They've absolutely crippled 1password to make local vaults as difficult to buy and use as possible. They don't roll out updated versions as often, many versions don't get support for local vaults for years, they make it nearly impossible to buy the non-subscription version, and you can no longer upgrade older licenses to use new versions.
Their entire business model is really sleazy and they've gone out of their way to alienate people who don't want to pay for a subscription and hosting service for something as simple and secure as locally encrypting passwords. I was a loyal customer for a long time but after a few years of them jerking non-subscribers around, I got tired of it and tell any friends and family to stay away from it.
Every company that has moved to a subscription and cloud-based product has essentially traded a one time $30-50 license to getting that (or more) every year, and the product is usually inferior from my experience.
> Every company that has moved to a subscription and cloud-based product has essentially traded a one time $30-50 license to getting that (or more) every year, and the product is usually inferior from my experience.
Two mild counterpoints:
(1) While "from my experience" is always definitionally anecdotal, most applications that I'm aware of that have moved to (or started with) a subscription-based model have released new features on a rolling schedule that's at least as fast, if not faster, than the "one-time license" model. On the Mac/iOS, there's Ulysses, Fantastical, and Drafts off the top of my head; cross-platform, the JetBrains IDEs all come to mind. (They're not precisely the same model due to their "perpetual fallback license" approach, but they're definitely trying to drive you to subscribe.) And, for all the mostly-deserved hate Adobe gets, their release cycle appears to have picked up speed since they moved to a subscription model.
(2) The one-time license model works great for applications that don't need any updates in the future beyond perhaps bug fixes. If you want ongoing support and new features, where does the money to support that come from? In years past it would have come from upgrade pricing, but programs went years between new releases and there was nothing that compelled users to upgrade if the old program was still working on their hardware. I get that as a user that's great, but for developers, it's, well, rocky. It was livable a decade ago because those big application programs were way more expensive. At today's prices, where $39 seems kinda steep, that may not be a workable business model.
As for 1Password specifically, I run it on a work laptop, a personal laptop, an iPad Pro, an iPad Mini and an iMac, and keeping the various "local vaults" in sync was always a bit of a pain in the ass -- and of course there was no way to access that vault over the web on a different machine if I really, truly needed to. And I know more than a few people using 1Password for Families. I don't think it's a "really sleazy" business model at all. It may be a business model that you don't like, but that's not the same thing.
Maybe they weren't. 1Password used to support self hosting and third party sync services. Some versions still support some third party services but only subscriptions work everywhere.
