Bitwarden raises $100M • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#21

Post by masklinn » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:37 AM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #6

Well that’s annoying. I guess the clock is ticking on Bitwarden becoming user hostile. I can’t see how they’ll be able to produce a return on that investment at their current price points. Having said that, I do think there is an opportunity for Bitwarden to expand into application secret management, and that could be a lucrative market with big enterprise customers if they get it right. The announcement seems to be…

How much they chase growth and how much further investment there is will probably be one of the big concerns. Also how much ROI the investors expect.

The market does seem to have space, 1password has an estimated ~235m revenue, and lastpass and dashlane ~70m. And all of them are quite a bit larger than the latest headcount I saw for bitwarden (reap. 800, 400, and 400, versus But it is worrying, especially with bitwarden having low TCOs currently, especially for the free-er side of the offering.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#22

Post by alex_suzuki » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:38 AM UTC

NickHoff wrote: post #10

Bitwarden already does one thing well. It's everything I'm looking for - open source, costs money but not much ($10/yr), 2FA, clean interface. I'm happy for the new investment, but I hope they don't start adding new things just for the sake of growing. Also - to the people who analyze funding rounds - $100M sounds like a huge amount to me. Why would a password manager need so much money?

Marketing

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#23

Post by xoa » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:40 AM UTC

deanmoriarty wrote: post #5

I moved from LastPass to Bitwarden a few years ago because of the nimbleness and simplicity of it, it felt so refreshing. How much time do we have left before Bitwarden gradually becomes as bad as LastPass for the sake of high growth? 2-3 years? I’m not passing any judgement on this raise, entrepreneurs do what they gotta do.

>How much time do we have left before Bitwarden gradually becomes as bad as LastPass? 2-3 years? I’m not passing any judgement on this raise, entrepreneur do what they gotta do.

Bitwarden though actually has an API, and in turn interesting community implementation potential such as the Rust-based Vaultwarden [0]. While I agree seeing them get a huge round does raise some concern in terms of the revenue generation pressure (1Password sticks in my mind as a worse example though with their switch to forced subs-only, no local/non-1P vaults, abandonment of native apps etc), to me the real sign would be if they broke self-hosting. But even so, of course with self-hosting one could simply stop there. Doesn't feel like quite the same situation as 1P or LastPass where one was really in a fully vs partially proprietary system.

I'd be OK with paying for updates to quality clients though so long as it was a regular payment system (not paying means staying on that version vs having it stop working).

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0: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#24

Post by michaelmior » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:40 AM UTC

NickHoff wrote: post #10

Bitwarden already does one thing well. It's everything I'm looking for - open source, costs money but not much ($10/yr), 2FA, clean interface. I'm happy for the new investment, but I hope they don't start adding new things just for the sake of growing. Also - to the people who analyze funding rounds - $100M sounds like a huge amount to me. Why would a password manager need so much money?

> Why would a password manager need so much money?

The announcement suggests they are looking to also launch their own authentication service and tools for managing application secrets.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#25

Post by Macha » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:40 AM UTC

yewenjie wrote: post #20

> The Bitwarden business model will not change Bitwarden remains committed to A fully featured free version, forever An open source architecture The ability to self-host Advanced business features This is great!

If you can trust that will stay at the end of the honeymoon, which is very much not a given in these cases.

At least vaultwarden is independent and someone can fork the clients when needed.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#26

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:41 AM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #6

Well that’s annoying. I guess the clock is ticking on Bitwarden becoming user hostile. I can’t see how they’ll be able to produce a return on that investment at their current price points. Having said that, I do think there is an opportunity for Bitwarden to expand into application secret management, and that could be a lucrative market with big enterprise customers if they get it right. The announcement seems to be…

[deleted]

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#27

Post by pavlov » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:41 AM UTC

NickHoff wrote: post #10

Bitwarden already does one thing well. It's everything I'm looking for - open source, costs money but not much ($10/yr), 2FA, clean interface. I'm happy for the new investment, but I hope they don't start adding new things just for the sake of growing. Also - to the people who analyze funding rounds - $100M sounds like a huge amount to me. Why would a password manager need so much money?

Enterprise sales presumably?

A $100M round probably means a valuation around $500-600M. They now need to grow the company to a couple billion so it can either go public (when the IPO market is alive again in a few years) or be sold to a bigger enterprise player.

$10/year customers are completely irrelevant to a company at this stage. Open source is nice as a sales bullet point, but not a central focus.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#28

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:41 AM UTC

leoedin wrote: post #8

In many ways it's a shame when a useful tool turns into a high growth startup. They're going to hire a bunch of developers who will need to justify their existence by adding features, they'll probably eventually either fail or get purchased and shut down. And then all the overly complex applications will start to rot. What's wrong with saying "this is a useful tool" and leaving it at that?

[deleted]

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#29

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:42 AM UTC

deanmoriarty wrote: post #5

I moved from LastPass to Bitwarden a few years ago because of the nimbleness and simplicity of it, it felt so refreshing. How much time do we have left before Bitwarden gradually becomes as bad as LastPass for the sake of high growth? 2-3 years? I’m not passing any judgement on this raise, entrepreneurs do what they gotta do.

[deleted]

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#30

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 11:43 AM UTC

aborsy wrote: post #4

I would never have someone else manage my passwords for me. You have to trust the server. It could serve the user with malicious JS code or an app update at any time. You can self host it though.

[deleted]