10 ms·

Ah for fuck's sake. It keeps happening to all the software I love. I guess I'll have to stop relying on convenience (I was a 1Password user years ago) and go 10

• attentive 4y ago
  keypassxc
• lumb63 4y ago
  I use KeePass. It’s up to you to sync passwords and they’re stored locally. I see those as features despite that they’re inconvenient.
  • qwerpy 4y ago
    I use cloud storage to store the kdbx file and sync it across a PC and my phone. It’s pretty awesome 99% of the time and just works. Once in a while you get a merge conflict and it’s not so good.
    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
      Even merge conflicts have been a lot better for me in recent years. My only worry with KeePass is that I have to rely on potentially sketchy client applications but I'm also fortunate enough to have the skills to make my own if I really felt the need. It's one of the few "not-my-solution" pieces of software which continually gives me a sense of data ownership.
    • lumb63 4y ago
      I run an SSH server on my laptop and SFTP it to my phone via Strongbox when I’m local.
  • noirscape 4y ago
    Another advantage to KeePass is that there's about half a million clients and most are actually written to be used for their platforms. Lots of more "modern" password managers (as well as generally other software) kinda suffer from having this weird mixed mobile and desktop interface, inheriting all the downsides of each interface while gaining the advantages of neither. (Not to mention all the issues with porting stuff between two different OSes; Mac and Windows have completely different ideas on what an interface should look like.) KeePass's official client being windows-only is a blessing in disguise since it means that each client developer can specifically focus on making it look good on whatever specific platform they're targeting.
  • jimt1234 4y ago
    I love Bitwarden. I've been a customer for years. Great product. Great team. However, I recently quit for this exact reason (evil VC influence), and migrated all of my secrets to KeePass. Yes, a slight inconvenience to manually sync across devices, but I sleep better at night knowing my secrets are no longer in the hands of some VC suit.
• worble 4y ago
  KeepassXC has served me well for many years, synced via my Nextcloud but could just as easily use dropbox or icloud, or even syncthing.
  • forsakenharmony 4y ago
    syncthing works really well imo, can also tell it to keep 3 versions as a backup
    • vetinari 4y ago
      I had conflicts that needed manual intervention too often. It is not something that most users would put up with.
  • 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    Upvote for keepassxc. I've been using it and its predecessor with the same database file for something like 15 years and have seen many of these services come and go in the meantime. It will outlive Bitwarden for sure.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I use KeepassXC and Strongbox.
  • kornhole 4y ago
    Yes KeepassXC is great. Nextcloud passwords is actively developed and looking good except for the Linux app failing on Arch.
• yoavm 4y ago
  As mentioned in other comments, BitWarden has both OSS client and server implementations. You can keep using it and if something goes wrong (or earlier, if you wish) you can always run it yourself.
• weaksauce 4y ago
  bitwarden is opensource. you can self host. the apps in the store are compatible with the self hosted options just change the url to your server. you can also fork any of the projects and build it yourself if you don't trust them.
• ok_dad 4y ago
  > Ah for fuck's sake. I agree, and I wish we had more power in these things than just forking. Now that I know Bitwarden took VC money, I'm also fucking out of this mess, and here I was about to renew for the 5th year in a row. Fuck VC's, they ruin everything good. Can I say that here? It's true.
  • secabeen 4y ago
    The entire finance industry has a disdain for "lifestyle businesses", that just generate enough profits for the founders and employees to live on, but will never generate an exit beyond that. I get why, but for utility products, a solid lifestyle for the employees and a useful product for users is enough, and should be enough.
    • jrochkind1 4y ago
      And can be enough if you don't need large quantities of investment capital. If you don't _need_ it, but _want_ it to get fabulously wealthy... well, "lifestyle business" is not the path to that, by definition. It's almost like the interests of those who want to get fabulously wealthy -- whether founders or investors -- become misaligned with the interests of the users, even steeper/faster than when you "just" have a "lifestyle business".
      • jjeaff 4y ago
        The thing is, founders can get fabulously wealthy with a lifestyle business or at least very wealthy, but it might take longer. But all the established money seeking rent parked at VC firms can't get a cut if you don't play ball with them.
        • sirsinsalot 4y ago
          Millions, even tens of millions, for founders isn't unheard of at all for small "lifestyle" businesses. Not VC billions, but fuck you money is certainly doable.
• trinsic2 4y ago
  Yeah, the very reason I'll stick with keepass.
• kdmccormick 4y ago
  If a simple git-based CLI solution is appealing to you, then try https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/. I wouldn't recommend it someone non-technical, but personally, I've never looked back. There are iOS and Android clients, too. Not especially polished, but they do the job.
  • jmcphers 4y ago
    Love passwordstore, been using it for almost 6 years with zero issues while watching my friends run frantically from one compromised or greedy password manager to another.
• Y_Y 4y ago
  I haven't seen, but would love to, a tech startup that is guaranteed not to sell out. I don't mean a promise from the founder on a blog, but a legal structure. I'm not sure what what form this would take or if it's such anathema that it could never be but it would be great to see. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's tired of the bait-amd-switch of companies who are all about freedom until they get acquired by a giant and then start hastily walling their garden.
  • aaronax 4y ago
    Cooperative Customers are members/owners. Examples: Tessitura, NISC
    • Y_Y 4y ago
      Someone posted this list of such co-ops recently: https://tech-coops.xyz/ https://tech-coops.xyz/ Is it true that they couldn't sell out though? I imagine if the buyer offered a pile of money then the majority of the owner-workers would go for it, even at the expense of the users.
      • aaronax 4y ago
        Interesting how your list focuses on worker-owned cooperatives. I had mostly thought about customer-owned cooperatives up until this point. Most of my exposure is with customer-owned ones, perhaps due to living in an agricultural area (grain elevator co-ops, fuel co-ops, rural electric co-ops, rural broadband co-ops). And working for one! I think that a worker-owned cooperative is not really in line with what I would consider to be the traditional cooperative spirit. Customer-owned has a clear mission to deliver value to its owners. That value would be to provide various services essentially at cost. Workers are paid market rate to get the work done. Profits are given back to the owners (customers). Worker-owned also has the mission to deliver value to the owners. The workers are going to value making as much money as possible, though being careful to not go past the point where they would find themselves without a job. So this type of co-op will be trying to extract maximum value out of the customer. This is a significantly different proposition. This type of co-op seems more like a company with an ESOP. I could see either type choosing to sell out. I guess either the workers or customers would think they have better places to invest the capital. So I guess co-ops too have up and down lifecycles like a standard company. As the co-op becomes ineffective or no longer needed, the capital invested in it would be re-deployed.
• dcow 4y ago
  In your opinion, what would the ideal password management business model be? A non-profit like Signal? (Not rhetorical, actually curious what people want here.) As a thought experiment, let's say there are 1000 people who get annoyed when a software product they use takes VC funding. For those 1000 people to sustain a software product with a team of 5 for 10 years at 150k average per head. you'd need 7.5MM dollars just to break even. That's $7,500 per user, or $750 per year. I doubt many people would be willing to pay that just to have a product that never takes VC funding. And note that's just to cover labor costs. If you want it audited, that's a solid 25k per audit. Operating costs for website and infrastructure, etc. Now if the product was exceptional and beat out other products in the space and generally had a slice of the pie, the number of users would increase and per user cost would decrease. But also doing as much with a team of 5 is no small feat.
  • aceazzameen 4y ago
    I'm not sure if there is a good business model in password management. I can't answer that question. What I do know is, a good password manager is the type of software that should strive to be feature complete. And at that point resources should be used for maintenance, security, and software/OS compatibility updates. In other words, a low-if-any growth, but profitable business assuming the software is good. But once you get into VC funding or acquisitions, businesses tend to want to grow and bloat their products by adding features no one asked for to increase their perceived value. I know I'm tired of seeing this happen to beloved software time and time again.
    • dcow 4y ago
      Perhaps then software utilities are better suited for a crowd funding model?
  • vanilla_nut 4y ago
    Non-profit like Signal that sells cloud hosting to pay the bills, standard protocol with self-hosting option for the server like email/browsers agreed upon decades ago, anyone can create an interoperable desktop/browser/mobile client. Fully encrypted such that even the non-profit doesn't have the decryption keys. That being said: it's unclear if anyone really understands how to build an open source product with cloud hosting covering the bills. Almost everyone either makes a deal with the devil (VC funding) or upsells too aggressively anyway. Cloud storage and CPU usage is basically negligible per-user for a password manager. I imagine you could service hundreds of millions of users on just a couple of capable machines, similar to HN's setup. Even with hundreds of passwords, most users total mere MB's of usage -- it's even simpler than email! I think this is one of the rare cases where corporate users can pay for big accounts with special sharing features and completely subsidize a free product for individual users. Or you could charge individual users $5 a year to cover cloud costs (more than enough), with self-hosting as an option for highly technical users to save a buck.
• crossroadsguy 4y ago
  I have accepted that one has to keep moving around. Password manager, backup software, it goes on. Right now I am hunting for a non-subscription note taking setup that will replace SimpleNote. So I’ll move to the next option from BW, just like I moved to it from LP.