5 ms·

I don't care about raising prices, I'm worried about the new CEO having a PE mindset. That means Bitwarden will now focus on extracting value while the product

by welder 5mo ago

I don't care about raising prices, I'm worried about the new CEO having a PE mindset. That means Bitwarden will now focus on extracting value while the product stagnates and degrades in quality. Time to jump ship before their security and quality goes down the drain.

adfm 5mo ago
PE? Private Equity is the slippery slope to Public Enshitification.
j16sdiz 5mo ago
+1 I am a paid subscriber. I am kind of ok with the price increase. The "coincident" with change of CEO and remove of "always free" tag worries me though.
- jnovek 5mo ago
  I just sent them a message along these lines. I’m happy to pay for good services, but M&A means cost-cutting measures to make the company look good for acquisition and that makes me uncomfortable with letting them store secure data for me. Switching is going to be a pain.
  - bglusman 5mo ago
    It is really easy to self-host, and do so securely...
    - jnovek 5mo ago
      I’m not buying hosting from a password manager, I’m buying security. I don’t have complete confidence that I can secure a self-hosted password manager and it’s not an area where I want to take risks.
      - xienze 5mo ago
        It's very simple, just don't make it accessible outside your home network. Clients sync when the server is accessible and use last synced data otherwise.
        gherkinnn 5mo ago
        The effort required to set this up far outweighs the price to pay someone to do it for me. I pay a cleaner, I have a dishwasher, I pay someone to do my taxes, I pay for companies to host software. Then again, I never order food and almost never get takeaway, as cooking is nice and I value my food enough to care what goes in it. Cheaper too, easily offsetting what I pay for my password manager.
        l72 5mo ago
        I mean does it? I have set it up before but I just set it up for my new small office team. I already had an internal server and WireGuard vpn in our office and it took 2 minutes to create a quadlet to run vaultwarden and a few more to configure it. The “hardest” part was training the team on how to use collections.
        rmunn 5mo ago
        Tailscale for your laptop, phone, etc. to be able to talk to the other computers when away from your home WiFi. (Optional, but makes syncing easier). Syncthing, talking to your Tailscale IP addresses if you use it, or your private WiFi network addresses if you don't use Tailscale. One folder synced, containing keyfile2.kdbx. 30 minutes to set up and then you almost never need to think about it again. If you don't trust Tailscale, you can run a Headscale server or just not use it. And the syncing is entirely run on your machines; your data never ends up written to someone else's SSD. It's really not much effort.
0x262d 5mo ago
I'm getting really tired of the enshittification cycle. Learning about android verification and captcha changes recently has been another big frustration point. I moved to android as a more open alternative to apple just a few years ago, and to bitwarden from lastpass around the same time. I would like to just have these infrastructural services work well and quietly without thinking about them for many years. Do I really have to put up with this happening faster and faster for the rest of capitalism? (I think so)
- hobonation 5mo ago
  Vendors doing a rug-pull isn't just capitalism. China is adding DRM to AM radio: old receivers won't work. Heck, Soviet WWII ration cards no longer give turmips.
  - pessimizer 5mo ago
    They're not doing it to increase margin. "Enshittification" or "rug-pulls" aren't when things get worse or things change, they're when the conditions that were used to attract an audience are changed in order to extract more margin after that audience is captured. The larger exampls to compare them to would be "dumping." Dump subsidized, tariff-free corn in Mexico to make it unprofitable to farm corn in Mexico, and after all of the Mexican farmers go bust, buy their land and raise the price of corn to infinity while cheaping out on the quality of seed and handling. Enshittification. Rug-pull.
  - throawayonthe 5mo ago
    uh, by DRM you mean Digital Radio Mondiale[0], an open digital radio broadcasting standard? sure analog receivers won't work, but hardly a rugpull lol [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale
    - BobbyTables2 5mo ago
      Yeah? That has to be the worst possible acronym for an open thing.
giancarlostoro 5mo ago
Not my project but Vaultwarden is an open source (in Rust) alternative backend for Bitwarden. I believe its been around a while, and is still maintained. https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
- pocksuppet 5mo ago
  Is there an alternative frontend as well, or are you still locked in?
  - belthesar 5mo ago
    There is not an alternative frontend that I'm aware of, but as the article mentions, the clients are Apache 2.0 licensed, so in the event of a rug pull, a fork and rebrand of the clients would be what is needed to restore service.
  - backscratches 5mo ago
    Their android app at least is open source and on available on their own f-droid repo
  - void-star 5mo ago
    https://github.com/doy/rbw https://github.com/doy/rbw Is an alternative Bitwarden cli front end. Probably has plenty of scaffolding to build a GUI frontend based on it. Edit: Just a bit of googling turned up these as well. https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app https://github.com/sgolub/bitclient https://github.com/sgolub/bitclient
  - fluidcruft 5mo ago
    Better question is how difficult would it be to have keypass use vaultwarden for sync.
- duckmysick 5mo ago
  Question for anyone self-hosting vaultwarden: how reliable is it and how do you harden it? I'm thinking about running it in a container (Podman Quadlet with systemd) behind a VPN, with daily backups with borg. Anything I'm overlooking here?
throwawayq3423 5mo ago
I jumped to Bitwarden because of 1P's new pricing doing exactly that. Circle of live, I guess.
- void-star 5mo ago
  Me too precisely. But after getting acclimated to a self hosted vaultwarden for the backend and beginning to explore some of the 3rd party Bitwarden frontends that implement its API, I’d recommend hanging in there a bit longer. I think there may be a moat around BW already for self-hosting. What’s next in the circle is keepass I guess? And it’s just not friendly/robust enough yet for me to switch to it with my family who will probably just go back to using the same passwords on multiple sites if they hit resistance in ease of use.
chancek 5mo ago
Yep! Feels like a hard truth about the product life-cycle. It may be time to find an alternative to what was a great alternative.
chatmasta 5mo ago
Give it less than one financial quarter and I guarantee the website will be about “identity for AI agents.”
jamiek88 5mo ago
Can anyone name a PE purchase that made a company better?
- IG_Semmelweiss 5mo ago
  in my humble opinion, Dominos ?
drzaiusx11 5mo ago
I'm so fucking tired of jumping ship with these password vault providers. This will be my third jump in so many years. Exactly what value do they think they have left to extract from me? I'm a paying customer for a product that essentially just stores an indexed list of strings with at-rest encryption. Their official App's autofill on my phone hasn't worked for several months now., I literally have to login to it once every couple hours just to manually copy and paste my usernames and passwords separately. I guess enshitification knows no bounds?

by welder 5mo ago

adfm 5mo ago

PE? Private Equity is the slippery slope to Public Enshitification.

j16sdiz 5mo ago

+1 I am a paid subscriber. I am kind of ok with the price increase. The "coincident" with change of CEO and remove of "always free" tag worries me though.

jnovek 5mo ago
I just sent them a message along these lines. I’m happy to pay for good services, but M&A means cost-cutting measures to make the company look good for acquisition and that makes me uncomfortable with letting them store secure data for me. Switching is going to be a pain.
- bglusman 5mo ago
  It is really easy to self-host, and do so securely...
  - jnovek 5mo ago
    I’m not buying hosting from a password manager, I’m buying security. I don’t have complete confidence that I can secure a self-hosted password manager and it’s not an area where I want to take risks.
    - xienze 5mo ago
      It's very simple, just don't make it accessible outside your home network. Clients sync when the server is accessible and use last synced data otherwise.
      - gherkinnn 5mo ago
        The effort required to set this up far outweighs the price to pay someone to do it for me. I pay a cleaner, I have a dishwasher, I pay someone to do my taxes, I pay for companies to host software. Then again, I never order food and almost never get takeaway, as cooking is nice and I value my food enough to care what goes in it. Cheaper too, easily offsetting what I pay for my password manager.
        l72 5mo ago
        I mean does it? I have set it up before but I just set it up for my new small office team. I already had an internal server and WireGuard vpn in our office and it took 2 minutes to create a quadlet to run vaultwarden and a few more to configure it. The “hardest” part was training the team on how to use collections.
        rmunn 5mo ago
        Tailscale for your laptop, phone, etc. to be able to talk to the other computers when away from your home WiFi. (Optional, but makes syncing easier). Syncthing, talking to your Tailscale IP addresses if you use it, or your private WiFi network addresses if you don't use Tailscale. One folder synced, containing keyfile2.kdbx. 30 minutes to set up and then you almost never need to think about it again. If you don't trust Tailscale, you can run a Headscale server or just not use it. And the syncing is entirely run on your machines; your data never ends up written to someone else's SSD. It's really not much effort.

0x262d 5mo ago

I'm getting really tired of the enshittification cycle. Learning about android verification and captcha changes recently has been another big frustration point. I moved to android as a more open alternative to apple just a few years ago, and to bitwarden from lastpass around the same time. I would like to just have these infrastructural services work well and quietly without thinking about them for many years. Do I really have to put up with this happening faster and faster for the rest of capitalism? (I think so)

hobonation 5mo ago
Vendors doing a rug-pull isn't just capitalism. China is adding DRM to AM radio: old receivers won't work. Heck, Soviet WWII ration cards no longer give turmips.
- pessimizer 5mo ago
  They're not doing it to increase margin. "Enshittification" or "rug-pulls" aren't when things get worse or things change, they're when the conditions that were used to attract an audience are changed in order to extract more margin after that audience is captured. The larger exampls to compare them to would be "dumping." Dump subsidized, tariff-free corn in Mexico to make it unprofitable to farm corn in Mexico, and after all of the Mexican farmers go bust, buy their land and raise the price of corn to infinity while cheaping out on the quality of seed and handling. Enshittification. Rug-pull.
- throawayonthe 5mo ago
  uh, by DRM you mean Digital Radio Mondiale[0], an open digital radio broadcasting standard? sure analog receivers won't work, but hardly a rugpull lol [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale
  - BobbyTables2 5mo ago
    Yeah? That has to be the worst possible acronym for an open thing.

giancarlostoro 5mo ago

Not my project but Vaultwarden is an open source (in Rust) alternative backend for Bitwarden. I believe its been around a while, and is still maintained. https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

pocksuppet 5mo ago
Is there an alternative frontend as well, or are you still locked in?
- belthesar 5mo ago
  There is not an alternative frontend that I'm aware of, but as the article mentions, the clients are Apache 2.0 licensed, so in the event of a rug pull, a fork and rebrand of the clients would be what is needed to restore service.
- backscratches 5mo ago
  Their android app at least is open source and on available on their own f-droid repo
- void-star 5mo ago
  https://github.com/doy/rbw https://github.com/doy/rbw Is an alternative Bitwarden cli front end. Probably has plenty of scaffolding to build a GUI frontend based on it. Edit: Just a bit of googling turned up these as well. https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app https://github.com/sgolub/bitclient https://github.com/sgolub/bitclient
- fluidcruft 5mo ago
  Better question is how difficult would it be to have keypass use vaultwarden for sync.
duckmysick 5mo ago
Question for anyone self-hosting vaultwarden: how reliable is it and how do you harden it? I'm thinking about running it in a container (Podman Quadlet with systemd) behind a VPN, with daily backups with borg. Anything I'm overlooking here?

throwawayq3423 5mo ago

I jumped to Bitwarden because of 1P's new pricing doing exactly that. Circle of live, I guess.

void-star 5mo ago
Me too precisely. But after getting acclimated to a self hosted vaultwarden for the backend and beginning to explore some of the 3rd party Bitwarden frontends that implement its API, I’d recommend hanging in there a bit longer. I think there may be a moat around BW already for self-hosting. What’s next in the circle is keepass I guess? And it’s just not friendly/robust enough yet for me to switch to it with my family who will probably just go back to using the same passwords on multiple sites if they hit resistance in ease of use.

chancek 5mo ago

Yep! Feels like a hard truth about the product life-cycle. It may be time to find an alternative to what was a great alternative.

chatmasta 5mo ago

Give it less than one financial quarter and I guarantee the website will be about “identity for AI agents.”

jamiek88 5mo ago

Can anyone name a PE purchase that made a company better?

IG_Semmelweiss 5mo ago
in my humble opinion, Dominos ?

drzaiusx11 5mo ago

I'm so fucking tired of jumping ship with these password vault providers. This will be my third jump in so many years. Exactly what value do they think they have left to extract from me? I'm a paying customer for a product that essentially just stores an indexed list of strings with at-rest encryption. Their official App's autofill on my phone hasn't worked for several months now., I literally have to login to it once every couple hours just to manually copy and paste my usernames and passwords separately. I guess enshitification knows no bounds?