6 ms·

I'm not referring to Bitwarden here but isn't this the standard M.O. of any SV startup? 1. Release great product for free 2. Attract as many free users as po

I'm not referring to Bitwarden here but isn't this the standard M.O. of any SV startup? 1. Release great product for free 2. Attract as many free users as possible to signal growth to investors 3. Keep running the unprofitable free tier at a loss as long as possible using your massive VC war chest, while locking in your users with various gotchas 4. Once you reach critical scale and gained mass user adoption and you've obliterated your competition with your bigger war chest, start monetizing and rentseeking your locked in userbase and squeezing them so the VC investors can start getting their money back or cross your fingers for an exit from a FAANG with big pockets 5. Gain a lot of negative publicity, so now a lot of startups pop up like mushrooms after rain, to poach your disgruntled users and compete with you using the exact same M.O. you did. Rinse and repeat. Did I miss anything?

sammorrowdrums 4y ago
4 also could add “try to avoid 5. by drawing up the regulatory ladder (such as YouTube becoming a bastion of large scale copyright enforcement)… so that it’s virtually impossible for startups to join the space.”
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Easiest way to do video copyright detection as a new video platform is to upload every video to Youtube and watch what it does.
elforce002 4y ago
This is frighteningly specific.
MaKleSoft 4y ago
You're absolutely right. Of course there is no guarantee that whatever alternative you seek won't turn out the exact same way. But unfortunately all you can do to punish that kind of behaviour is to vote with your wallet and move somewhere else. And hope it'll turn out better this time... There ARE people out there who are trying to build a profitable, ethical business instead of chasing unsustainable growth. Unfortunately the only way to find out who they are is by giving them a chance...
metadaemon 4y ago
Ah, the lifecycle of a company. I think of the first rounds of funding as a sort of puberty. Going public is the mid-life crisis, signaling the downward spiral towards inevitable death. Of course, being bought out is like God taking Enoch directly to heaven, where who knows what happens. Those large companies with unnatural lifespans have somehow tapped into the deep, dark magic of the Elder Ones (usually government contracts).
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Those large companies with unnatural lifespans have somehow tapped into the deep, dark magic of the Elder Ones (usually government contracts) Or, you're Apple, and your cloud hosts the digital lives of all your users from teenage years to adulthood, so they're not gonna switch to any competitor no matter what.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    Yeah This happens with google too. I have a friend who has so many business/personal docs (she's a writer) on google as well as gigabytes upon gigabytes of photos both for professional and her family. I have tried many times to go over on a weekend and help them degoogle at least their stuff after having seen reports on here of google just locking down accounts or deleting them wholesale (can't say i've seen that with apple? but it has to happen there as well) .
  - metadaemon 4y ago
    Akin to vampirism, I suppose.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    If you got to that position by just selling something customers want, then good on you.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Sure, good on you, but once you got that position, what's stopping you from monetizing your users by selling their personal data to advertisers? I don't understand why anyone would celebrate and worship monopolies? Publicly listed companies are not your friends. You're just a dollar sign for them.
kornhole 4y ago
The people at Bitwarden and their supporters are familiar with countless examples of this playbook. Those tricks are not as easy to pull anymore. I have seen Bitwarden be very ethical in their business so far. I recommend it to my friends and family and to my company to pay for the service. It is a similar model to Nextcloud who successfully funds their business from governments and companies and provides it free to individuals. This model can and does work well.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  ... this just happened to 1password less than a year ago... what 'anymore' are you talking about?
- nacs 4y ago
  The server and client-side apps/extensions for Bitwarden are open source unlike Lastpass too. At worst, we'll have to fork a current release if BW does stupid things in the future.
  - htrp 4y ago
    until they aren't open source anymore and once the FOSS forks are many features behind the product, then they adjust pricing
    - nacs 4y ago
      I switched to Bitwarden after using Lastpass for years and it's pretty feature-complete for me -- it has feature parity with LP and there's a bunch of features that I don't even use. Even the unofficial Rust-based server looks to have more features than I need: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/wiki https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/wiki
      - cronofdoom 4y ago
        I self-host the vaultwarden server on my homelab for my family. I love being able to use collections to share passwords with my spouse and the same for each of my kids. I got tired of Lastpass's janky clients, UI, and data breaches. Now I control the security of my passwords.
_verandaguy 4y ago
Full disclosure, I'm a paying user of Bitwarden. I think for BW this kind of falls apart at #3. The main draw of this product for me and many others is that it's actually pretty no-frills. It's also broadly compatible with importing and exporting between dozens of other password managers. That said, this could be a blind spot for me. Let me know if there's any gotchas I should know about here.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on Vaultwarden?
  - _verandaguy 4y ago
    I haven't used it, and last time I heard of it, it was still called bitwarden_rs. I like the project in principle since it capitalizes on BW's open API, and that's really good work in the spirit of open-source software. Having said that: I haven't dug into it much. I don't know what the current state of auditing on it is, or how widespread adoption is relative to the mainline BW backend. I hope they use a database backend other than BW's default MSSQL, which has always seemed like a weird choice to me coming from mostly Linux, and so mostly Postgres and Maria/MySQL, though I skew heavily developer over DBA, and that distinction may as well be personal preference (as in, I don't have an intelligent reason to dislike MSSQL beyond my habit of using other things).
- kornhole 4y ago
  The amount of data in a typical password vault is insignificantly small measured in kilobytes. Bitwarden cost structure is mostly fixed costs for the infrastructure with small variable costs. If a company was providing hosting of large data stores, supporting many free users would be more difficult.
- toqy 4y ago
  It is fairly no frills. But they're gonna have to add some frills if they want to use up that $100M
api 4y ago
This is bad but how else do you fund a serious software project? Polished well tested and supported software is massively expensive to produce yet we've conditioned the market to believe it should be "free," which means the only way to really do it is to do something like the above. If everyone expected a car to be free cars would be loaded with all kinds of convoluted bolted-on features to extract money from you: ads, special fuels that can only be produced by the maker, special licenses to drive on roads, special deals with repair shops, and so on. What you describe is actually one of the less shady ways of funding software. The more common, successful, and shady methods are surveillance capitalism, addictionware (most of mobile gaming), and cryptocurrency scams. If you structure the market such that honest business is difficult to impossible, things don't stop costing money. They just find less honest ways to make it.
- rvz 4y ago
  JetBrains has already done it for years. [0] Hundreds of millions in revenue. Profitable. Zero VC capital raised. [0] Supporting, sells and develops open-source software used by millions of developers worldwide. When I see capital raised, the treadmill for an expected return starts running and it is not for everyone. [0] https://twitter.com/chetanp/status/1205907182396395525 https://twitter.com/chetanp/status/1205907182396395525
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >JetBrains has already done it for years. JetBrains was also founded in Eastern Europe which probably helped a lot in getting off the ground with little money as there your dollars used to go way, way further than in the west and the local job opportunities were scarce. In the early 2000's an experienced SW dev in my corner of Eastern Europe was lucky to take home 300 USD and would not shy away form overtime as needed. Replicating the same thing in present day would be impossible as now no self respecting experienced dev here would get out of bed for less than 2k EUR take home pay and would absolutely do the bare minimum with zero overtime, or even work way less than the contracted working time. The 90's to early 2000's was a wild west in Eastern Europe. Few job opportunities, low wages and low CoL, plus fast internet in every home, meant that everyone was hustling hard in their free time to make a great SW product using no money at all to sell on the international market and get rich. Now things are different here. Plenty of great paying jobs at established western companies or startups means that the people here are more likely to just want to work at random big corp or new startup for good pay and WLB rather than put 50h+ workweeks in building their own product at home like their predecessors did. My point is that JetBrains was more of an exception by catching a great wave in time and space that can't be replicated today.

sammorrowdrums 4y ago

4 also could add “try to avoid 5. by drawing up the regulatory ladder (such as YouTube becoming a bastion of large scale copyright enforcement)… so that it’s virtually impossible for startups to join the space.”

robertlagrant 4y ago
Easiest way to do video copyright detection as a new video platform is to upload every video to Youtube and watch what it does.

elforce002 4y ago

This is frighteningly specific.

MaKleSoft 4y ago

You're absolutely right. Of course there is no guarantee that whatever alternative you seek won't turn out the exact same way. But unfortunately all you can do to punish that kind of behaviour is to vote with your wallet and move somewhere else. And hope it'll turn out better this time... There ARE people out there who are trying to build a profitable, ethical business instead of chasing unsustainable growth. Unfortunately the only way to find out who they are is by giving them a chance...

metadaemon 4y ago

Ah, the lifecycle of a company. I think of the first rounds of funding as a sort of puberty. Going public is the mid-life crisis, signaling the downward spiral towards inevitable death. Of course, being bought out is like God taking Enoch directly to heaven, where who knows what happens. Those large companies with unnatural lifespans have somehow tapped into the deep, dark magic of the Elder Ones (usually government contracts).

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Those large companies with unnatural lifespans have somehow tapped into the deep, dark magic of the Elder Ones (usually government contracts) Or, you're Apple, and your cloud hosts the digital lives of all your users from teenage years to adulthood, so they're not gonna switch to any competitor no matter what.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Yeah This happens with google too. I have a friend who has so many business/personal docs (she's a writer) on google as well as gigabytes upon gigabytes of photos both for professional and her family. I have tried many times to go over on a weekend and help them degoogle at least their stuff after having seen reports on here of google just locking down accounts or deleting them wholesale (can't say i've seen that with apple? but it has to happen there as well) .
- metadaemon 4y ago
  Akin to vampirism, I suppose.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  If you got to that position by just selling something customers want, then good on you.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Sure, good on you, but once you got that position, what's stopping you from monetizing your users by selling their personal data to advertisers? I don't understand why anyone would celebrate and worship monopolies? Publicly listed companies are not your friends. You're just a dollar sign for them.

kornhole 4y ago

The people at Bitwarden and their supporters are familiar with countless examples of this playbook. Those tricks are not as easy to pull anymore. I have seen Bitwarden be very ethical in their business so far. I recommend it to my friends and family and to my company to pay for the service. It is a similar model to Nextcloud who successfully funds their business from governments and companies and provides it free to individuals. This model can and does work well.

sleepybrett 4y ago
... this just happened to 1password less than a year ago... what 'anymore' are you talking about?
nacs 4y ago
The server and client-side apps/extensions for Bitwarden are open source unlike Lastpass too. At worst, we'll have to fork a current release if BW does stupid things in the future.
- htrp 4y ago
  until they aren't open source anymore and once the FOSS forks are many features behind the product, then they adjust pricing
  - nacs 4y ago
    I switched to Bitwarden after using Lastpass for years and it's pretty feature-complete for me -- it has feature parity with LP and there's a bunch of features that I don't even use. Even the unofficial Rust-based server looks to have more features than I need: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/wiki https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/wiki
    - cronofdoom 4y ago
      I self-host the vaultwarden server on my homelab for my family. I love being able to use collections to share passwords with my spouse and the same for each of my kids. I got tired of Lastpass's janky clients, UI, and data breaches. Now I control the security of my passwords.

_verandaguy 4y ago

Full disclosure, I'm a paying user of Bitwarden. I think for BW this kind of falls apart at #3. The main draw of this product for me and many others is that it's actually pretty no-frills. It's also broadly compatible with importing and exporting between dozens of other password managers. That said, this could be a blind spot for me. Let me know if there's any gotchas I should know about here.

candiddevmike 4y ago
Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on Vaultwarden?
- _verandaguy 4y ago
  I haven't used it, and last time I heard of it, it was still called bitwarden_rs. I like the project in principle since it capitalizes on BW's open API, and that's really good work in the spirit of open-source software. Having said that: I haven't dug into it much. I don't know what the current state of auditing on it is, or how widespread adoption is relative to the mainline BW backend. I hope they use a database backend other than BW's default MSSQL, which has always seemed like a weird choice to me coming from mostly Linux, and so mostly Postgres and Maria/MySQL, though I skew heavily developer over DBA, and that distinction may as well be personal preference (as in, I don't have an intelligent reason to dislike MSSQL beyond my habit of using other things).
kornhole 4y ago
The amount of data in a typical password vault is insignificantly small measured in kilobytes. Bitwarden cost structure is mostly fixed costs for the infrastructure with small variable costs. If a company was providing hosting of large data stores, supporting many free users would be more difficult.
toqy 4y ago
It is fairly no frills. But they're gonna have to add some frills if they want to use up that $100M

api 4y ago

This is bad but how else do you fund a serious software project? Polished well tested and supported software is massively expensive to produce yet we've conditioned the market to believe it should be "free," which means the only way to really do it is to do something like the above. If everyone expected a car to be free cars would be loaded with all kinds of convoluted bolted-on features to extract money from you: ads, special fuels that can only be produced by the maker, special licenses to drive on roads, special deals with repair shops, and so on. What you describe is actually one of the less shady ways of funding software. The more common, successful, and shady methods are surveillance capitalism, addictionware (most of mobile gaming), and cryptocurrency scams. If you structure the market such that honest business is difficult to impossible, things don't stop costing money. They just find less honest ways to make it.

rvz 4y ago
JetBrains has already done it for years. [0] Hundreds of millions in revenue. Profitable. Zero VC capital raised. [0] Supporting, sells and develops open-source software used by millions of developers worldwide. When I see capital raised, the treadmill for an expected return starts running and it is not for everyone. [0] https://twitter.com/chetanp/status/1205907182396395525 https://twitter.com/chetanp/status/1205907182396395525
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >JetBrains has already done it for years. JetBrains was also founded in Eastern Europe which probably helped a lot in getting off the ground with little money as there your dollars used to go way, way further than in the west and the local job opportunities were scarce. In the early 2000's an experienced SW dev in my corner of Eastern Europe was lucky to take home 300 USD and would not shy away form overtime as needed. Replicating the same thing in present day would be impossible as now no self respecting experienced dev here would get out of bed for less than 2k EUR take home pay and would absolutely do the bare minimum with zero overtime, or even work way less than the contracted working time. The 90's to early 2000's was a wild west in Eastern Europe. Few job opportunities, low wages and low CoL, plus fast internet in every home, meant that everyone was hustling hard in their free time to make a great SW product using no money at all to sell on the international market and get rich. Now things are different here. Plenty of great paying jobs at established western companies or startups means that the people here are more likely to just want to work at random big corp or new startup for good pay and WLB rather than put 50h+ workweeks in building their own product at home like their predecessors did. My point is that JetBrains was more of an exception by catching a great wave in time and space that can't be replicated today.