Why small teams overpay for password managers

Most password managers are priced for the enterprise and then sold to everyone. A five-person team pays the same per-seat rate as a five-thousand-person company — for capability built for a compliance department, not for them.

The features that justify that price tag — SSO, automated provisioning, custom roles, advanced policy controls, a dedicated account manager — are exactly the ones a small team rarely turns on. You end up paying for a long feature list and using a short one: store a login, share it with a teammate, find it again next week.

The result is a quiet tax. At seven or eight dollars per user per month, a team of ten pays close to a thousand dollars a year, most of it for capability it never touches.

But the core of a password manager is small and well understood: encrypt secrets on the device, sync the ciphertext, and let people share access without ever exposing the plaintext. That part does not cost enterprise money to run.

We think small teams should pay for the part they actually use — the same encryption and the same daily workflow, at roughly half the headline price. (Prices we mention for other products are based on their publicly listed pricing and can change; check the source before you decide.)