Dashlane in 2026: apps, security, and what you're paying for

On September 16, 2025, Dashlane did something almost nobody in the password-manager market had dared: it said the quiet part out loud. Free was over. The plan that had capped users at 25 passwords on a single device was retired, and the announcement did not pretend otherwise — the company said it wanted to "accelerate security innovations," which is corporate for "free users don't pay for those." A year later, the move looks less like a stumble and more like a strategy: Dashlane has become the industry's premium-first product, for better and worse.

This is Dashlane as it exists in late 2026 — the plans, the prices, the security model, the two-factor story, and the VPN that comes along for the ride.

What Dashlane is

Dashlane started in Paris in 2009 and now runs from New York with its French roots intact — a French-American company selling a polished, subscription-only credential manager. The core product is a zero-knowledge password vault: your data is encrypted on your device before it syncs, and Dashlane's servers hold material the company says it cannot read. The apps cover Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and the major browsers, and the design brief has always been the same: make the expensive option feel worth it.

On the enterprise side, the company now wraps its offerings in a platform brand called Dashlane Omnix — "proactive credential security," in marketing terms, meaning password management plus credential risk detection for companies. The consumer apps most people mean when they say "Dashlane" sit underneath that umbrella, quietly unchanged in spirit.

The free tier is gone, and it is not coming back

The history matters because so many guides still get it wrong. For years, Dashlane Free was the generous-seeming entry point: 25 passwords, one device, no syncing. Then, as the roundup of free managers records, the plan was retired on September 16, 2025. ZDNet reported at the time that free users got about a month to move, with discounted upgrade offers, before the cutoff.

What exists now is a free trial of Premium — Dashlane's own plan pages describe exactly that — followed by a subscription. If a review recommends "Dashlane Free" in 2026, it was written before the funeral. The consolidation went further than the free tier, too: Dashlane's plan comparison now lists Dashlane Free, Premium Plus, Premium Plus Family, Essentials, and Advanced as plans it "no longer offers or sells." The portfolio has been pruned down to the two things that sell.

What the paid plans cost in late 2026

The personal lineup is two plans. Premium covers one person with everything: unlimited passwords and devices, the built-in authenticator, dark-web monitoring, and the VPN. Friends & Family extends that to up to 10 members, which is more seats than most rivals give a family plan.

Plan	Price	What you get
Premium	about $60 a year	Full vault, authenticator, dark-web monitoring, VPN
Friends & Family	about $90 a year	Premium for up to 10 members
Omnix Password Management	$8 per user, per month	Business password management
Omnix Credential Protection	$4 per user, per month	Business credential monitoring

Two caveats on those numbers. The personal prices are the list figures reported around the free-plan sunset, and Dashlane has changed personal pricing again since — a September 2026 support notice describes the latest round. The business figures come from Dashlane's pricing page, billed annually. Treat the exact dollars as a moving target and the shape as stable: one personal plan, one family plan, priced at the top of the market.

And it is the top. Premium works out to roughly $5 a month against Bitwarden's $19.80-a-year Premium and Proton Pass's few dollars — the Bitwarden guide covers what the cheap end of the market does, and the honest answer is "most of this, for a quarter of the price."

The two-factor story: vault login and the built-in authenticator

Two different things get called "Dashlane 2FA," and separating them matters.

The first is the second factor on your Dashlane account itself. For years that meant a TOTP authenticator app — Google Authenticator, Authy, anything standards-compliant. Then June 2025 brought FIDO2 security-key support, which made a YubiKey a first-class way into the vault rather than a curiosity. Dashlane has also spent two years pushing passwordless accounts: master-password-free sign-up arrived in 2024, and ZDNet's coverage of the Yubico partnership noted the trade — with no master password, recovery after you lose your devices runs through Dashlane's own process, which moves a slice of trust from your head to the company's infrastructure. It is a defensible design. It is also one 1Password deliberately avoided, keeping its two-secret model while adding passkeys alongside it.

The second is the built-in authenticator: paid Dashlane plans store TOTP seeds for your other accounts and generate the six-digit codes in the same app that autofills your passwords, available on the paid tiers per the plan comparison. As convenience, it works well. As architecture, it stores the second factor beside the first — one open vault hands over both halves of every login that uses it. We build a dedicated 2FA vault for the opposite design, with the factors deliberately split, but the principle matters more than the product: codes and passwords do their jobs best in separate places.

The VPN that comes with it

Dashlane Premium has bundled a VPN for years, and the partner has always been Hotspot Shield — set up, per Dashlane's support pages, in the VPN section of your Dashlane account. The honest assessment has not changed much in a decade: it is a real VPN from a known provider, useful for public Wi-Fi and casual use, and it is not a reason to buy a password manager. Power users who care about wire protocols, server selection, or a provider's jurisdiction already have opinions, and Hotspot Shield's owner Pango has attracted its share of criticism over the years. Treat the VPN as a bonus that costs you nothing at the margin, not a line item.

Where Dashlane earns it, and where it does not

The case for Dashlane is execution. The apps are the most consistently polished in the category, autofill is reliable across the awkward corners of iOS and Android, and the dark-web monitoring runs live — you get alerts when your data shows up, not a weekly digest of things that happened last month. Customer support is human and responsive, which is rarer than it should be. For a household that will never read a comparison table and just wants the thing to work everywhere, Friends & Family at 10 seats is a genuinely good deal against rivals that stop at five or six.

The case against is the price and the direction. At roughly $60 a year for one person, you are paying several times Bitwarden's rate for fit and finish, not for stronger encryption — the zero-knowledge architectures are comparable, as the NordPass guide and the free-manager roundup both lay out. The closed-source clients mean you trust Dashlane's implementation rather than reading it. And a company that killed its free tier to "accelerate security innovations" has told you where it stands: the paying customer is the customer. That is a legitimate position. It is just not a bargain.

Frequently asked questions

Does Dashlane still have a free plan?

No. Dashlane Free — 25 passwords on one device — was retired on September 16, 2025, and nothing replaced it. What exists now is a free trial of Premium, then a subscription to Premium or Friends & Family. Guides recommending the free tier in 2026 are out of date. If free is the requirement, Bitwarden, Proton Pass, and KeePass all store unlimited passwords at no cost, and they will still be free next year, which is more than Dashlane's free tier could ever promise.

How much does Dashlane cost in 2026?

The two personal plans are Premium, listed around $60 a year for one person, and Friends & Family, around $90 a year for up to 10 members — figures reported at the 2025 free-plan sunset and subject to the September 2026 price adjustment Dashlane announced in its support notes. On the business side, the Omnix Password Management package runs $8 per user per month and Credential Protection $4, billed annually. Check the live pricing page before budgeting: the direction of travel has been upward.

Can Dashlane store my 2FA codes?

Yes. Paid plans include the built-in authenticator: scan a site's QR code into a Dashlane entry and the TOTP code appears beside the password, autofilling at sign-in. It handles standard TOTP well. The design caveat is the usual one — the seed sits next to the password it protects, so whoever opens the vault gets both factors. If that bothers you, keep codes in a dedicated authenticator and passwords in the manager, which is exactly the split our own vault exists to provide.

Does Dashlane work with YubiKey?

Yes. Since June 2025, Dashlane supports FIDO2 security keys as a way to sign in to the vault — a phishing-resistant second factor, and part of the passwordless push that also made the master password optional. You can register a YubiKey in your account's security settings and use its touch at sign-in from new devices. As always with security keys, the key guards entry but not the data itself — and losing every enrolled key plus every device puts you on the recovery path, so keep a spare registered.

Is the Dashlane VPN worth anything?

Some, if you already pay for Dashlane. The bundled Hotspot Shield VPN handles public Wi-Fi and casual privacy fine, and it is included with Premium rather than sold separately. It is not a full-featured VPN for streaming, torrenting, or the privacy-maximalist use cases — no bundled manager VPN is — and Hotspot Shield's parent company has drawn criticism over the years. Nobody should choose a password manager because of its VPN. Treat it as a free umbrella in a bag you already bought.

If you pay for Dashlane's polish on the password side, keep the second factor independent. The guest generator takes a Base32 secret, an otpauth:// URI, a QR image, or a Google Authenticator export and produces codes instantly — nothing stored, nothing sent, cleared on reload. The features page covers the vault version.