1Password Series C

My password-manager of choice, 1Password, doesn’t care about the consumer market anymore.

Read their Series C announcement.

You might read of yet another unicorn raising money.

But I read about a company that deeply cared about its (Mac) users and that now sees the future in B2B services.

I don’t fault them.

1Password has been profitable from the start — contrary to many others. It did so by building a delightful product (I have been a user since Christmas 2008).

But even though they had a lucrative life-style business, there is way more money in the B2B market. So they took that route and are not looking back.

A single company — where you could easily have 1000 employees — earns them 8$ per employee a month (8000$/month). That’s equal to 1600 1Password family plans. A feature winning them a family is worth nothing. A feature winning them a company? Easily $100k per year!

And that future is already here.

1Password 8 is subscription only, while v7 had a fixed-price version. Why? This is how enterprise buys software nowadays.

1Password 7 was a native Mac app. 1Password 8 is an Electron app. They can pull it off as business users already have all sorts of crap on their machine. Electron is one of the good ones there.

In the future, more might come and I wish this wasn’t the case. 1Password is the app I couldn’t live without.