7 ms·
Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site
- ktm5j 5mo agoI'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.
- bakoo 5mo agoSwitched recently, and was positively surprised by the flexibility of the import process.
- rvz 5mo ago"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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427981
- cicko 5mo agoCompared with KeePassXC and Syncthing, it is infinitely more expensive!
- TurkTurkleton 5mo agoOh yeah, I love having to manage sync conflicts in my password database because I was dumb enough to edit it on two separate computers that weren't both online at the same time.
- rpdillon 5mo agoWorks best if you have an always on client. Easy if you have a VPS or a home lab, even a small one, a nuisance if you don't.
- asdfqwertzxcv 5mo agoI have that and still have regular sync conflicts. :(
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- sigio 5mo agoYeah, my main reason to stay away from Keepass, everything is in a single versioned binary file. I like 'passwordstore.org', where every secret is it's own gpg-encrypted textfile in a git repo. Every change is a commit, easy to see history, easy to revert or know which version is newest. And easy to selfhost, you just need a place to git push/pull from.
- cicko 5mo agoWhat's to manage? A merge does the job.
- BoredPositron 5mo agoLook at the CEOs other "ventures" he is a private equity squeeze guy.
- milkglass 5mo agoJust use vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
- esperent 5mo agoDo you have to self host it? I'm moderately decent at self hosting. I'm fairly confident in my backups and security. But also, I am not a system backup nor security expert, and I don't want to become either. The one last thing that I really want to leave to the experts is my secrets management.
- nathanmills 5mo agoYou don't need to be a system backup expert to take backups, and with that attitude you will never become a system backup novice either. There is no gaurentee paid services will keep your data available either. One company lost my data and I was very glad to have backups.
- cornell532 5mo agoI like Elestio for managing devops of self-hosting. I don't want to do backups, monitor and fork git repositories for updates, etc. It's non-trivial. My time is scarce. However, I'm extremely reluctant to give my password database hosting to ANYONE. I feel like this is something I need to "own" myself. Perhaps on Coolify, Dokploy, or on a Raspberry Pi with regular backups hosted at my home or office. This is extra work that I'm not eager to do; and frankly, it goes against my philosophy of outsourcing "commodity" work to which I'm ill-equipped to add substantial value. On the other hand, password managers are the most sensitive software I can imagine. Lastly, Sharing passwords with my wife, coworkers, etc is genuinely very valuable. Either of us can update, maintain etc our shared set of passwords. Last I looked, Keepass and its ilk cannot replace that functionality
- thunderbong 5mo agoThis uses the Bitwarden client and extensions, which is it's main attraction (I use it too). My worry however is about the future - what if a core functionality goes behind a paywall.
- elashri 5mo agoNow 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.
- 542458 5mo agoAs much as I hate the changes Bitwarden is making, I’m kinda with them on not adding official vaultwarden support. Having to support multiple backends (some of which you don’t control!) with your frontend makes everything massively more complicated.
- alt227 5mo agoIts not about them having to support multiple 3rd party backends, its about them not making any hostile changes which actively block them.
- aneutron 5mo agoThank 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 ...
- mlnj 5mo agoHave been a customer for years, but if the core values are going away, so am I. It's not even about the money.
- Cyan488 5mo agoI 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.
- 542458 5mo agoBitwarden is open-source though? This is about the hosted version of it, which has a free tier. But you can run the same software on your server at home if you want, for free. (That said, I am also concerned about the direction Bitwarden is taking. I just think this shows that even OSS projects can have direction/rugpull issues.)
- Cyan488 5mo agoYou're right, though the friends and family that I would feel the need to recommend a password manager to aren't the type that would self-host their own servers.
- maineldc 5mo agoSo what would you recommend to your friends and family that need a password manager? Genuinely curious. I pay for a service for my family because I need reliable and easy for my wife and daughter to use it.
- stevesimmons 5mo ago- KeePass files synced between laptop and phone on OneDrive, DropBox, etc - KeePassXC on Windows and Mac - Keepass2Android mobile client - Browser integration on mobile. - On laptop, I prefer no browser integration; Copy username and password with Ctrl+B and Ctrl+C
- chipotle_coyote 5mo agoActually, 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.
- persedes 5mo agourgh of course it has to be private equity. Really liked the product and did not mind paying for it...but not ready for the PE enshittification.
- nacs 5mo agoThis feels like deja-vu with Lastpass. LogMeIn buys Lastpass, multiple massive breaches occur[, people move to Bitwarden].
- troyvit 5mo agoDid Lastpass have a project like Vaultwarden behind it at the time? I'm hoping against hope that that will keep us with an open vault.
- jmux 5mo agovaultwarden is great, but password managers are security critical software that need consistent maintenance and constant updates. if bitwarden is acquired and the new owner decides an open source version of their product is not a business necessity, without someone actively supporting the salaries of engineers it’s unlikely to continue to be secure for much longer.
- hgoel 5mo ago
- baal80spam 5mo agoAh, good old rugpull. Just use KeePass.
- leosanchez 5mo agoHow do you sync between devices?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nathanaldensr 5mo agoLast time I looked into this, you really couldn't in a reasonably simple way. It was possible between two users, but more than two just caused issues with syncing.
- doubled112 5mo agoSyncing between your own devices is still an easier problem to solve than syncing between different users. The database is just a file. I use a self hosted Nextcloud, but you don't have to. KeePassXC allows you to automate opening a database from the URL column. My family and I share a second database and open it from there, but it's super kludgy on any other device.
- nvme0n1p1 5mo agohttps://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- timw4mail 5mo agoSyncthing
- ilvez 5mo agoLived like this years, never going to look back. Add mobile to the mix and you're screwed with conflicts and manual resolution.
- faangguyindia 5mo agoi 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.
- mfro 5mo agoGreat heads up! I will work on self-hosting this month.
- OptionOfT 5mo agoThere are 2 versions out there, the one from Bitwarden itself, and an open-source rewrite called Vaultwarden. But, the main developer of works at Bitwarden. Thankfully you can easily export your passwords and move to another system (unlike say Authy where we had to inject Javascript to extract the TOTP seeds).
- cik 5mo agoWhat's the current method that works? I keep meaning to ditch Authy, and now that I'm moving to ProtonPass, it seems like a great time to finally finish this (Ente?)
- OptionOfT 5mo agoI did it a couple of years ago, I don't know what works today. Sorry. I would still recommend switching to Vaultwarden. With Tailscale you don't have to expose it to the outside world. Just keep a copy of the export somewhere else. I like my export unencrypted and move it to a location that is encrypted.
- 6ak74rfy 5mo agoI have been self-hosting Vaultwarden for a few months and it has been great. But this news still worries me because Vaultwarden still relies on open-source Bitwarden clients and sounds like those could be on the chopping board anytime soon. Separately, I don't know if there is a self-hostable password manager which allows easy family sharing. (KeepassXC won't work, I believe, because the whole vault is a single file.)
- deepriverfish 5mo agowhat'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.
- dandellion 5mo agoI've been self-hosting Vaultwarden for some time, I'm pretty happy with it.
- deepriverfish 5mo agocan you access it in your phone?
- happymellon 5mo agoYes.
- happymellon 5mo agoIf you are using Bitwarden self hosted, you can switch it out for Vaultwarden.
- AdmiralAsshat 5mo agosigh 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.
- nusl 5mo agoThe 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.
- webworker 5mo agoThey bumped prices just a few months back.
- UnhappyMeaning 5mo agoPrivate equity ruins housing. They also ruin software.
- aborsy 5mo ago[flagged]
- rytis 5mo agomaybe because the company promised "always free"? if the company can't keep the promises, then maybe they shouldn't make them in the first place?
- nathanmills 5mo agoWould you really be okay with HN charging monthly to use the site? HN probably stores more data anyways, passwords are pretty small in comparison to comments, and I produce more of them aswell.
- elaus 5mo agoI think the deal is pretty clear with stuff like this: Free accounts for individual users, earning money with businesses. It's not like Bitwarden is giving away their product without getting anything in return: The free users (tech-savy early adopters) were the ones that pitched Bitwarden to their bosses when they were looking for a password solution for their company. It's really no different than Adobe or other companies giving away student licences. Companies are not stupid.
- jabroni_salad 5mo agoMy first bitwarden invoice is dated november 2019. My concern here is 'squeeze' type activities that other companies with strong M&A leaderships have brought to their customers. For consumers, loyalty is exploited, not rewarded, and one must be vigilant for signals to jump ship.
- summermusic 5mo agoI'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!
- ryukoposting 5mo agoYup. But, where to?
- iosjunkie 5mo agoBrb vibe coding a replacement /s
- anderber 5mo agoI know it's not open-source, but I've been happy with Protonpass.
- minedwiz 5mo agoAt least the clients are, it's something. https://github.com/protonpass https://github.com/protonpass
- magicalhippo 5mo agoAnd they get audited, last one quite recently[1]: The audit confirmed Proton Pass security is exceptionally robust: - No remote exploits found: Users cannot be hacked simply by visiting a malicious website or clicking a link. - No encryption bypasses identified: Attackers can’t use shortcuts, backdoors, or weak keys to bypass the encryption layer. Take it for what it's worth. [1]: https://proton.me/business/blog/proton-pass-audit-2026 https://proton.me/business/blog/proton-pass-audit-2026
- dualvariable 5mo agoTurns out I'm already paying for that but not using it, so I guess it is time to get locked into the Proton ecosystem even more...
- AnonC 5mo agoI 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.
- gaiagraphia 5mo agoThe 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!
- Goofy_Coyote 5mo agoThis 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.
- microflash 5mo agoI guess it is time ... (sigh)
- kelvinjps10 5mo agoWhy projects get destroyed just after I migrate to them?. Guess I'll have to go back to kepass.
- Scottn1 5mo agoI literally just spent hours in January of researching all the commonly mentioned options out there and trying them for myself before deciding fully on Bitwarden Family. I was a KeepassXC user for years and had my family on it as well. For 2026 I wanted to be more modern and was tired of worrying about backups (like a teenager only having their passwords on their phone), as well as syncing and accessibility. Then spent many more hours getting everyone off individual KeepassXC installs and transferred to the Bitwarden Family account. I am locked in with paid annual until Next January, but if I have to change again do to enshittification or changes made to, what I felt was a good open-source product and company, I am not going to be happy, nor will my family.
- donmcronald 5mo agoHow does the GPL licensing affect future versions of the open source clients? I use Vaultwarden right now. Part of the reason was that I wanted something where there was a minimum guarantee. In the case of Vaultwarden, I can always fall back to the web interface if needed. It wouldn't be convenient, but it guarantees no one can take away my password vault. I really hate the per user per feature per byte per year pricing structure that everything has morphed into. I don't mind paying something for good software that I rely on, but having everything locked down and controlled by a 3rd party with continually increasing subscription fees is terrible. I've worked in the small business space my whole life and it's being destroyed. Private investors are buying everything. I'm talking about owning all the small businesses of certain types; family doctors, dentists, optometrists, vets etc. seem to be the big target. It's terrifying and most people don't even realize it. It's very sad to see core values that turn out to be lies. Always free is a tough spot to be in, but these companies could absolutely use a better business model that doesn't kill small businesses. And, based on what I see, increasing IT costs are killing small businesses. What we need in the small business space is a tier of services where small businesses can self host using their own on-premise, vertically scalable infrastructure (ie: 1 server). In most cases they can tolerate some downtime and, even if they don't want to, a lack of resources usually means they don't have a choice (ex: they're not running HA network connections). Businesses with <10-20 employees are often viewed as not being worth the effort of having as a customer, so they end up with self-serve, unsupported, non-discounted, over priced, trash subscriptions. By the time they grow enough to be a valuable customer their only experience with some products is misery. I wish I could set up small businesses with self-hosted infrastructure that can't be rug pulled while they're still small with an easy upgrade path into a hosted service if/when they grow.
- kevincox 5mo agoIt doesn't. All third-party contributions must assign copyright to Bitwarden. https://contributing.bitwarden.com/contributing/ https://contributing.bitwarden.com/contributing/ https://cla-assistant.io/bitwarden/clients https://cla-assistant.io/bitwarden/clients
- andreashaerter 5mo ago> What we need in the small business space is a tier of services where small businesses can self host using their own on-premise, vertically scalable infrastructure (ie: 1 server). In most cases they can tolerate some downtime and, even if they don't want to, a lack of resources usually means they don't have a choice (ex: they're not running HA network connections). I think the same: Small service businesses care most about Time To Recovery (TTR) when doing services. As long as they communicate at least by phone and the website is up, they usually tolerate downtime when they know when their backoffice services are back online. This is classic Business Continuity Management, 5-10 questions usually make clear what must work in every case when and what has to be available for supporting this process. Example: I got a customer which prints all logistics / distribution labels in batches. They can still work where money comes in (=shipping stuff) for quite a long time (4h min, 8h max) if the next batch of labels cannot be printed / some system is going down needed to support shipping. So no need for expensive HA around legacy software, but enough time for a good process to get back online with the latest backup on replacement hardware which is already there on-site. The thing is: HA is FAR more expensive and complicated than e.g. getting another stand-by server as fast replacement, maintain the hypervisor on this second server e.g. every six month and test restoring backups on it once a month (best: automated: IMPI boot, restore without VM networks, testing, shutdown). Same with a firewall; two used Enterprise Servers + Proxmox VE Subscription, OPNSense + 2 x N150 Hardware and two consumer WANs (e.g. Cable and VDSL) is really not that expensive if only the WAN is a bit more complicated from the POV of a SME admin because of failover. Classi VLANs+ACL and services like surveillance as needed... > Businesses with <10-20 employees are often viewed as not being worth the effort of having as a customer, so they end up with self-serve, unsupported, non-discounted, over priced, trash subscriptions. By the time they grow enough to be a valuable customer their only experience with some products is misery. Exactly. This is why I do SME IT since ever, no matter for which $BigCorp I've done consulting and DevOps. I automate them. I consult them. My company (plug: https://foundata.com https://foundata.com) does it for a few bugs per month (Hypervisor, Groupware (Calendar, Mail) Firewalling, VPN, Directory Services, Jitsi/OpenCloud/BBB) if they understand that they finance the high quality of the managed services ON THEIR HARDWARE with all other customers and we do not work per-hour but per-service + we run Open Source also for other reasons than "no or fewer licensing costs". And I like it even this does not make you rich. Because I REALLY share your concerns ("owning all the small businesses of certain types; family doctors, dentists, optometrists, vets" -> I don't know where you are from, but it is the very same here in Germany... example: https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/panorama3/Spekulanten-greifen-nach-Arztpraxen,arztpraxen110.html https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/panorama3/Spekulanten...)
- mmonaghan 5mo agoGood for them. Much easier to build a great product if you're making money from it. I tried bitwarden a while ago but ended up going with dashlane for a few years. I'm on 1password now and really like it but more competition is always better.
- crackercrews 5mo ago> Bitwarden has also stopped listing “Inclusion” and “Transparency” as tentpole values on its careers page. I'm pretty sure I have never cared about what values a company listed on its careers page, unless I am considering working there.
- graemep 5mo agoEven then you should be sceptical. These values change when convenient, and big businesses will demonstrate different values in different countries. A value you stick to as long as its in your interest to do so is meaningless.
- solarkraft 5mo agoI stopped paying them when they started closing their clients. If they remain good stewards of FOSS I have no problem with starting again - Bitwarden provides serious value to me. But I’ll probably have to rethink recommending it to people, since any type of friction is seriously harmful here.
- dizhn 5mo agoA lot of folks are talking about Vaultwarden which is great. Don't forget to check out the fork that added OIDC support, some (but not all) features of which has been merged into Vaultwarden.
- nunez 5mo ago> 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. Pour one out for another open source project "optimized" by VC
- webworker 5mo agoReminder that they also Recently bumped prices a few months ago. My annual renewed just a month before they did that.
- ilvez 5mo agoI really don't understand all the FUD about it. Their stack is mainly GPLv3 and if they start to drag it to really bad territories, current awesome tooling cannot be taken away. What am I missing?
- RamenJunkie_ 5mo agoIf Bitwarden gets sold I am just going back to a paper notebook for passwords.
- apendergast 5mo agoMeanwhile, just below the screenshot in the article: " Just getting started? Get basic password management today. Always free. Create Free Account " See https://bitwarden.com/pricing/ https://bitwarden.com/pricing/ EDIT: the article correctly mention that in an UPDATE " Update: After publication, an employee on the Bitwarden subreddit said that “Always free” had been restored on its pricing page, calling it an “oversight” by the marketing team. The product page for Bitwarden’s personal password manager remains unchanged. "
- andreashaerter 5mo agoThoughts and reviews about Passbolt? TOTP handling seems a bit off, extensions are not mostly read-only (OK for me). But the "share a single secret" access control seems nice: https://www.passbolt.com/pricing/pro https://www.passbolt.com/pricing/pro https://www.passbolt.com/vs/bitwarden/overview https://www.passbolt.com/vs/bitwarden/overview https://www.passbolt.com/docs/hosting/install/ https://www.passbolt.com/docs/hosting/install/ PHP backend (IMHO a downside): https://github.com/passbolt/passbolt_api https://github.com/passbolt/passbolt_api. But There appears to be a significant amount of auditing behind Passbolt's security claims, assuming the information on https://www.passbolt.com/security https://www.passbolt.com/security is accurate.