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Pricing is truly annoying with password managers. I know this is an edge case but I volunteered for my kid’s school PTA and discovered to my horror that all the

Pricing is truly annoying with password managers. I know this is an edge case but I volunteered for my kid’s school PTA and discovered to my horror that all the passwords were stored in a single Google Sheet. But the pricing for the number of users we were looking at (a very small core number of staff but a large number of volunteer parents) made pretty much every password manager service unaffordable, even with non profit discounts. Per seat pricing doesn’t work out for everyone. We ended up using Dashlane because its free tier allows sharing between users but the administration is so much more work than it needs to be.

coder543 2y ago
I know very little about PTAs, but... why would a PTA need to share passwords anyways, instead of having separate logins?
- afavour 2y ago
  Immediate example that comes to mind: there’s a paid-for Canva account that multiple people need to use. Can’t use separate logins because then you’d need multiple subscriptions.
  - woleium 2y ago
    This is in breach of the tos though, right? Great example to set for the kids.
    - afavour 2y ago
      Pretty sure the kids aren’t aware of the PTA’s use of Canva.
    - bzmrgonz 2y ago
      Moral argument is that a PTA are part time organizations and if canva doesn't cater to that business model, then shared credentials is fair use, commercial and for profit use is a horse of a different color.
forty 2y ago
Hi! could you please explain what is this admin work that is bothering you? Thanks! (working at Dashlane, and happy to forward feedback to product team. I'll already forward your comment on pricing)
- afavour 2y ago
  It’s not really your fault, it’s us bending your free tier into something it isn’t intended to be. Maximum number of passwords shared, only logging in to one device at a time etc. It’s a really weird edge case but eye opening for me as someone who is usually in a very well resourced tech environment. Google offers a great free tier for non profits and in the ideal world we’d have a password manager that plugs into our Google organization without a second thought. But that’s a premium tier feature and any money not spent on enriching the kids education has to be justified to the nth degree. We have people who are go-tos for a two factor auth code because their phone numbers are the ones attached to the accounts… people will go to surprising lengths! There isn’t a good business case for it as such but volunteer organizations (as opposed to well resourced non profits) would make good use of a free tier and it would generate goodwill with people who are sometimes responsible for purchasing decisions in their day jobs.
  - woleium 2y ago
    You could self-host bitwarden on a $5 a month instance (or free-forever, if you choose to trust oracle or gcp), and then put TOTP 2fa into your bitwarden instance. Still requires a little maintenance on the instance, but this can be 99% automated.
    - afavour 2y ago
      Yeah, the thought has occurred to me. But I’m only going to be there for a few years, the responsible thing is to do something that’ll survive long after I’m gone.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    I've volunteered for and served on the boards of several small, youth-oriented nonprofits. They all had this weird idea that you can't spend any money on operational stuff. Yeah I get that you want to minimize it, and you should. But payments for necessary services should just be part of the budget. There is overhead to running these orgs and not every penny can go straight through to the kids. If you make things a PITA for the volunteers, eventually you won't have any volunteers. People are giving their time freely to help, but most are busy and don't want to f*ck around with complicated solutions that waste that time.
Melatonic 2y ago
Why not just use something like Keepass in this scenario for free (forever) ?

coder543 2y ago

I know very little about PTAs, but... why would a PTA need to share passwords anyways, instead of having separate logins?

afavour 2y ago
Immediate example that comes to mind: there’s a paid-for Canva account that multiple people need to use. Can’t use separate logins because then you’d need multiple subscriptions.
- woleium 2y ago
  This is in breach of the tos though, right? Great example to set for the kids.
  - afavour 2y ago
    Pretty sure the kids aren’t aware of the PTA’s use of Canva.
  - bzmrgonz 2y ago
    Moral argument is that a PTA are part time organizations and if canva doesn't cater to that business model, then shared credentials is fair use, commercial and for profit use is a horse of a different color.

forty 2y ago

Hi! could you please explain what is this admin work that is bothering you? Thanks! (working at Dashlane, and happy to forward feedback to product team. I'll already forward your comment on pricing)

afavour 2y ago
It’s not really your fault, it’s us bending your free tier into something it isn’t intended to be. Maximum number of passwords shared, only logging in to one device at a time etc. It’s a really weird edge case but eye opening for me as someone who is usually in a very well resourced tech environment. Google offers a great free tier for non profits and in the ideal world we’d have a password manager that plugs into our Google organization without a second thought. But that’s a premium tier feature and any money not spent on enriching the kids education has to be justified to the nth degree. We have people who are go-tos for a two factor auth code because their phone numbers are the ones attached to the accounts… people will go to surprising lengths! There isn’t a good business case for it as such but volunteer organizations (as opposed to well resourced non profits) would make good use of a free tier and it would generate goodwill with people who are sometimes responsible for purchasing decisions in their day jobs.
- woleium 2y ago
  You could self-host bitwarden on a $5 a month instance (or free-forever, if you choose to trust oracle or gcp), and then put TOTP 2fa into your bitwarden instance. Still requires a little maintenance on the instance, but this can be 99% automated.
  - afavour 2y ago
    Yeah, the thought has occurred to me. But I’m only going to be there for a few years, the responsible thing is to do something that’ll survive long after I’m gone.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I've volunteered for and served on the boards of several small, youth-oriented nonprofits. They all had this weird idea that you can't spend any money on operational stuff. Yeah I get that you want to minimize it, and you should. But payments for necessary services should just be part of the budget. There is overhead to running these orgs and not every penny can go straight through to the kids. If you make things a PITA for the volunteers, eventually you won't have any volunteers. People are giving their time freely to help, but most are busy and don't want to f*ck around with complicated solutions that waste that time.

Melatonic 2y ago

Why not just use something like Keepass in this scenario for free (forever) ?