The year password managers got expensive (and what that tells you)

Something quietly happened to the password manager market over the last twelve months, and almost nobody talked about it.

Bitwarden raised its premium price for the first time in ten years. Doubled it, actually. 1Password announced increases of its own in March. Dashlane went further and killed its free plan outright — if you had a free Dashlane account, it went read-only in September 2025, and the accounts get deleted entirely this September. The cheapest way to stay a Dashlane customer is now about sixty dollars a year.

None of these companies did anything wrong, exactly. Running a cloud sync service for millions of vaults costs real money. Servers, security teams, audits, the works. Those bills arrive every month whether you log in or not, and eventually they land on you.

But it's worth sitting with what you're actually paying for.

You're renting a copy of your own secrets

Here's the deal every cloud password manager offers: give us an encrypted copy of everything — your logins, your card numbers, your recovery codes — and we'll keep it on our servers so it follows you between devices. In exchange, you pay us forever.

The convenience is real. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. But so is the other half of the bargain. Your vault now exists in a place you don't control, behind an account that can be phished, on infrastructure that is, by definition, the most valuable target on the internet. A building containing millions of vaults is exactly the building thieves case.

We don't have to speculate about how that goes wrong. In 2022, attackers walked off with backups of LastPass customer vaults. Encrypted backups, sure — but encrypted things can be cracked offline, slowly, with no rate limits and no alarms, for years. Anyone whose master password was a bit weak in 2022 is still exposed today. There's no recall button.

Every cloud manager will tell you their architecture is different, their encryption stronger, their audits more frequent. Fine. Probably true. It's still the same bet: that a copy of your most sensitive data, sitting on someone else's computer, will stay safe forever. The subscription is you paying, annually, to keep that bet running.

The other way to do this

There's an older idea that the industry mostly abandoned because it doesn't generate recurring revenue: keep the vault on your device and nowhere else.

No server, so there's nothing to breach at scale. No account, so there's nothing to phish. No monthly infrastructure bill, so there's no reason to charge you monthly. The "attack surface" stops being the entire internet and shrinks to one phone that someone would need to physically hold — and then still get past your master password and your face.

That's the whole premise of PassVult. Your passwords, 2FA codes, cards and notes live in an AES-256 encrypted vault on your phone, full stop. Moving to a new phone happens over Bluetooth or WiFi-Direct, device to device, without touching the internet. You pay once. The app stops costing money after that because it stops costing us money after that — there are no servers to feed.

I won't pretend local-only is free of tradeoffs, because it isn't. You don't get background sync across five devices. You don't get a browser extension filling forms on your desktop. And there is no "forgot password" link — nobody can reset your master password, including us, which is either terrifying or the entire point depending on who you are. If continuous everywhere-sync matters more to you than anything else, honestly, stay with a cloud manager. They're good at that.

But if you read that list of tradeoffs and felt something closer to relief than dread, you're the person we built this for.

See the whole thing side by side

We put together a full comparison — PassVult against 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, LastPass, Proton Pass and KeePass — covering where each one stores your vault, what each costs over a decade, breach history, and the features that only exist here, like the duress erase code and Travel Mode. There's a slider on the page that adds up subscription costs over time. Drag it to ten years before you renew anything.

It's all here: passvult.com/passvult-comparison

The short version: a decade of Dashlane runs around $600. A decade of 1Password, about $360. A decade of PassVult is $12.99, because there's no second payment.

Prices went up this year because someone has to pay for all those servers. It doesn't have to be you.

PassVult is a one-time purchase on iOS and Android. No account. No cloud. No renewal, ever.