What password managers cost a year, and which free tiers are actually free

Bitwarden Premium is $19.80 a year, checked 21 August 2026, and it is the cheapest paid password manager on this ledger. 1Password Individual advertises $2.99 a month paid annually, which is $35.88 — but the asterisk beside that price leads to 1Password’s own footnote saying the discount is “available for new 1Password customers only for the first year with annual billing”, and the struck-through standard rate printed next to it is $3.99 a month, or $47.88 a year. So the year-two comparison is $19.80 against $47.88. If you would rather pay nothing at all, Bitwarden’s free plan carries unlimited passwords on unlimited devices with no expiry, and Proton Pass’s free plan, Apple Passwords and Google Password Manager are $0.00 a year as well. Family plans change the arithmetic: Bitwarden Families is $47.88 for up to six people, which is $7.98 each.

The price that is not the price

This is the category the desk was built for, so it is satisfying when a vendor puts the whole trick on one page in plain sight.

1Password’s personal pricing page shows two numbers per plan. The big one is $2.99 a month for Individual and $4.49 for Families. Immediately beside each, struck through, is a second number: $3.99 and $5.99. Both are labelled “Per month. Paid annually.” Both carry an asterisk.

So the annual figures are $35.88 for year one and $47.88 from year two, and for Families $53.88 then $71.88. We have recorded those as the renewal prices in the ledger above, which is unusual for this desk — most of the time the renewal column reads “Not published” because the vendor never states one. Here the vendor states the standard rate, prints it on the same line as the discount, and tells you in a footnote how long the discount lasts. That is enough. We are not guessing; we are doing twelve-times-a-month on a number 1Password published itself.

Credit where it is due, incidentally: printing the standard rate next to the promotional one is more than most of this category manages. The complaint is not that 1Password hid it. It is that “from $2.99” is the number that ends up in every comparison table, and $47.88 is the number that ends up on the card.

Bitwarden’s page, by contrast, has no strike-through, no percentage badge and no coupon on the sign-up link. Nothing on it describes $19.80 as introductory. We have still logged its renewal as “not published”, because Bitwarden does not state one — but a price with no advertised discount attached has nothing to fall off.

What a family plan is actually for

Family plans are the strongest value in this category and the most commonly bought too late. The break-even is not intuition, it is a two-column sum, so here it is at the standard rates.

Individual and Premium prices multiplied out per person; family plans are flat. 1Password figures are the standard rates, not the first-year ones. Both family plans cover up to six people — Bitwarden states “Up to 6 users”, and 1Password describes Families as everything in Individual plus “Invite up to 5 family members”. Prices read 21 August 2026; the multiplication is ours.

The answer differs by vendor, and it differs in a way worth knowing before you buy:

1Password Families pays for itself at two people. $71.88 against $95.76 for two Individual accounts. There is no scenario with a partner in it where two separate 1Password subscriptions make sense, and the same holds in year one ($71.76 separately against $53.88).

Bitwarden Families needs three. At two people, two Premium accounts cost $39.60 and the family plan costs $47.88, so buying twice is $8.28 cheaper. At three, separate accounts cost $59.40 and the family plan wins. Bitwarden Premium is cheap enough that its own family plan has to wait its turn.

Filled to six, the per-head figures are $7.98 a year with Bitwarden and $11.98 with 1Password. Both are small numbers. The gap that matters is not between the two family plans, it is between a family plan and four people each quietly paying for their own thing.

The free tiers, and what each one really allows

“Free tier” covers a lot of sins, so here is what each one is, all read on 21 August 2026.

Bitwarden Free is the most complete free plan of any paid manager here. Bitwarden’s own list of features “included in every Bitwarden account” runs to unlimited devices and unlimited passwords, browser, mobile and desktop apps, passkey management, encrypted export, and free sharing with one other user. The paid tier adds an integrated authenticator, file attachments, emergency access and security reports. Nothing about the free plan is a countdown.

Proton Pass’s free plan is close behind: unlimited logins, notes and cards, unlimited devices, passkeys on all devices, ten hide-my-email aliases, and no credit card. Proton’s own phrasing on the product page is “No trials, just free forever.”

Apple Passwords and Google Password Manager cost nothing and have no paid tier at all, which makes them the only entries here with no upgrade path to be nudged along. The constraint is scope rather than price. Google states its own boundary on its front page — “Manage your saved passwords in Android or Chrome” — and Apple’s is the shape of Apple. If every device and browser in your life sits inside one of those two, $0.00 a year is a genuine answer and not a compromise.

Vaultwarden is free software rather than a free service: AGPL-3.0, no licence fee, and a server you host yourself. If it runs on a machine you already own and already leave on, the marginal cost is small. If you rent a virtual server for it, that rental is your password-manager bill, and it should be compared with $19.80 rather than with zero. Worth knowing: vaultwarden.net is not the project. It is a community-run public instance, and its own front page says as much.

1Password and Dashlane have no free tier. Both offer a 14-day trial and then it is a subscription.

NordPass has a free plan with a limit that deserves naming. On its plans page, the free column marks “Access on multiple devices” as not included. A password manager that does not sync between your phone and your laptop is a password list, and NordPass says so in its own comparison table rather than hiding it. Just read the row.

The three prices we could not read

This desk prices from what the vendor actually serves. Three of the products in this category did not serve us a price at all on 21 August 2026, which is why three of the names in the brief are absent from the ledger above.

Dashlane’s personal pricing page lists Premium and Friends & Family (10 accounts) and prints, in the slot where each price goes, --. NordPass’s plans page renders the word “Loading” eighteen times, including in every price and in the phrase “for the first 0 months”. Proton Pass Plus served “$0.00” in its price field and “undefined% off” in its discount badge.

All three build their price cards in the browser, so a reader with JavaScript on sees numbers. We are not accusing anyone of hiding anything; this is ordinary modern web plumbing. But two things follow from it, and both are the reader’s problem rather than ours. A price assembled in your browser can vary by who is asking, and a price that is not in the page cannot be quoted, archived or checked against what you were charged last year. NordPass’s own markup gives the game away on the first point: the template reads “for the first 0 months”, which means the price it is about to fill in is a first-term price by construction.

We will price all three the moment they serve a figure we can read.

Five years of this

Password managers are the least-churned subscription most people own. You buy one, you import 200 logins, and you are still paying in 2031. So the honest horizon is not a year.

The 1Password year-two figures are the vendor’s own struck-through standard rates. The Bitwarden year-two figures are today’s price carried forward — Bitwarden publishes no renewal price and has not committed to holding it. Five-year columns are our arithmetic on prices read 21 August 2026 and assume nothing changes, which over five years it will.

One person, five years: $99.00 with Bitwarden against $227.40 with 1Password, a difference of $128.40. A household of six: $239.40 against $341.40, a difference of $102.00. Neither gap is life-altering. Both are larger than the sticker prices suggest, which is the whole reason to look past year one.

The verdict

On the only question this desk asks — what does it cost you a year, and what does it renew at — Bitwarden wins three times over. It is the cheapest paid individual plan at $19.80, the cheapest family plan at $47.88 for six, and the most complete free plan attached to any of them. It also carries no advertised discount, which means there is no year-two step to be surprised by.

1Password’s real price is $47.88 a year, not $35.88, and $71.88 for a family, not $53.88. That is not a scandal and the vendor prints both numbers. It is simply the figure you should be comparing, and it is roughly two and a half times Bitwarden’s.

If you are not going to pay: Bitwarden Free is the best-provisioned free plan that is not tied to one company’s platform, and Proton Pass’s free plan is a near-equal. Apple Passwords and Google Password Manager are free, permanent and perfectly reasonable inside their own boundaries, and both vendors state those boundaries themselves.

And if you are on NordPass’s free plan wondering why your phone and laptop disagree, that is not a bug. It is the row in the table marked “not included”.

None of the above is a security opinion. Encryption models, audit history and how each of these behaves the day it is breached are the questions that should decide this, and they are not questions with dollar signs in them. We have told you what the five years cost.