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 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.

This is very sad.

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.

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.

Why projects get destroyed just after I migrate to them?. Guess I'll have to go back to kepass.

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!

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.

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 ...

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

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.

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.

Private equity ruins housing.

They also ruin software.

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.

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 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.

I guess it is time ... (sigh)

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.

Just use KeePass.

"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