Password managers · cost comparison
1Password vs self-hosted Vaultwarden: what each actually costs
1Password on the Business tier against Vaultwarden running on the smallest server that fits it. Every figure below is computed from the sizing model and the dated prices at the foot of this page, and includes the part most comparisons leave out: your own time.
At 10 people, self-hosting Vaultwarden costs $42.30 a month against $89.90 for 1Password. You are ahead after 3 months and $1,564 better off over 36 months, with your own time already priced in.
- 1Password
- $89.90per month, Business
- Self-hosted
- $42.30server, backups and your time
- Server and backups
- $4.80Basic 512 MiB, 0.5 GB RAM
- 36-month difference
- $1,564 saved by self-hosting
- Break-even
- 3 monthsafter $150 of setup time
The same comparison at every team size
Self-hosting has a floor and almost no slope, while per-seat software has no floor and a steep slope. That is the whole story, and it is why the answer flips somewhere in this table rather than being the same for everyone.
| Team size | 1Password | Self-hosted | Without valuing your time | Server needed | 36-month difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | $8.99 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic 512 MiB (0.5 GB) | -$1,349 |
| 5 people | $44.95 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic 512 MiB (0.5 GB) | -$54.60 |
| 10 people | $89.90 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic 512 MiB (0.5 GB) | +$1,564 |
| 25 people | $225 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic 512 MiB (0.5 GB) | +$6,418 |
| 50 people | $450 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic 512 MiB (0.5 GB) | +$14,509 |
| 100 people | $899 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic 512 MiB (0.5 GB) | +$30,691 |
| 250 people | $2,248 | $44.70 | $7.20 | Basic 1 GiB (1 GB) | +$79,151 |
The balance tips in favour of self-hosting at around 10 people.
Where the self-hosted money actually goes at 10 people
| Line item | Per month | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Server | $4.00 | Basic 512 MiB at DigitalOcean: 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 10 GB disk |
| Backups | $0.80 | Provider snapshots at 20% of the server price. Skipping this is not a saving, it is a bet. |
| Your time | $37.50 | 0.5 hours a month of updates, upgrades and the occasional broken thing, at $75 an hour |
| Total | $42.30 | Plus $150 once, for roughly 2 hours of first-time setup |
1Password at this size costs $89.90 a month. 10 seats at $8.99 each. This is the annually-billed rate, which is what the vendor's page displayed; paying monthly costs more.
What Vaultwarden needs to run at 10 people
A Rust reimplementation of the Bitwarden server. It runs comfortably in a fraction of a gigabyte because vault data is small and encrypted client-side.
| Resource | Required | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 0.3 GB | 0.2 GB for the stack at rest, plus 1 MB per active user, plus 25% headroom |
| Disk | 2.2 GB | 2 GB base, plus 0.02 GB per user |
| vCPU | 1 | The project's own baseline. For this workload memory runs out before the processor does. |
What you give up, stated plainly
- Uptime is now yours. 1Password has an operations team on call. Self-hosted, a failed upgrade at 18:00 on a Friday is your evening.
- Backups only exist if you test restoring them. The $0.80 line above buys snapshots, not a rehearsed recovery.
- Vaultwarden is a light lift: one container and no scheduled work beyond image updates. That is why the maintenance line is 0.5 hours a month rather than zero.
- Feature parity is never exact. Vaultwarden covers the core of what teams use 1Password for; the long tail of integrations and enterprise controls is where the gap shows.
Where to put Vaultwarden
0.3 GB of memory and 2.2 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the Basic 512 MiB at DigitalOcean for $4.00 a month.
Go to DigitalOcean Compare hosts
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and Hetzner in particular is usually cheaper per gigabyte of memory than anything quoted above. Price them yourself before you commit.
The DigitalOcean link above is a referral link: if you sign up through it and pay your first $25, we receive $25 of DigitalOcean account credit. That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
Vaultwarden at a glance
| Licence | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
|---|---|
| Written in | Rust |
| GitHub stars | 67,195, checked 2026-09-12 |
| Latest release | 1.37.2 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-09 |
| Ships Docker images | Yes |
| Project | github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden · dani-garcia/vaultwarden |
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
| Input | Value used | Source | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1Password Business | USD 8.99 per seat per month | vendor pricing page | 2026-09-12 |
| DigitalOcean Basic 512 MiB | $4.00 per month | provider pricing page | 2026-09-12 |
| Engineer time | $75 per hour | our published assumption | — |
| Vaultwarden sizing | 0.2 GB base, 1 MB per user | project documentation | — |
Prices move. If the vendor has changed theirs since 2026-09-12, the figures above are stale and the source links are the authority, not us. How we handle that.