What happened to buying a password manager once
Every price on this page was checked against the vendor's own pricing page on 13 September 2026. Where we could not confirm a number we say so rather than round it off.
Enpass has stopped selling its lifetime licence
For about a decade, Enpass was the answer when somebody asked for a password manager they could buy once. That is over. The word lifetime no longer appears anywhere on the Enpass pricing page.
What is on sale there now: a free tier capped at 25 items in one vault, Premium at $1.99 a month billed annually, a three-year plan at $49.99, and a family plan at $3.99 a month for six people. The three-year plan is the longest commitment you can buy. People who already hold a lifetime licence keep it and keep their updates. New customers cannot buy one.
Third-party resellers still list an Enpass lifetime SKU. Enpass itself does not acknowledge them on its pricing page. Buying a lifetime licence for a product whose vendor has stopped selling lifetime licences is a bet on that vendor's future policy, not a purchase of one.
Dashlane's free plan is already gone, and the export window closes this week
Dashlane ended its free plan on 16 September 2025. Existing free users were given one year to upgrade or get their data out. That year ends on 16 September 2026.
If you still have a legacy Dashlane free account, export your passwords this week. Not because of where you move them, but because an export file is the thing that keeps your options open. New Dashlane users now get a 14-day trial instead of a free tier.
The two big subscription rises of 2026
1Password raised its Individual plan from $35.88 to $47.88 a year on 27 March 2026, a rise of 33.4%. Families went from $59.88 to $71.88. Existing subscribers moved to the new rate at their first renewal after that date.
Bitwarden raised Premium from $9.99 to $19.80 a year on 21 January 2026. That is 98.2%, and it was the first Premium increase in roughly a decade.
One correction, because it keeps being repeated
A number of sites claimed that Bitwarden trimmed its free tier alongside that increase, and that free users lost the built-in authenticator, file attachments and emergency access.
That is not true, and it would suit us to repeat it. Bitwarden's own announcement says the free plan continues to offer unlimited logins across unlimited devices. The features named were Premium-only well before 2026; Bitwarden's plan documentation listed them as free-tier limitations back in 2024. Bitwarden's free tier remains the most generous in the category, and if free is what you need, it is a genuinely good answer.
Similarly: LastPass still has a free tier. It is limited to one device type, so your phones or your computers but not both, which is a real constraint and a different claim from "LastPass is no longer free". Their Premium is $36 a year.
What a one-time licence costs now
Buying a password manager outright is still possible. It is just expensive.
| Product | One-time price |
|---|---|
| Proton Pass Lifetime | $199.00 |
| Strongbox | $124.99 |
| KeePassium Pro | EUR 79.99 |
| Enpass | no longer sold |
| Lockbox | $7.99 |
Two caveats on that table, because precision matters more than a tidy row. Proton's lifetime plan has historically been sold only through their annual fundraiser rather than normal checkout, so treat it as rarely available. KeePassium publishes its price in euros only, so the dollar equivalent moves with the exchange rate.
Why one-time pricing is disappearing
It is not greed, or not only greed. It is architecture.
Most password managers keep your vault on their servers. That is what makes the web app work, what makes sharing work, and what makes sync effortless. It also means every customer costs the vendor money every month, for as long as they keep the account. A one-time payment against an unbounded monthly cost only works while the company is growing fast enough that new buyers cover old ones. When growth slows, that maths stops working, and the lifetime licence is the first thing to go.
The way to sell something once is to not have that cost. If the vault lives on the device and sync is an encrypted blob the vendor cannot read and does not have to reason about, the per-user cost is close to zero. That is the whole reason Lockbox can be $7.99 once: not a promotion, and not a growth strategy, but a consequence of where the data sits.
Lockbox is $7.99 once. Your first 10 items are free with no card. Passwords, 2FA codes, secure notes, private photos and files, encrypted on your device. Cross-device sync is included in that one price, because syncing encrypted blobs costs us almost nothing.
What we do not have
A page like this is worth nothing if it only lists other people's problems, so: Lockbox has no third-party security audit yet, and we say so on our transparency page. Our app code is closed, unlike Bitwarden and KeePassXC. There is no Safari or Firefox extension, only Chrome. There is no iPhone autofill yet. If any of those is decisive for you, one of the products above is the better buy, and Bitwarden's free tier costs nothing to try.
What we will not do is start charging you every year for something you already bought.