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Bitwarden raises $100M

bitwarden.com

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Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#51

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

1Password is 4x the price and is not open source. Doesn't 1Password's stronger backing provide more risk for Bitwarden investors too (chasing the same customers but with less to spend on acquisition)?

Spitballing, $100M, assuming investors want 20% per annum return and Bitwarden do 50% profit ... they need 24M paying customers. Where are they at now?

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#52

Post by fyvhbhn »

yewenjie wrote: post #46
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?

What's your point?

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#53

Post by zuhsetaqi »

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.

How is vaultwarden more independent than bitwarden? Aren't they both FOSS and can be forked?

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#54

Post by infinityio »

vishnuharidas wrote: post #38

I always enjoyed the value that Bitwarden provides: free to use, password generator, and a vault to keep other texts. But somehow I never got the TOTP working. Once I locked out of Bitwarden because of Cloudflare blocking my IP address for some unknown reason. I restarted my router and the problem got fixed.

> But somehow I never got the TOTP working.

I think bitwarden's TOTP generation is a paid feature, but it still provides the option to store the secrets in the free version

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#55

Post by gigatexal »

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!

I love that they offer a free version and are committed to it. But I depend on it for password management so much so that even if they didn't just raise 100M I'd pay for it in hopes that they stayed around. I think everyone who can, should.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#56

Post by acatton »

zuhsetaqi wrote: post #53
Macha wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is vaultwarden more independent than bitwarden? Aren't they both FOSS and can be forked?

bitwarden server is mostly written by bitwarden's CTO. [1]

If tomorrow bitwarden decides to do "a mongodb" (= violating the AGPL, and make it closed-source), you would have to spin up a new community to maintain the AGPL fork.

[1] https://github.com/bitwarden/server/graphs/contributors

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#57

Post by ignoramous »

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?

With smartphones leading the push towards digital everything, passwords (auth / authz) have become the most important asset, even for consumers.

Edit: An interesting conversation between Basecamp's DHH and 1Password's Teare on their series-a as an opportunity to de-risk the venture: https://archive.is/Kdnpz

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#58

Post by usrusr »

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?

Particularly if it's a trust-centric product like this. Sure, I wouldn't expect outright secret exfiltration no matter how bad it gets, but switching password management providers isn't exactly what you want to happen on a regular basis. (yes, this form of lock-in has most likely been a big factor in the investment decision)

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#60

Post by phpisthebest »

scarface74 wrote: post #47
jlokier wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, and what is that one like the 6th or more "auth standard" they all "agreed to" before promptly doing their own variations which then get spun into a new standard they all "agree" to before.......
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