Free tiers are funded by something. Usually by reading the metadata they promised not to read. We chose not to do that. So we charge you instead — a sum we hope you'll find unremarkable.
You lose access to your vault. There is no recovery, because a recovery mechanism would be a back-door we could be compelled to use. Write your passphrase down somewhere physical — a sealed envelope in a sock drawer is acceptable; a sticky note on your monitor is not.
Your vault is exportable as a versioned, documented file. The crypto envelope is open, and we will publish a final reference implementation that can decrypt it offline. Your vault outlives the company.
Free tiers in this category are funded by reading the data the company promised not to read, or by training models on it, or by selling adjacent ads. We do not want to do any of those things. £4.99 a month covers our costs and pays our auditor.
Because we'd rather get the single-user case completely right than ship a half-finished team-sharing product. Family-level per-item sharing is on the roadmap for the personal plan (X25519 key-wrapping is in the envelope spec already). Real team plans come after that; if you need one, please tell us.