1Password Business, 8 seats → Vaultwarden, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, Vaultwarden saves you $757 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$72.93/hrBelow that rate, moving to Vaultwarden 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 × 8 seats, billed annual | $71.92 |
| Every month | $71.92 |
What the escape costs
| Linode Nanode 1GB 1 vCPU · 1 GB RAM · 25 GB disk · 0.98 TB transfer | $5.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 10 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.07 |
| Your time 0.75 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $37.50 |
| Every month | $42.57 |
| Migration, once 6 hours of your time, our estimate | $300.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $5.00 vc2-1c-1gb · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $5.00 Nanode 1GB · used above
- DigitalOcean $6.00 1 vCPU · 1 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $29.35 |
| After one year | $52 |
| After 3 years | $757 |
Or don't run it yourself
PikaPods runs Vaultwarden from $1.80/month. Runs the same open-source software, applies updates, and takes daily encrypted backups to storage you own. The maintenance hours drop to zero, because not spending them is the entire product.
| PikaPods Vaultwarden their published minimum for this app | $1.80 |
| Your time nothing per month; they patch it and back it up | $0.00 |
| Every month | $1.80 |
| Migration, once 3 hours — half our estimate for the self-hosted route, since there is no server to build | $150.00 |
| After 3 years, against 1Password Business | $2,374 |
At $50 an hour that saves $2,374 over 3 years, against $757 for running it yourself.
That figure is PikaPods's own minimum for Vaultwarden and rises with the CPU, memory and storage you give it — it is not the same allocation as the Linode box priced above, and a busy install will cost more. Verified 19 Oct 2026 from their catalogue.
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- 1Password's security team, audits and bug-bounty programme
- Travel Mode, Watchtower breach monitoring and account recovery
- Someone else being responsible when the vault server goes down
You gain
- A Rust implementation light enough to run on the smallest box any provider sells
- Bitwarden-compatible clients on every platform, so the apps are not the compromise
- Free seats and free family sharing
If you decide to do it
There is a deployment kit for this one: a pinned Docker Compose stack with no default passwords, an install script, a backup that encrypts before it leaves the machine, and — the part almost nobody ships — a restore drill that nightly restores the newest backup into a throwaway database and checks your data is actually in it. It has been deployed and run, not just written.
The kits live in the repository, generated from a spec so the pinned image tags are checked against the registry on every build.
Read this before you decide
- A password vault is the single worst thing to lose. If you are not confident you will keep backups tested and the host patched, the honest answer is to stay on 1Password however the arithmetic reads.
- Vaultwarden is an unofficial reimplementation of the Bitwarden server. It is well regarded and widely used, but it is not the vendor's own code.
- Exposing it to the public internet needs a reverse proxy with TLS and, ideally, fail2ban. That is in the maintenance estimate, and it is not optional.
- The maintenance estimate here is deliberately higher than the software needs, because security patching on this box is not something you get to defer.
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?
dani-garcia/vaultwarden has 69,285 stars, was last pushed 3 days ago, and last cut a release (1.37.4) 13 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 |
| Linode plan catalogue | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| dani-garcia/vaultwarden activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 10 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 Linode, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.