1Password Individual Review: Paying For Polish When The Free Tier Is Elsewhere

Three prices for one plan

In Canadian dollars the Individual plan has three prices depending on how you pay. Annual billing is $4.75 a month, charged as $57.00 up front. Monthly billing is $5.99, which totals $71.88 across twelve months, about 26% more for the option to quit any month. The third number is the promotion: new customers subscribing directly on 1password.com see $3.56 a month for the first twelve months of annual billing, and the plan then renews at the list rate. 1Password is explicit that the promotion is not offered through Google Play or the Apple App Store.

The terms and the pricing page describe the trial from different ends. The pricing page offers fourteen days "before choosing a plan" with the line "No credit card required. Cancel anytime." The terms say new users "may be required to enter your billing information" for the trial and that on its last day, unless the subscription has been cancelled, "you will be automatically charged" the fees for the plan selected. Subscriptions then renew automatically each cycle unless cancelled from the account page or through support.

Two clauses matter more to a Canadian buyer than they would to an American one. The terms say all amounts are in US dollars and that currency-conversion fees added by your bank are yours to bear, while the pricing page is showing Canadian prices. And the payment list names ACH debit only for eligible US bank accounts, which leaves a credit card or a 1Password gift card. All amounts paid are described as non-refundable, with refund requests considered case by case at the company's discretion.

Six operating systems, five browsers, one gigabyte

The plan covers one user with 1 GB of storage. 1Password's own comparison table lists apps for macOS, iOS, watchOS, Windows, Android and Linux, and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox and Brave. Items are not limited to logins; the table lists addresses and credit cards, and a developer toolkit with SSH workflows, Git commit signing and a CLI with SDKs is included at no extra charge.

Sharing is more flexible than a single-user plan suggests. You can share an item with anyone, including people without a 1Password account, set the share to expire, and see a history of what was shared. Travel Mode hides selected vaults when you cross borders. Guest accounts for vault sharing and unlimited shared vaults are Families features; Individual has neither.

Passkeys as vault items, and the Secret Key

1Password treats a passkey as an ordinary item. When a site offers to create one, the browser extension offers to save it; signing in later is a prompt at the top of the page, with an Other options menu if several passkeys match. Because they are items, passkeys sync to every device on the account and can be shared like a password, which is the practical advantage over passkeys locked to one phone's platform keychain. Deleting one in 1Password does not remove it from the website, and the support page is careful to say so.

The account model is the other distinguishing feature. The pricing table lists end-to-end encryption of everything in a vault, URLs and item titles included, and a dual layer of protection from the account password and a Secret Key. A Secret Key makes a weak account password less catastrophic than in a single-secret design, and it is also why losing the credentials that unlock the vault is a serious problem.

Against Bitwarden Premium

Bitwarden's page shows only US dollars: Premium is US$19.80 a year, listed as US$1.65 a month, and it sits on top of a free tier that already includes unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, passkey management, a generator and sharing with one other user. 1Password Individual is $57.00 a year at list in Canadian dollars. The two figures are in different currencies and are left unconverted; even so, the 1Password number is the larger by a wide margin, and that side has no free tier, only the 14-day trial.

Bitwarden Premium includes 5 GB of personal storage; 1Password Individual includes 1 GB. Both handle passkeys; what 1Password adds at this price is the Secret Key, Travel Mode, a watchOS app and a developer toolkit. If you have never used a password manager, Bitwarden's free plan is the lower-risk first step. If you have tried both and prefer 1Password's apps, that preference is the thing you are paying for.

Skip it if free is the point

Do not sign up if the thing you want from a password manager is that it costs nothing. 1Password has no free plan, and the pricing page offers nothing below the paid Individual tier apart from the 14-day trial. Bitwarden's free tier covers the essentials indefinitely, including passkeys. Also pass if you store scanned documents in your vault; 1 GB fills faster than it sounds once passport scans and PDFs go in.

Do sign up, on the annual plan, if the trial convinces you. Monthly billing costs $14.88 a year more for flexibility you are unlikely to use, and the newcomer discount only exists on annual billing bought directly from 1Password. If you give the trial a card, set a reminder for day 13: the terms say the charge lands on the last day unless you have cancelled, and a refund after that is at the company's discretion.