Dashlane Discontinued Its Free Plan: Your Vault Is Export-Only

Every other page in this set is about a downgrade. This one is about a discontinuation, and the difference is not academic.

A downgrade leaves you somewhere. Dashlane's free tier is not becoming more limited — it is going away, and what replaces it is not a plan at all.

The sentence that matters

Dashlane's own description of the end state:

"You will no longer be able to add to, edit, copy, or view your data in Dashlane, just export it."

Four verbs on the blocked list, and the fourth one is the shock. View.

Everywhere else in this category, a lapsed subscription leaves you able to read your own vault. 1Password freezes the account and states you "can still view all your items, copy your passwords, and even copy items to vaults outside your account". Bitwarden and Proton Pass have free tiers to land on.

Dashlane's end state is a vault you cannot open and can only pour out.

Export-only is a real route, not a trap

It is worth being fair about this, because "cannot view your data" sounds like a hostage situation and is not quite one.

Export remains available. Dashlane publishes the steps. Your credentials are not being deleted or held — they are being handed to you in a file and the door is being closed behind you.

That is a legitimate way to wind down a free tier. It is also a narrow route with a single point of failure: if you miss the window, the mechanism you would use to read your passwords is the mechanism that has been switched off.

Which is why the only sensible response to this page is to export today rather than to work out precisely when the deadline falls.

About the date

We would normally give you the exact date. Here we are not going to, and the reason is worth stating.

The Dashlane article we checked referred to the change taking effect on 16 September 2025 in one place and to acting before 16 September 2026 in another. Those cannot both be right, and we have no way to resolve which is current from the source itself.

On a page about losing access to your passwords, printing a confident wrong date is worse than printing none. Check the notice inside your own account — and treat whatever it says as the outer bound rather than the plan.

The export file is the dangerous part

Dashlane's CSV export is unencrypted. Dashlane has said so itself elsewhere in its documentation: CSV files are not encrypted, and others can read them.

So the half hour in which this file exists is the most exposed your credentials will ever be. Treat it accordingly:

1. Do the whole migration in one sitting. Export, import, verify, delete. Do not export on Friday and import on Monday.
2. Export to a folder that is not synced. Desktop and Documents are frequently backed up to a cloud service automatically, and a plaintext password list uploaded to a backup provider cannot be retracted.
3. Never email it to yourself. Your email password is in the file.
4. Delete it properly and empty the bin.
5. Rotate what matters afterwards — email, banking, and the master password of wherever you land.

Where to go

Two free tiers in this category are genuinely complete rather than trials in disguise:

Bitwarden Free documents unlimited storage of logins, notes, cards and identities, on any device, for one user. It also has the best export arrangement we have scored — 29 out of 30 — which matters if you have just learned what a bad one feels like.

Proton Pass Free documents unlimited entries and unlimited devices, capping aliases and 2FA items instead. Its paid tier is also the only one offering a PGP-encrypted export, which removes the plaintext moment entirely next time.

If you would rather pay for Dashlane than move, that is a perfectly reasonable choice — it is capable software with an unusually honest approach to export security. Just make it a decision rather than something that happens to you because a deadline passed.

For how every major manager behaves when the money stops, see what happens to your passwords when you stop paying.