1Password Business, 12 seats → Passbolt, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, Passbolt saves you $1,220 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$76.52/hrBelow that rate, moving to Passbolt pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on 1Password Business.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| 1Password Business $8.99/month × 12 seats, billed annual | $107.88 |
| Every month | $107.88 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-1c-2gb 1 vCPU · 2 GB RAM · 55 GB disk · 2 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $10.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 15 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.10 |
| Your time 1 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $50.00 |
| Every month | $60.10 |
| Migration, once 10 hours of your time, our estimate | $500.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $10.00 vc2-1c-2gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $12.00 Linode 2GB
- DigitalOcean $12.00 1 vCPU · 2 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $47.78 |
| After one year | $73 |
| After 3 years | $1,220 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- 1Password's security team, audits and bug bounty
- Polished mobile apps; Passbolt's are functional rather than pleasant
- Watchtower breach monitoring and account recovery
You gain
- OpenPGP end-to-end encryption with per-user keys, which is a genuinely different security model
- Sharing and access control designed for organisations rather than households
- AGPL-3.0, free seats, and no per-user charge at any size
Read this before you decide
- A password vault is the worst thing to lose. If you will not keep backups tested and the host patched, stay on 1Password whatever this page says.
- Passbolt's key model means a lost private key is unrecoverable by design. That is a security feature and an operational hazard; plan recovery before you migrate.
- It needs GPG, a mail server for invitations, and TLS. The 10-hour estimate assumes all three go smoothly, which they often do not.
Other projects that replace 1Password
Bitwarden are catalogued on OpenStore, a curated directory of open-source software with notes on what each project replaces and how actively it is maintained. This site prices the exit; that one browses the market. Weighing the options before committing hours to a migration is time better spent than time spent monitoring a server you chose too quickly. Entries verified 19 Oct 2026.
Is the project alive?
passbolt/passbolt_api has 6,177 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (v5.16.0) 32 days ago. Licence: AGPL-3.0. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The 1Password figure is the site's own wording: “1Password Business costs $8.99 per user per month when billed annually, or $107.88 per user per year”.
| 1Password pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| passbolt/passbolt_api activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 25 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.