Subscription based licensing is mostly rent-seeking.
The cloud storage, compute, and egress for a password manager is fractions of a penny per year per user.
Yes, engineering and upkeep and new features costs money. If those features are truly valuable, then the market would bear paying an additional one-time fee, just as photoshop 8 had to be better than photoshop 7 in some way to justify the purchase.*
But what new features could a mature password manager possibly have? Support for newer version of IOS and Android is the only must-have that comes to mind.
Subscriptions for expensive products that relies heavily on deals, licensing and huge cloud infrastructure like Netflix, Spotify, etc? Yeah, it's not rent-seeking.
Now, for an app that store your passwords, maybe some attachments and, since forever, allowed local vaults. Nowadays being intentionally crippled unless you adhere to this, comparatively, expensive annual subscription?
Yeah, that's totally textbook definition of rent-seeking behavior.
The cloud storage, compute, and egress for a password manager is fractions of a penny per year per user.
Yes, engineering and upkeep and new features costs money. If those features are truly valuable, then the market would bear paying an additional one-time fee, just as photoshop 8 had to be better than photoshop 7 in some way to justify the purchase.*
But what new features could a mature password manager possibly have? Support for newer version of IOS and Android is the only must-have that comes to mind.
* File format changes not-withstanding.