscription model a few years ago, while other apps, like Evernote, Pocket, PushBullet, and Todoist, require subscriptions to access their full feature set. 1Password isn't entirely making that jump, but it's heading in that direction as it begins to offer more services — like syncing and file storage — overtop of its core app.