And this whole discussion is because they’ve announced that will be dropped with version 8. No more standalone licenses, local vaults or syncing via Dropbox/iCloud. Even this (potential) “self-hosted” option sounds ridiculous; users are going to have to run a version of their cloud server locally and use that for syncing instead of just having a vault they can sync locally or through the service of their choice.
Yeah, I just noticed that though too late to edit my post to note it :(. Sounds like they plan to nuke the native Mac application, the core original value proposition, in favor of some cross platform Electron thing as well. Oh well, it had a good run, but the business incentives are pretty inexorable forces I guess when they're aiming for a multi-billion valuation cash out.
Although devil's advocate:
>users are going to have to run a version of their cloud server locally and use that for syncing instead of just having a vault they can sync locally or through the service of their choice.
I don't see that as inherently ridiculous if it genuinely was a full standalone version with no internet dependencies. Lots of local software going back ages and ages in Unix splits up "server" and "client" sides of things and it can be a sensible architecture in some instances and does not by itself mean anything bad. Like, I don't see what your issue would be vs "sync locally", if it's all under your control, potentially on the same system even, how would that not be merely another way to sync locally just a different implementation? And I don't see the value of "a service of my choice" vs literally just being able to run it as my own service. "Service of my choice" should mean who provides the VPS or colo or whatever, or what VPN I use to access my own local server. A true self-host eliminates the need for Dropbox or iCloud which is fine by me.
Of course this being modern AgileBits I kind of expect a fairly large number of asterisks here that neuter it in practice. But then again that they are even asking at all is something I wouldn't have predicted, I guessed they'd eventually attempt to full force everyone into their subscription model and that would be the end of my 1P upgrades/usage. Maybe it will be anyway if the application starts sucking even harder moving forward, but local host on a normal pay model could change my mind.
