Staff writer, software and security
Six years as a procurement analyst renewing software contracts for a mid-size logistics firm, a job that consists almost entirely of discovering that the quoted price and the invoiced price are two different documents.
Maintains a working file of first-term versus renewal pricing for around sixty consumer security and software products, rebuilt each quarter from vendor checkout pages rather than from press releases, because the two disagree more often than you would expect.
Covers Password managers, VPNs, AI subscriptions · At this desk since 3 February 2026
Devin covers the categories where the first-term discount is deepest and the renewal is steepest: VPNs above all, but password managers and AI subscriptions are heading the same way. He is the desk’s specialist in the sentence that appears in six-point grey type under the buy button.
His standing position is that a price is not a price until you have seen it on a checkout screen with a total on it. Marketing pages round down, comparison sites go stale, and the only figure worth printing is the one the vendor is willing to charge you today.
3 pieces
Bitwarden Premium is $19.80 a year with no discount attached to it. 1Password's advertised price is a first-year rate, and the vendor's own footnote says so. Here is the ledger, the family-plan break-even, and the three prices we could not read at all.
Two of the five biggest names in this category will not tell you what you pay in year three. One has charged the same €5 a month since 2009. Here is the ledger, dated.
Sixteen paid tiers from five vendors, priced by the year and dated. The pattern underneath all of them is that you are no longer buying a feature set, you are buying an allowance.