Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site

114

ggpi about 4 hours ago 73 commentsRead Article on fastcompany.com

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Discussion (73 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

chipotle_coyote•about 2 hours ago

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.

nacs•about 1 hour ago

This feels like deja-vu with Lastpass.

LogMeIn buys Lastpass, multiple massive breaches occur[, people move to Bitwarden].

troyvit•20 minutes ago

Did Lastpass have a project like Vaultwarden behind it at the time? I'm hoping against hope that that will keep us with an open vault.

rcxdude•about 1 hour ago

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.

persedes•about 2 hours ago

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.

beAbU•about 1 hour ago

womp womp

Cyan488•about 3 hours ago

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.

542458•about 2 hours ago

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.

(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.)

pigeons•25 minutes ago

The server is only recently free, if indeed it is at all. I don't remember when or if that changed, because for most of its life it was definitely not free (open source).

Cyan488•about 2 hours ago

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.

maineldc•about 2 hours ago

So what would you recommend to your friends and family that need a password manager? Genuinely curious.

I pay for a service for my family because I need reliable and easy for my wife and daughter to use it.

alt227•about 2 hours ago

> But you can run the same software on your server at home if you want, for free.

Whats to say this will still be true if the company gets sold?

xienze•about 2 hours ago

The fact that Vaultwarden exists?

happymellon•about 2 hours ago

Except that we do have Vaultwarden, so those who haven't already switched still have an option.

mccolin•about 2 hours ago

I hear you, but the flip side is that it sounds like they did right by their early adopters in grandfathering you in.

Cyan488•about 2 hours ago

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.

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.

nusl•about 2 hours ago

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.

gaiagraphia•43 minutes ago

The private equity virus has a biological imperative to spread.

All those people who paid half a mil on education must appear useful at the expense of us all!

summermusic•about 2 hours ago

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!

ryukoposting•26 minutes ago

Yup. But, where to?

iosjunkie•23 minutes ago

Brb vibe coding a replacement /s

mfro•about 2 hours ago

Great heads up! I will work on self-hosting this month.

OptionOfT•about 2 hours ago

There are 2 versions out there, the one from Bitwarden itself, and an open-source rewrite called Vaultwarden.

But, the main developer of works at Bitwarden.

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).

aneutron•about 3 hours ago

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.

Sad really ...

mlnj•about 3 hours ago

Have been a customer for years, but if the core values are going away, so am I. It's not even about the money.

ktm5j•about 2 hours ago

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.

UnhappyMeaning•about 2 hours ago

Private equity ruins housing.

They also ruin software.

AdmiralAsshat•about 2 hours ago

sigh

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.

milkglass•about 3 hours ago

Just use vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

esperent•about 2 hours ago

Do you have to self host it?

I'm moderately decent at self hosting. I'm fairly confident in my backups and security.

But also, I am not a system backup nor security expert, and I don't want to become either.

The one last thing that I really want to leave to the experts is my secrets management.

nathanmills•about 2 hours ago

You don't need to be a system backup expert to take backups, and with that attitude you will never become a system backup novice either. There is no gaurentee paid services will keep your data available either. One company lost my data and I was very glad to have backups.

thunderbong•about 2 hours ago

This uses the Bitwarden client and extensions, which is it's main attraction (I use it too).

My worry however is about the future - what if a core functionality goes behind a paywall.

AnonC•about 1 hour ago

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.

deepriverfish•about 2 hours ago

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.

dandellion•about 2 hours ago

I've been self-hosting Vaultwarden for some time, I'm pretty happy with it.

deepriverfish•about 2 hours ago

can you access it in your phone?

happymellon•about 2 hours ago

Yes.

happymellon•about 2 hours ago

If you are using Bitwarden self hosted, you can switch it out for Vaultwarden.

faangguyindia•about 2 hours ago

i mostly moved out of all SaaS, today i've Go app with sqlite backing for everything!

whenever i need any new feature, i just add it.

baal80spam•about 2 hours ago

Ah, good old rugpull.

Just use KeePass.

jarofgreen•about 2 hours ago

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.

jabroni_salad•about 1 hour ago

If you are referring to an organization rather than a family, have a look at Pleasant Password Server.

leosanchez•about 2 hours ago

How do you sync between devices?

nvme0n1p1•about 2 hours ago

https://syncthing.net/

timw4mail•about 1 hour ago

Syncthing

ilvez•11 minutes ago

Lived like this years, never going to look back. Add mobile to the mix and you're screwed with conflicts and manual resolution.

nathanaldensr•about 2 hours ago

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.

doubled112•about 2 hours ago

Syncing between your own devices is still an easier problem to solve than syncing between different users. The database is just a file.

I use a self hosted Nextcloud, but you don't have to.

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.

elashri•about 3 hours ago

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.

542458•about 2 hours ago

As much as I hate the changes Bitwarden is making, I’m kinda with them on not adding official vaultwarden support. Having to support multiple backends (some of which you don’t control!) with your frontend makes everything massively more complicated.

alt227•about 2 hours ago

Its not about them having to support multiple 3rd party backends, its about them not making any hostile changes which actively block them.

rvz•about 3 hours ago

"Always free" was never sustainable for a password manager that took VC money and now needs growth at all costs [0].

Obviously 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

cicko•about 3 hours ago

Compared with KeePassXC and Syncthing, it is infinitely more expensive!

TurkTurkleton•about 3 hours ago

Oh yeah, I love having to manage sync conflicts in my password database because I was dumb enough to edit it on two separate computers that weren't both online at the same time.

sigio•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, my main reason to stay away from Keepass, everything is in a single versioned binary file. I like 'passwordstore.org', where every secret is it's own gpg-encrypted textfile in a git repo. Every change is a commit, easy to see history, easy to revert or know which version is newest. And easy to selfhost, you just need a place to git push/pull from.

rpdillon•about 2 hours ago

Works best if you have an always on client. Easy if you have a VPS or a home lab, even a small one, a nuisance if you don't.

BoredPositron•about 2 hours ago

Look at the CEOs other "ventures" he is a private equity squeeze guy.