Actually, the part of the article that made me prick my ears up was this paragraph:<p><i>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.</i><p>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.
This is what made me and others nervous when they announced a huge investment into the company a few years ago. It was already a good and self-sustaining product, and taking on that investment was just going to create an expectation of returns later down the line, something that was more likely to result in enshittification.
This feels like deja-vu with Lastpass.<p>LogMeIn buys Lastpass, multiple massive breaches occur[, people move to Bitwarden].
womp womp
urgh of course it has to be private equity. Really liked the product and did not mind paying for it...but not ready for the PE enshittification.
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.<p>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.<p>Probably worth jumping ship now before it mutates into another shitty corporate org, except this one is keeping your passwords.
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.<p>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.<p>It was embarrassing to have unknowingly recommending something like that.
Bitwarden is open-source though? This is about the hosted version of it, which has a free tier. But you can run the same software on your server at home if you want, for free.<p>(That said, I am also concerned about the direction Bitwarden is taking. I just think this shows that even OSS projects can have direction/rugpull issues.)
You're right, though the friends and family that I would feel the need to recommend a password manager to aren't the type that would self-host their own servers.
> But you can run the same software on your server at home if you want, for free.<p>Whats to say this will still be true if the company gets sold?
The fact that Vaultwarden exists?
Except that we do have Vaultwarden, so those who haven't already switched still have an option.
I hear you, but the flip side is that it sounds like they did right by their early adopters in grandfathering you in.
Early adopters are exactly the people that like to test and recommend things to the majority. Without being aware of it, I was recommending a different product than the one I was using.<p>People stake their own personal reputations behind their recommendations. I don't think quietly changing the product without warning is doing right by their early adopters.
I'm already paying for the Protonmail suite so reading this was my cue to finally switch over to Proton Pass. Thanks for the heads up.
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!
Great heads up! I will work on self-hosting this month.
There are 2 versions out there, the one from Bitwarden itself, and an open-source rewrite called Vaultwarden.<p>But, the main developer of works at Bitwarden.<p>Thankfully you can easily export your passwords and move to another system (unlike say Authy where we had to inject Javascript to extract the TOTP seeds).
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).<p>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.<p>Sad really ...
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).<p>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).<p>I’m not into KeePass and other local password managers since I need a shared solution for multiple people using the same vault.
Private equity ruins housing.<p>They also ruin software.
<i>sigh</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>Which I really don't want to see happen, because having to move all my shit for myself and my family <i>again</i> after the LastPass debacle is going to be an extraordinary headache.
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.
I've been self-hosting Vaultwarden for some time, I'm pretty happy with it.
If you are using Bitwarden self hosted, you can switch it out for Vaultwarden.
i mostly moved out of all SaaS, today i've Go app with sqlite backing for everything!<p>whenever i need any new feature, i just add it.
Just use vaultwarden <a href="https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden</a>
Do you have to self host it?<p>I'm moderately decent at self hosting. I'm fairly confident in my backups and security.<p>But also, I am not a system backup nor security expert, and I don't want to become either.<p>The one last thing that I really want to leave to the experts is my secrets management.
This uses the Bitwarden client and extensions, which is it's main attraction (I use it too).<p>My worry however is about the future - what if a core functionality goes behind a paywall.
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.
Ah, good old rugpull.<p>Just use KeePass.
Unfortunately that has no team features, and last time I checked they were quite pushy about not adding any - which is totally fair, they know what product they want to make and are sticking to it! But BitWarden has good team features.
How do you sync between devices?
Syncthing
<a href="https://syncthing.net/" rel="nofollow">https://syncthing.net/</a>
Last time I looked into this, you really couldn't in a reasonably simple way. It was possible between two users, but more than two just caused issues with syncing.
Syncing between your own devices is still an easier problem to solve than syncing between different users. The database is just a file.<p>I use a self hosted Nextcloud, but you don't have to.<p>KeePassXC allows you to automate opening a database from the URL column. My family and I share a second database and open it from there, but it's super kludgy on any other device.
"Always free" was never sustainable for a password manager that took VC money and now needs growth at all costs [0].<p>Obviously predictable. Bitwarden is now in the extraction phase and it is now time to pay an expensive...<p>...$1.65 a month.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427981">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427981</a>
Compared with KeePassXC and Syncthing, it is infinitely more expensive!
Look at the CEOs other "ventures" he is a private equity squeeze guy.
[flagged]
My first bitwarden invoice is dated november 2019. My concern here is 'squeeze' type activities that other companies with strong M&A leaderships have brought to their customers. For consumers, loyalty is exploited, not rewarded, and one must be vigilant for signals to jump ship.
I think the deal is pretty clear with stuff like this: Free accounts for individual users, earning money with businesses.<p>It's not like Bitwarden is giving away their product without getting anything in return: The free users (tech-savy early adopters) were the ones that pitched Bitwarden to their bosses when they were looking for a password solution for their company. It's really no different than Adobe or other companies giving away student licences. Companies are not stupid.
Would you really be okay with HN charging monthly to use the site? HN probably stores more data anyways, passwords are pretty small in comparison to comments, and I produce more of them aswell.
maybe because the company promised "always free"?<p>if the company can't keep the promises, then maybe they shouldn't make them in the first place?