It's slightly shocking how angry people get about companies going from one-time purchase to subscription. Like many software companies, 1Password made a business decision to focus on a subscription product. This strikes me as reasonable and naturally aligned with the customer expectation that this software be supported in perpetuity as OSes and browsers evolve over time. $5/month is not a crazy price to pay for a critical piece of software you use every day—to the contrary I kind of feel like it's the minimum price for a consumer software product to be sustainable. I don't want my password manager to be cutting corners because they can't afford to invest properly in the product.
As far as deprecating the bring-your-own-sync approach, I understand this is legit flexibility that some customers want, and I'm glad there is a competitor that does a good job of it. Personally though, after many years of using 1Password + Dropbox, I must say I've had a lot fewer sync problems since migrating over to 1Password for Families. If I had a broad sync strategy maybe I would feel otherwise, but I don't—to the contrary, I'm moving away from Dropbox because of the shenanigans they are pulling with my OS internals, and maintaining a VPS or even an AWS account with S3 is a significant burden that I don't take lightly. As a product engineer, a single integrated sync is easier to provide guarantees, and prevents a lot of problems caused by third parties with no recourse to debug.
As far as deprecating the bring-your-own-sync approach, I understand this is legit flexibility that some customers want, and I'm glad there is a competitor that does a good job of it. Personally though, after many years of using 1Password + Dropbox, I must say I've had a lot fewer sync problems since migrating over to 1Password for Families. If I had a broad sync strategy maybe I would feel otherwise, but I don't—to the contrary, I'm moving away from Dropbox because of the shenanigans they are pulling with my OS internals, and maintaining a VPS or even an AWS account with S3 is a significant burden that I don't take lightly. As a product engineer, a single integrated sync is easier to provide guarantees, and prevents a lot of problems caused by third parties with no recourse to debug.