What I mean is if you depend on paid services for things like email or your password manager, you have to be able to guarantee that you will always be able to pay for it or else you will be locked out of that critical service to some extent. For example if you were to sign up for Tutanota and have one email for personal use, another for healthcare, and another for banking, and then at some point you are either in a tough financial spot or your payment method gets lost or stolen, you might lose your email for critical services.
Simple login doesn’t have this issue because they promise that even if you stop paying you get to keep the aliases you’ve made. But most services don’t operate like that.
I know the default answer would be “what are the odds you won’t be able to afford $10 a month”. For context I am poor and have always been poor, so it’s very easy for me to understand that even if I become successful there will always be the possibility that I might lose everything, and the whole point of security is preparing for when bad things happen, even if they don’t.
I’m curious if anyone else shares this opinion, because I haven’t heard anyone else in the privacy space talk about it. Probably because most prominent people aren’t dirt poor and don’t factor that into their threat model.
If you can afford $10/month today but you think you might not be able to afford it next month, better save the money.
If you can afford it today and are reasonably sure you’ll be able to afford it next month, but aren’t sure about 2 months from now, then it’s enough to just have some kind of strategy in mind for downloading your data and gracefully cancelling the service, given a month of lead time. Like with email, I can download the email I have archived at my provider by clicking a few buttons. Then I change the MX record of my email domain to go to my self-hosted email or even (shudder) forward to something like gmail. I do expect to keep paying domain renewal ($10/year) for quite a while.
I wouldn’t use a hosted password manager by any means though. Give all my passwords to some company? I’m kind of a fuddy duddy but I guess there must be some pretty good drugs out there that I haven’t heard about. Maybe I’m missing out.