Now I started to worry about their clients openness to work with valultwarden. They also said in the past they will not change the behavior to not accept third party servers. But who knows now.
Thank you so much for posting this. I have been paying the annual 10$ (which went up by 2$ this year), but now it looks like I have to pay a whopping 30$ a year (a 3x increase, with no increase in features or value at all).
The cherry on the shit cake is that they did not give me any heads up at all. Quite sad. Bitwarden has been consistently one of the best pieces of softwares I have ever used. Simple, just does what it does and gets out of the way.
I stopped endorsing closed-source software to friends and family years ago, because you can't trust the companies behind them not to quietly change directions.
Years ago I used a free workout app that I really liked. After a few months of using it I recommended it to friends. I only much later found out that I was on a grandfathered version of the free plan without ads or restrictions. The company had made changes to the free plan since I joined, and all new accounts (like my friends) were subject to ads and restrictions.
It was embarrassing to have unknowingly recommending something like that.
Ooh, that's a great idea. I'm writing that down in my lost of ways to enshittify a company for money in case I ever end up in charge of a company that can be enshittified for money.
Actually, the part of the article that made me prick my ears up was this paragraph:
In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory role, according to LinkedIn, with no announcement from the company. His replacement, Michael Sullivan, former CEO of both Acquia and Insightsoftware, touts his experience with “all facets of mergers and acquisitions” on his own LinkedIn page, including experience working with leading private equity firms.
In combination with downplaying the free plan and removing any hint of now politically unfashionable DEI-like language, what this screams to me is: Bitwarden is being prepped for a sale.
I have been self-hosting Vaultwarden for a few months and it has been great. But this news still worries me because Vaultwarden still relies on open-source Bitwarden clients and sounds like those could be on the chopping board anytime soon.
Separately, I don't know if there is a self-hostable password manager which allows easy family sharing. (KeepassXC won't work, I believe, because the whole vault is a single file.)
what's a good open source and secure alternative? even if payed? I've been using bitwarden for years but this change plus their new CEO gives me pause.
The writing on the wall seems to have been when they suddenly doubled the price of a yearly subscription without notifying anyone. That struck me as skeezy as **...looks like it may just be the beginning.
I hope people are actively mirroring their GH repos, because I expect at some point they might suddenly decide to change the license to Proprietary and move to scrub the repos from the web. At which point, the community will then fork the last-free version and start to maintain a fork.
Which I really don't want to see happen, because having to move all my shit for myself and my family again after the LastPass debacle is going to be an extraordinary headache.
The price doesn't seem bad, though this case smells of some sort of greater internal shift that's, at least for me, indicative the Bitwarden is being turned into a profit-machine-at-any-cost rather than providing a good service for money.
This new CEO is a massive red flag. Literally nothing about anything relevant to the product or industry, though he's apparently good at private equity and selling orgs.
Probably worth jumping ship now before it mutates into another shitty corporate org, except this one is keeping your passwords.
I've paid for Bitwarden for years, but I can come to no other conclusion from all this (CEO all about private equity, severe price hike, scrubbing of core values, hiding the free tier) that it will be sold soon. Time to jump ship!
I feel glad that I never went paid (though I do pay for software and services). Bitwarden always seemed laggy: both the development pace and the iOS app (though the latter improved a bit only in the last two years). The moment Bitwarden took VC funding ($100 million?), it was clear that it would “pivot” to enterprise, raise prices for consumers and do other things that describe enshittification. It’s probably in the same league as 1Password (another scummy company with similar practices and deteriorating applications).
On password managers, anyone using ProtonPass want to chime in on how it is? I’ve read online that Proton (as a company) has a tendency to start working on new things all the time and let the ones they created remain half baked and languishing (to some extent).
I’m not into KeePass and other local password managers since I need a shared solution for multiple people using the same vault.
I wasn’t paying for the code tbh, I could always self-host (VaultWarden) at home behind Tailscale, it was all about the management, uptime, and most importantly, supporting a good software I used and loved for years.
Sad, really.
I’ll either move to self-hosting it at home behind TS, or going back to keepass tbh, anyway, I’m not staying on a sinking ship.
P.S: VaultWarden had a few bad CVEs this year (like an Auth Bypass), but when I looked deeper, it wouldn’t have much of a negative effect on me as a self-hosted home user that shares everything with family.
How does the GPL licensing affect future versions of the open source clients?
I use Vaultwarden right now. Part of the reason was that I wanted something where there was a minimum guarantee. In the case of Vaultwarden, I can always fall back to the web interface if needed. It wouldn't be convenient, but it guarantees no one can take away my password vault.
I really hate the per user per feature per byte per year pricing structure that everything has morphed into. I don't mind paying something for good software that I rely on, but having everything locked down and controlled by a 3rd party with continually increasing subscription fees is terrible.
I've worked in the small business space my whole life and it's being destroyed. Private investors are buying everything. I'm talking about owning all the small businesses of certain types; family doctors, dentists, optometrists, vets etc. seem to be the big target. It's terrifying and most people don't even realize it.
It's very sad to see core values that turn out to be lies. Always free is a tough spot to be in, but these companies could absolutely use a better business model that doesn't kill small businesses. And, based on what I see, increasing IT costs are killing small businesses.
What we need in the small business space is a tier of services where small businesses can self host using their own on-premise, vertically scalable infrastructure (ie: 1 server). In most cases they can tolerate some downtime and, even if they don't want to, a lack of resources usually means they don't have a choice (ex: they're not running HA network connections).
Businesses with <10-20 employees are often viewed as not being worth the effort of having as a customer, so they end up with self-serve, unsupported, non-discounted, over priced, trash subscriptions. By the time they grow enough to be a valuable customer their only experience with some products is misery.
I wish I could set up small businesses with self-hosted infrastructure that can't be rug pulled while they're still small with an easy upgrade path into a hosted service if/when they grow.
Good for them. Much easier to build a great product if you're making money from it. I tried bitwarden a while ago but ended up going with dashlane for a few years. I'm on 1password now and really like it but more competition is always better.
I stopped paying them when they started closing their clients. If they remain good stewards of FOSS I have no problem with starting again - Bitwarden provides serious value to me.
But I’ll probably have to rethink recommending it to people, since any type of friction is seriously harmful here.
40 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadObviously predictable. Bitwarden is now in the extraction phase and it is now time to pay an expensive...
...$1.65 a month.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427981
The cherry on the shit cake is that they did not give me any heads up at all. Quite sad. Bitwarden has been consistently one of the best pieces of softwares I have ever used. Simple, just does what it does and gets out of the way.
Sad really ...
Years ago I used a free workout app that I really liked. After a few months of using it I recommended it to friends. I only much later found out that I was on a grandfathered version of the free plan without ads or restrictions. The company had made changes to the free plan since I joined, and all new accounts (like my friends) were subject to ads and restrictions.
It was embarrassing to have unknowingly recommending something like that.
I've tried many workout apps. Besides tying you to your phone (because their Watch apps aren't great), they ALL sell out eventually.
In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory role, according to LinkedIn, with no announcement from the company. His replacement, Michael Sullivan, former CEO of both Acquia and Insightsoftware, touts his experience with “all facets of mergers and acquisitions” on his own LinkedIn page, including experience working with leading private equity firms.
In combination with downplaying the free plan and removing any hint of now politically unfashionable DEI-like language, what this screams to me is: Bitwarden is being prepped for a sale.
And how is that relevant, either way?
What do people recommend? I'm on Linux/Firefox/android and don't want to self host.
Enshittificstion incoming.
Just use KeePass.
whenever i need any new feature, i just add it.
Separately, I don't know if there is a self-hostable password manager which allows easy family sharing. (KeepassXC won't work, I believe, because the whole vault is a single file.)
The writing on the wall seems to have been when they suddenly doubled the price of a yearly subscription without notifying anyone. That struck me as skeezy as **...looks like it may just be the beginning.
I hope people are actively mirroring their GH repos, because I expect at some point they might suddenly decide to change the license to Proprietary and move to scrub the repos from the web. At which point, the community will then fork the last-free version and start to maintain a fork.
Which I really don't want to see happen, because having to move all my shit for myself and my family again after the LastPass debacle is going to be an extraordinary headache.
This new CEO is a massive red flag. Literally nothing about anything relevant to the product or industry, though he's apparently good at private equity and selling orgs.
Probably worth jumping ship now before it mutates into another shitty corporate org, except this one is keeping your passwords.
They also ruin software.
On password managers, anyone using ProtonPass want to chime in on how it is? I’ve read online that Proton (as a company) has a tendency to start working on new things all the time and let the ones they created remain half baked and languishing (to some extent).
I’m not into KeePass and other local password managers since I need a shared solution for multiple people using the same vault.
All those people who paid half a mil on education must appear useful at the expense of us all!
I wasn’t paying for the code tbh, I could always self-host (VaultWarden) at home behind Tailscale, it was all about the management, uptime, and most importantly, supporting a good software I used and loved for years.
Sad, really.
I’ll either move to self-hosting it at home behind TS, or going back to keepass tbh, anyway, I’m not staying on a sinking ship.
P.S: VaultWarden had a few bad CVEs this year (like an Auth Bypass), but when I looked deeper, it wouldn’t have much of a negative effect on me as a self-hosted home user that shares everything with family.
I use Vaultwarden right now. Part of the reason was that I wanted something where there was a minimum guarantee. In the case of Vaultwarden, I can always fall back to the web interface if needed. It wouldn't be convenient, but it guarantees no one can take away my password vault.
I really hate the per user per feature per byte per year pricing structure that everything has morphed into. I don't mind paying something for good software that I rely on, but having everything locked down and controlled by a 3rd party with continually increasing subscription fees is terrible.
I've worked in the small business space my whole life and it's being destroyed. Private investors are buying everything. I'm talking about owning all the small businesses of certain types; family doctors, dentists, optometrists, vets etc. seem to be the big target. It's terrifying and most people don't even realize it.
It's very sad to see core values that turn out to be lies. Always free is a tough spot to be in, but these companies could absolutely use a better business model that doesn't kill small businesses. And, based on what I see, increasing IT costs are killing small businesses.
What we need in the small business space is a tier of services where small businesses can self host using their own on-premise, vertically scalable infrastructure (ie: 1 server). In most cases they can tolerate some downtime and, even if they don't want to, a lack of resources usually means they don't have a choice (ex: they're not running HA network connections).
Businesses with <10-20 employees are often viewed as not being worth the effort of having as a customer, so they end up with self-serve, unsupported, non-discounted, over priced, trash subscriptions. By the time they grow enough to be a valuable customer their only experience with some products is misery.
I wish I could set up small businesses with self-hosted infrastructure that can't be rug pulled while they're still small with an easy upgrade path into a hosted service if/when they grow.
I'm pretty sure I have never cared about what values a company listed on its careers page, unless I am considering working there.
But I’ll probably have to rethink recommending it to people, since any type of friction is seriously harmful here.