1Password Teams costs $7.99/user/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $288 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$7.99/user/mo is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Vaultly: the pay-once alternative
Vaultly does the same core job for $39, once. Bitwarden-style zero-knowledge vaults, shared teams and TOTP, self-hosted with no per-seat fee.
| Vaultly | 1Password Teams | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $39 once | $7.99/user/mo |
| 5-person team, 3 years | $39 | ~$1,438 |
| Zero-knowledge encryption | Yes | Yes |
| Your data on your server | Yes | No |
| Shared vaults | Yes | Yes |
| TOTP codes | Yes | Yes |
| Audit log | Yes | Business tier |
| Works offline / air-gapped | Yes | Limited |
| Source you can read | Yes, MIT | No |
Five months of 1Password for a five-person team already costs more than Vaultly, which then never charges you a per-seat cent again.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need 1Password Teams's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Vaultly is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Vaultly — $39, once
Bitwarden-style zero-knowledge vaults, shared teams and TOTP, self-hosted with no per-seat fee.