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Bitwarden raises $100M

bitwarden.com

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Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#41

Post by ryukafalz »

Macha wrote: post #25
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.

Right - the benefit of FOSS is that we can keep using it as-is if we need to. I think that leads to excellent business incentives from the user’s standpoint. I’m currently a paying Bitwarden customer for convenience’s sake, but if they start messing it up I’ll just go host it myself.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#42

Post by scarface74 »

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!

How do you trust the word of a company that doesn’t have a profitable business model?

Just wait for the inevitable “Our Amazing Journey” post on their website.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#43

Post by GekkePrutser »

pavlov wrote: post #27
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.

I don't really want them to grow. Growing usually means overinflated expectations and when they aren't met by the new products they will try to retrieve the shortfall from their existing customer base with additional monetisation, driving them away in the process.

I hope it won't go this way here but such a cash buyin is usually the start of a difficult time.

> $10/year customers are completely irrelevant to a company at this stage.

Yet it's exactly the plan most customers and supporters would be on. So in other words, we don't matter anymore. This is why we can't have nice things :(

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#44

Post by dwbit »

endigma wrote: post #37
sneak wrote: post #12

The trend of open source spyware is really worrisome to me. More often than not these corporate open source projects include spyware features (Bitwarden included) that phone home without user consent. They claim selfhosting is a goal, yet their published client will report on your activity to Microsoft without your consent.

Citation (code snippet(s)?) please.

Bitwarden only uses Visual Studio for crash reporting, but you can skip this altogether by grabbing the F-Droid build or self-hosting.

More info here: https://bitwarden.com/help/security-faqs/#q-what-third-party...

F-Droid: https://mobileapp.bitwarden.com/fdroid/

Self-hosting: https://bitwarden.com/help/install-on-premise-linux/

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#45

Post by scarface74 »

phphphphp wrote: post #40
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?

1Password, a competitor, raised ~$650m earlier in the year off the back of exceptional growth. The investment case is likely: Bitwarden are doing well, 1Password are doing very well, maybe Bitwarden can do very well too with some additional capital. Password management is rapidly growing in mindshare, there's a big market and great room for growth, the amounts involved are commensurate with the opportunity -- every s…

Or 1Password could just suffer from the DropBox problem - it’s a feature not a product.

Every company’s answer to that is also the same “we will target the enterprise”.

They aren’t “doing well” if they still require outside funding.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#46

Post by yewenjie »

bilekas wrote: post #35

This is interesting I guess. But can't say it's something to be excited about. I've been using vaultwarden purely because I wanted to play around with rust and it turned into my favourite manager of all time. 10/10 would recommend!

But isn't it just a clone of the Bitwarden server without any extra feature?

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#47

Post by scarface74 »

jlokier wrote: post #36
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 money isn't for the password manager particularly. In the article they list a number of new things they want to develop. I think there will come a point when most mainstream web services will require "passwordless" authentication, which means users will have to register with one of a few commercial passwordless providers. Think "login to service X with Google/Git…

And the three companies behind the major platforms - Google, Apple, and Microsoft - have all agreed on a standard and will integrate a solution into their operating systems.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#48

Post by rvz »

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!

> This is great!

Keybase said the same thing.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#50

Post by midasuni »

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!

Why has someone put 100m in? Because they expect 200m back.
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