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FYI - Bitwarden took $100M in VC money last year. At some point, the pressure to aggressively monetize will unfortunately happen. https://techcrunch.com/2022/

FYI - Bitwarden took $100M in VC money last year. At some point, the pressure to aggressively monetize will unfortunately happen. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/open-source-password-manager-bitwarden-raises-100m/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/open-source-password-manag...

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
My take in life: whenever VC or PE investors take over, start moving away from that product and pronto.
- 22289d 3y ago
  The new CEO concerns me. I didn't know who the founder was but I always had the impression it was a lone hacker. They passed the baton. Now it's some old Web 1.0 guy who was the CEO of eFax in the 90's. That's not the type of service I thought I was using. I looked up their headquarters in Santa Barbara and it's a co-working space. That doesn't sound very secure. Though that could be their corp address and they're hiding where they work.
  - louthy 3y ago
    > The new CEO concerns me. I didn't know who the founder was but I always had the impression it was a lone hacker. They passed the baton. Now it's some old Web 1.0 guy who was the CEO of eFax in the 90's. This sounds like ageism to me. I don't know if this guy is any good or not, but calling out someone as a 'concern' just because they were successful in the past isn't a good look. Is there anything more substantive behind your concern?
    - oooyay 3y ago
      I've never heard "web 1.0 guy" as a pejorative, on top of what you said. For the curious, Michael Crandell is the CEO and he founded Right Scale in 2007 which exited in 2018 with 250 employees. He was EVP at eFax in the early aughts, which would have been somewhere in his twenties. He's a Stanford and Harvard graduate as well as a self-taught programmer in assembly. Here's an interview with him: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/michael-crandell-of-bitwarden-5-things-you-need-to-know-to-optimize-your-companys-approach-to-6844f97dd875 https://medium.com/authority-magazine/michael-crandell-of-bi... Kyle Spearrin is still at BitWarden and is listed as the Founder & CTO: https://bitwarden.com/about/ https://bitwarden.com/about/ It looks like he lives in Jacksonville, FL and has a lot of hobbies. Maybe this is some internalization, but thinking about another engineer referring to me, pejoratively, as a "web 1.0 engineer" would probably leave me confused. Am I supposed to be ashamed I played in the early days of the web?
      - mananaysiempre 3y ago
        > he founded Right Scale in 2007 which exited in 2018 with 250 employees. A strong negative signal as far as I am concerned. For a consumer-oriented software startup, an “exit” is most of the time a polite euphemism for selling the userbase to a juicing machine of some sort; the second place is taken by selling the product to an enterprise-oriented business which doesn’t want the userbase and eventually will, with more or less grace, show them the door. Therefore, when I see a consumer-oriented, VC-funded startup, I don’t see why I should consider trusting them for even a second. Dine on the free lunch while it lasts, yes; squirrel away every bit of software they’re willing to release, yes; trust, depend on, or invest even a tiniest bit of my time, no.
        oooyay 3y ago
        Right Scale was a cost management platform; this is the product now: https://www.flexera.com/products/cloud-management-platform https://www.flexera.com/products/cloud-management-platform. I don't think I'd refer to it as consumer oriented. The exit seems to be motivated by an industry shift to containers, which building cost models for is a significantly different business: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/09/26/flexera-acquires-rightscale-the-multi-cloud-management-platform-company/?sh=552078835433 https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/09/26/flexera... Based on the interview I linked BitWarden is going down a venture of trying to offer vault-like enterprise secrets management on top of BitWardens tech, which could mean they're trying to monetize the more enterprise side of their business.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        I’m with you on all that. Web 1.0… so he has a fundamental understanding of how the Internet works? And was successful before blockchain nonsense came around? Sounds like good qualifications to me.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - 22289d 3y ago
    - 22289d 3y ago
      I like my software written by nerds, not business guys from the dotcom era. You can try to poke holes in that with whatever isms you want, it's still true. And I'm not alone.
      - nativeit 3y ago
        It’s a good thing you’re practicing what you preach and not pigeon holing anyone then.
  - xxkylexx 3y ago
    The "new" CEO has been at the helm since 2019. Long before the mentioned funding in 2022. We don't really have a HQ since we are a 100% remote company. Source: I am the Bitwarden founder.
    - junon 3y ago
      Can you maybe touch a bit on the intended relationship between you and the VC? Are there plans to do aggressive monetization of Bitwarden? As a long time user, I'm a bit concerned as well.
      - xxkylexx 3y ago
        Bitwarden has had VC investors for years, long before the mentioned 2022 funding. I think our track record to date shows how we operate in this relationship. We specifically choose partners that align with our vision, not just anyone that comes off the street wanting to throw money at us (though there are many). Our health as a company afford us this luxury. Bitwarden is and has been monetized since the beginning. There are no plans to change how we monetize our products. It's working well for us.
        junon 3y ago
        Thanks, then this all seems to be much ado about nothing. Cheers!
        sleepybrett 3y ago
        that or check back in a year when the founder will say, "... the realaties of the market..."
        nativeit 3y ago
        You could ask them, you’re replying to the founder right now, after all.
- monlockandkey 3y ago
  Hopefully VC never ever touch Hackernews... :)
  - unixhero 3y ago
    Oh sure yes they are indeed here.
    - capableweb 3y ago
      Fairly sure that was meant tongue in cheek, as HN is literally run by a VC firm for all intents and purposes. Moderators seems to do a pretty well done making it impartial, but worth keeping in mind that Y Combinator ultimately run this website.
      - unixhero 3y ago
        Who should keep that in mind?
  - rootsudo 3y ago
    :) :o :(
  - uoaei 3y ago
    Hacker News is essentially a marketing and legitimization arm of a VC firm. The community around it is the value. They know what happens if they try to change it.
    - crossroadsguy 3y ago
      > They know what happens if they try to change it. Nothing. Nothing of consequence; either way. You know, maybe that’s why?
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    https://media.tenor.com/_ggy1Lk730kAAAAd/laughing-sad.gif https://media.tenor.com/_ggy1Lk730kAAAAd/laughing-sad.gif
- shanusmagnus 3y ago
  I used to think this kind of talk was bullshit grandpa paranoia. Sadly, I now agree with it 100%.
ploum 3y ago
Wow, thanks for the info. This is indeed quite a huge sum of money for such a cheap service from which you can easily migrate. That’s a bit worrying.
- rmdes 3y ago
  should OSS users of Vaultwarden be worried?
  - 1una 3y ago
    Maybe. Vaultwarden is just a compatible server. All the clients (web, browser extension, desktop, cli and mobile apps) are still maintained by Bitwarden.
    - kioleanu 3y ago
      Since the extensions themselves are still open source and very stable, they will probably be forked
  - e12e 3y ago
    Please note that bitwarden server is floss too - vaultwarden is just a simpler backend to self-host (and without a dependency on Microsoft SQL server): https://github.com/bitwarden/server https://github.com/bitwarden/server https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
- bradfa 3y ago
  It depends. If the point of the VC money is to go after enterprise customers and to expand into other enterprisey software security products, then $100M seems reasonable to me, especially for the time when the investment happened. The VC market seems to have cooled quite a bit from when Bitwarden took that investment, so times change and maybe they were just striking while the iron was hot? The $10/year individual plan wouldn't warrant $100M investment. But going after big companies who are going to commit to $X/year/employee or similar kinds of pricing packages might, especially if Bitwarden integrates with existing corporate directory systems and such for delegating and managing accounts.
drumhead 3y ago
The potential enshitification from this worries me. What crazy stroke will they feel they have to pull on users to satisfy the VCs need for a quick cash out.
Try1275 3y ago
What are they doing with this kind money? Venture out into other topics like Proton with Protonpass and Protondrive?
- dboreham 3y ago
  New yachts?
poisonborz 3y ago
We would need a Vaultwarden-like project for the clients as well to have an OS fork. https://github.com/bitwarden/clients https://github.com/bitwarden/clients
- e12e 3y ago
  I'm not sure I follow - both the server and clients (with exception of one web app) is FOSS already? AGPL/GPL 3?
  - poisonborz 3y ago
    For now. It would be great if the client part would have a fork with an OS maintainer as well, who merges upstream changes but would also add features the corporate entity wouldn't want to do do. Vaultwarden is much much easier to selfhost for example.
mogoh 3y ago
You are right, but I think it is relatively easy to just export Bitwarden data and import it to KeePassXC if it will be necessary.
- lucideer 3y ago
  What would the benefit of doing that over continuing to use Bitwarden (or a fork of it) with a self-hosted backend? Surely this is the inherent benefit of using open source?
Rapzid 3y ago
Welll.. Crap. And I just moved off LastPass within the past year :| I even pay for Bitwarden and it's been great with its back-to-basics UI that just works, and not crushing page load performance with the Chrome plugin.. But 100M is a huge sum and we saw how this turns out.
dabeeeenster 3y ago
As someone who much prefers bootstrapping businesses, this seems like a just insane amount of money to raise. If you had a growing popular product like this, why on earth would you raise that amount of money? This isn't a rhetorical question btw! I would honestly like to know the rationale here?!
- taneq 3y ago
  I guess a lot of people have a hard time saying no when offered a hundred million dollars.
- tycho-newman 3y ago
  You mostly take VC money when you can’t get credit from ordinary lenders, and your product hasn’t generated a profit.
kpdemetriou 3y ago
The typical trajectory of VC-backed companies is one of the things that led us to develop Backbone[1]. We've opted to forego VC funding and the short-term benefits in entails to build the long-term foundational infrastructure for end-to-end encryption. Another concerning realization is how sparingly encryption is used in (many) modern password managers. Sure, it makes search easier but it also leaks secrets stored in metadata fields without any disclosure to the user. And this is in the single-user setting! There are vastly more security considerations as soon as a common "workspace" is involved. [1] https://backbone.dev/ https://backbone.dev/
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  FWIW that crypto effect on headings prevents quick visual scanning/parsing of the page and is mildly inconvenient.
andersa 3y ago
What could a password managing service possibly need this amount of money for - or worse - what could they possibly plan to be doing with it to convince the VC that they will get even more money back from this deal?
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  1password is going enterprise.
- midnitewarrior 3y ago
  They are adding new products like an enterprise Secrets Manager for deployed applications.
- vdfs 3y ago
  Security, They need a lot of security personnel to guard data
johnchristopher 3y ago
The flack bitwarden takes in almost every submission about how they are tainted because of VC investments is getting boring.
- belthesar 3y ago
  I can understand your position, but there's more than a few of us that have watched some of our favorite products pursue new verticals for the sake of making more money, losing focus on what made them great in the first place, and ultimately dying, forcing us to pivot to some replacement that is better not because its made some revolutionary improvement to the problem space, but because it's less distracted. All that to say, every time you hear someone talking about this, it's not because they want to talk crap about Bitwarden, it's because they are afraid of getting too sucked into yet another product that works well, only to have to leave when the company's leadership loses focus. Largely because they received pressure from investors trying to 10x their investment in the short term when they could have received sustainable dividends over time.
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    That's a slippery slope argument though. I am happy for the people you describe that they found a support group in HN comments for the impending demise of bitwarden but it's still just noise and doesn't nurture interesting conversations. Like the recurring "this webapp requires javascript", "signal is centralized", etc. It's becoming memes.
computershit 3y ago
They have been monetized for awhile now while their open source offering has been supported.
StevePerkins 3y ago
FYI - Your two primary alternatives are LastPass and 1Password. The former of which is melting down due to security flaws, and the latter has raised roughly $1B in VC money: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/1password-series-c-funding/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/1password-series-c-funding... At a certain point, you just have to live your life. To accept that products you use might change in the future, and you might need to migrate to something else down the road. The alternative is just keep something like KeePass around on a thumb drive, and forgo all the cloud sync, and browser and native app autocomplete integration. But those things are really the main point to all these products. Without that, I would argue that you're better off with a pad of paper in your desk drawer.
- mptest 3y ago
  I've found ProtonPass to be useful. Depending on how you feel about the proton ecosystem. I don't know how much VC money they've taken though.
  - tristan957 3y ago
    I use Proton for everything, but until they have a ProtonPass CLI, it is a non-starter for me. I want CLI access for my terminal email client.
  - protonmail 3y ago
    If you look at the total financial means Proton has spent to develop and grow, >98% came from the community, making VC funding less than 2%. In fact, the total amount of VC money is actually even less than the money we have given away in various donations (you can learn more about those here: https://proton.me/blog/2022-lifetime-fundraiser-results https://proton.me/blog/2022-lifetime-fundraiser-results).
    - mptest 3y ago
      Holy crap! Never been so excited at a corporate account reply! Love your products. Love your philosophy. Great to know about limited VC funding! Thanks for the info. Now I can add Non Vc Funded TM to my list of endorsements for your services.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
I hope to be moved over to passkeys before the password manager enshitification begins in earnest. https://passkeys.directory/ https://passkeys.directory/
lamnk 3y ago
Wow, I wasn't aware of this. With such amount of money raised, I would expect a more polished app/frontend. Their core open-source product as a password manager is solid, but the UX/UI could definitely use some improvement.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

My take in life: whenever VC or PE investors take over, start moving away from that product and pronto.

22289d 3y ago
The new CEO concerns me. I didn't know who the founder was but I always had the impression it was a lone hacker. They passed the baton. Now it's some old Web 1.0 guy who was the CEO of eFax in the 90's. That's not the type of service I thought I was using. I looked up their headquarters in Santa Barbara and it's a co-working space. That doesn't sound very secure. Though that could be their corp address and they're hiding where they work.
- louthy 3y ago
  > The new CEO concerns me. I didn't know who the founder was but I always had the impression it was a lone hacker. They passed the baton. Now it's some old Web 1.0 guy who was the CEO of eFax in the 90's. This sounds like ageism to me. I don't know if this guy is any good or not, but calling out someone as a 'concern' just because they were successful in the past isn't a good look. Is there anything more substantive behind your concern?
  - oooyay 3y ago
    I've never heard "web 1.0 guy" as a pejorative, on top of what you said. For the curious, Michael Crandell is the CEO and he founded Right Scale in 2007 which exited in 2018 with 250 employees. He was EVP at eFax in the early aughts, which would have been somewhere in his twenties. He's a Stanford and Harvard graduate as well as a self-taught programmer in assembly. Here's an interview with him: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/michael-crandell-of-bitwarden-5-things-you-need-to-know-to-optimize-your-companys-approach-to-6844f97dd875 https://medium.com/authority-magazine/michael-crandell-of-bi... Kyle Spearrin is still at BitWarden and is listed as the Founder & CTO: https://bitwarden.com/about/ https://bitwarden.com/about/ It looks like he lives in Jacksonville, FL and has a lot of hobbies. Maybe this is some internalization, but thinking about another engineer referring to me, pejoratively, as a "web 1.0 engineer" would probably leave me confused. Am I supposed to be ashamed I played in the early days of the web?
    - mananaysiempre 3y ago
      > he founded Right Scale in 2007 which exited in 2018 with 250 employees. A strong negative signal as far as I am concerned. For a consumer-oriented software startup, an “exit” is most of the time a polite euphemism for selling the userbase to a juicing machine of some sort; the second place is taken by selling the product to an enterprise-oriented business which doesn’t want the userbase and eventually will, with more or less grace, show them the door. Therefore, when I see a consumer-oriented, VC-funded startup, I don’t see why I should consider trusting them for even a second. Dine on the free lunch while it lasts, yes; squirrel away every bit of software they’re willing to release, yes; trust, depend on, or invest even a tiniest bit of my time, no.
      - oooyay 3y ago
        Right Scale was a cost management platform; this is the product now: https://www.flexera.com/products/cloud-management-platform https://www.flexera.com/products/cloud-management-platform. I don't think I'd refer to it as consumer oriented. The exit seems to be motivated by an industry shift to containers, which building cost models for is a significantly different business: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/09/26/flexera-acquires-rightscale-the-multi-cloud-management-platform-company/?sh=552078835433 https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/09/26/flexera... Based on the interview I linked BitWarden is going down a venture of trying to offer vault-like enterprise secrets management on top of BitWardens tech, which could mean they're trying to monetize the more enterprise side of their business.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      I’m with you on all that. Web 1.0… so he has a fundamental understanding of how the Internet works? And was successful before blockchain nonsense came around? Sounds like good qualifications to me.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - 22289d 3y ago
  - 22289d 3y ago
    I like my software written by nerds, not business guys from the dotcom era. You can try to poke holes in that with whatever isms you want, it's still true. And I'm not alone.
    - nativeit 3y ago
      It’s a good thing you’re practicing what you preach and not pigeon holing anyone then.
- xxkylexx 3y ago
  The "new" CEO has been at the helm since 2019. Long before the mentioned funding in 2022. We don't really have a HQ since we are a 100% remote company. Source: I am the Bitwarden founder.
  - junon 3y ago
    Can you maybe touch a bit on the intended relationship between you and the VC? Are there plans to do aggressive monetization of Bitwarden? As a long time user, I'm a bit concerned as well.
    - xxkylexx 3y ago
      Bitwarden has had VC investors for years, long before the mentioned 2022 funding. I think our track record to date shows how we operate in this relationship. We specifically choose partners that align with our vision, not just anyone that comes off the street wanting to throw money at us (though there are many). Our health as a company afford us this luxury. Bitwarden is and has been monetized since the beginning. There are no plans to change how we monetize our products. It's working well for us.
      - junon 3y ago
        Thanks, then this all seems to be much ado about nothing. Cheers!
        sleepybrett 3y ago
        that or check back in a year when the founder will say, "... the realaties of the market..."
        nativeit 3y ago
        You could ask them, you’re replying to the founder right now, after all.
monlockandkey 3y ago
Hopefully VC never ever touch Hackernews... :)
- unixhero 3y ago
  Oh sure yes they are indeed here.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    Fairly sure that was meant tongue in cheek, as HN is literally run by a VC firm for all intents and purposes. Moderators seems to do a pretty well done making it impartial, but worth keeping in mind that Y Combinator ultimately run this website.
    - unixhero 3y ago
      Who should keep that in mind?
- rootsudo 3y ago
  :) :o :(
- uoaei 3y ago
  Hacker News is essentially a marketing and legitimization arm of a VC firm. The community around it is the value. They know what happens if they try to change it.
  - crossroadsguy 3y ago
    > They know what happens if they try to change it. Nothing. Nothing of consequence; either way. You know, maybe that’s why?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  https://media.tenor.com/_ggy1Lk730kAAAAd/laughing-sad.gif https://media.tenor.com/_ggy1Lk730kAAAAd/laughing-sad.gif
shanusmagnus 3y ago
I used to think this kind of talk was bullshit grandpa paranoia. Sadly, I now agree with it 100%.

ploum 3y ago

Wow, thanks for the info. This is indeed quite a huge sum of money for such a cheap service from which you can easily migrate. That’s a bit worrying.

rmdes 3y ago
should OSS users of Vaultwarden be worried?
- 1una 3y ago
  Maybe. Vaultwarden is just a compatible server. All the clients (web, browser extension, desktop, cli and mobile apps) are still maintained by Bitwarden.
  - kioleanu 3y ago
    Since the extensions themselves are still open source and very stable, they will probably be forked
- e12e 3y ago
  Please note that bitwarden server is floss too - vaultwarden is just a simpler backend to self-host (and without a dependency on Microsoft SQL server): https://github.com/bitwarden/server https://github.com/bitwarden/server https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
bradfa 3y ago
It depends. If the point of the VC money is to go after enterprise customers and to expand into other enterprisey software security products, then $100M seems reasonable to me, especially for the time when the investment happened. The VC market seems to have cooled quite a bit from when Bitwarden took that investment, so times change and maybe they were just striking while the iron was hot? The $10/year individual plan wouldn't warrant $100M investment. But going after big companies who are going to commit to $X/year/employee or similar kinds of pricing packages might, especially if Bitwarden integrates with existing corporate directory systems and such for delegating and managing accounts.

drumhead 3y ago

The potential enshitification from this worries me. What crazy stroke will they feel they have to pull on users to satisfy the VCs need for a quick cash out.

Try1275 3y ago

What are they doing with this kind money? Venture out into other topics like Proton with Protonpass and Protondrive?

dboreham 3y ago
New yachts?

poisonborz 3y ago

We would need a Vaultwarden-like project for the clients as well to have an OS fork. https://github.com/bitwarden/clients https://github.com/bitwarden/clients

e12e 3y ago
I'm not sure I follow - both the server and clients (with exception of one web app) is FOSS already? AGPL/GPL 3?
- poisonborz 3y ago
  For now. It would be great if the client part would have a fork with an OS maintainer as well, who merges upstream changes but would also add features the corporate entity wouldn't want to do do. Vaultwarden is much much easier to selfhost for example.

mogoh 3y ago

You are right, but I think it is relatively easy to just export Bitwarden data and import it to KeePassXC if it will be necessary.

lucideer 3y ago
What would the benefit of doing that over continuing to use Bitwarden (or a fork of it) with a self-hosted backend? Surely this is the inherent benefit of using open source?

Rapzid 3y ago

Welll.. Crap. And I just moved off LastPass within the past year :| I even pay for Bitwarden and it's been great with its back-to-basics UI that just works, and not crushing page load performance with the Chrome plugin.. But 100M is a huge sum and we saw how this turns out.

dabeeeenster 3y ago

As someone who much prefers bootstrapping businesses, this seems like a just insane amount of money to raise. If you had a growing popular product like this, why on earth would you raise that amount of money? This isn't a rhetorical question btw! I would honestly like to know the rationale here?!

taneq 3y ago
I guess a lot of people have a hard time saying no when offered a hundred million dollars.
tycho-newman 3y ago
You mostly take VC money when you can’t get credit from ordinary lenders, and your product hasn’t generated a profit.

kpdemetriou 3y ago

The typical trajectory of VC-backed companies is one of the things that led us to develop Backbone[1]. We've opted to forego VC funding and the short-term benefits in entails to build the long-term foundational infrastructure for end-to-end encryption. Another concerning realization is how sparingly encryption is used in (many) modern password managers. Sure, it makes search easier but it also leaks secrets stored in metadata fields without any disclosure to the user. And this is in the single-user setting! There are vastly more security considerations as soon as a common "workspace" is involved. [1] https://backbone.dev/ https://backbone.dev/

johnchristopher 3y ago
FWIW that crypto effect on headings prevents quick visual scanning/parsing of the page and is mildly inconvenient.

andersa 3y ago

What could a password managing service possibly need this amount of money for - or worse - what could they possibly plan to be doing with it to convince the VC that they will get even more money back from this deal?

sleepybrett 3y ago
1password is going enterprise.
midnitewarrior 3y ago
They are adding new products like an enterprise Secrets Manager for deployed applications.
vdfs 3y ago
Security, They need a lot of security personnel to guard data

johnchristopher 3y ago

The flack bitwarden takes in almost every submission about how they are tainted because of VC investments is getting boring.

belthesar 3y ago
I can understand your position, but there's more than a few of us that have watched some of our favorite products pursue new verticals for the sake of making more money, losing focus on what made them great in the first place, and ultimately dying, forcing us to pivot to some replacement that is better not because its made some revolutionary improvement to the problem space, but because it's less distracted. All that to say, every time you hear someone talking about this, it's not because they want to talk crap about Bitwarden, it's because they are afraid of getting too sucked into yet another product that works well, only to have to leave when the company's leadership loses focus. Largely because they received pressure from investors trying to 10x their investment in the short term when they could have received sustainable dividends over time.
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  That's a slippery slope argument though. I am happy for the people you describe that they found a support group in HN comments for the impending demise of bitwarden but it's still just noise and doesn't nurture interesting conversations. Like the recurring "this webapp requires javascript", "signal is centralized", etc. It's becoming memes.

computershit 3y ago

They have been monetized for awhile now while their open source offering has been supported.

StevePerkins 3y ago

FYI - Your two primary alternatives are LastPass and 1Password. The former of which is melting down due to security flaws, and the latter has raised roughly $1B in VC money: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/1password-series-c-funding/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/1password-series-c-funding... At a certain point, you just have to live your life. To accept that products you use might change in the future, and you might need to migrate to something else down the road. The alternative is just keep something like KeePass around on a thumb drive, and forgo all the cloud sync, and browser and native app autocomplete integration. But those things are really the main point to all these products. Without that, I would argue that you're better off with a pad of paper in your desk drawer.

mptest 3y ago
I've found ProtonPass to be useful. Depending on how you feel about the proton ecosystem. I don't know how much VC money they've taken though.
- tristan957 3y ago
  I use Proton for everything, but until they have a ProtonPass CLI, it is a non-starter for me. I want CLI access for my terminal email client.
- protonmail 3y ago
  If you look at the total financial means Proton has spent to develop and grow, >98% came from the community, making VC funding less than 2%. In fact, the total amount of VC money is actually even less than the money we have given away in various donations (you can learn more about those here: https://proton.me/blog/2022-lifetime-fundraiser-results https://proton.me/blog/2022-lifetime-fundraiser-results).
  - mptest 3y ago
    Holy crap! Never been so excited at a corporate account reply! Love your products. Love your philosophy. Great to know about limited VC funding! Thanks for the info. Now I can add Non Vc Funded TM to my list of endorsements for your services.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

I hope to be moved over to passkeys before the password manager enshitification begins in earnest. https://passkeys.directory/ https://passkeys.directory/

lamnk 3y ago

Wow, I wasn't aware of this. With such amount of money raised, I would expect a more polished app/frontend. Their core open-source product as a password manager is solid, but the UX/UI could definitely use some improvement.