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Bitwarden raises $100M

bitwarden.com

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Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#191

Post by jbotz »

rvz wrote: post #132
MaKleSoft wrote: post #125

If you're a Bitwarden user and this doesn't worry you, you haven't been paying attention to the history of almost every company that has accepted VC funds. It doesn't matter how well intentioned the founders are - once you accept that kind of money, it's not your product anymore. You are now in the business of making money, nothing else, and those skewed incentives will start bleeding into their product and business…

They're right you know. This happened to Keybase a while back and some nasty stuff happened to it and it is now in someone else's hands. Hope this won't happen to Bitwarden but we'll see. But anything is still possible.

Keybase was an entirely different case... first of all, they didn't just take VC funding, they were bought outright ("acqui-hired" by Zoom for their skillset). Secondly, they didn't have any significant income, whereas Bitwarden has been a profitable business all along.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#192

Post by nacs »

kornhole wrote: post #184
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #131

I'm not referring to Bitwarden here but isn't this the standard M.O. of any SV startup? 1. Release great product for free 2. Attract as many free users as possible to signal growth to investors 3. Keep running the unprofitable free tier at a loss as long as possible using your massive VC war chest, while locking in your users with various gotchas 4. Once you reach critical scale and gained mass user adoption and you'…

The people at Bitwarden and their supporters are familiar with countless examples of this playbook. Those tricks are not as easy to pull anymore. I have seen Bitwarden be very ethical in their business so far. I recommend it to my friends and family and to my company to pay for the service. It is a similar model to Nextcloud who successfully funds their business from governments and companies and provides it free to…

The server and client-side apps/extensions for Bitwarden are open source unlike Lastpass too.

At worst, we'll have to fork a current release if BW does stupid things in the future.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#193

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

metadaemon wrote: post #175
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #131

I'm not referring to Bitwarden here but isn't this the standard M.O. of any SV startup? 1. Release great product for free 2. Attract as many free users as possible to signal growth to investors 3. Keep running the unprofitable free tier at a loss as long as possible using your massive VC war chest, while locking in your users with various gotchas 4. Once you reach critical scale and gained mass user adoption and you'…

Ah, the lifecycle of a company. I think of the first rounds of funding as a sort of puberty. Going public is the mid-life crisis, signaling the downward spiral towards inevitable death. Of course, being bought out is like God taking Enoch directly to heaven, where who knows what happens. Those large companies with unnatural lifespans have somehow tapped into the deep, dark magic of the Elder Ones (usually government…

>Those large companies with unnatural lifespans have somehow tapped into the deep, dark magic of the Elder Ones (usually government contracts)

Or, you're Apple, and your cloud hosts the digital lives of all your users from teenage years to adulthood, so they're not gonna switch to any competitor no matter what.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#194

Post by selykg »

radiKal07 wrote: post #123

Any Apple-devices users here? Why would I use this instead of Apple built-in password manager?

I think the biggest is simply having access to your data on non-apple devices and non-apple browsers. I.e. using it in Chrome or Firefox or whatever browser you want, as long as there's an extension that supports the browser it's likely available.

You can store a lot more data in Bitwarden as well, including custom fields, so you aren't stuck with just a username and password and optional 2FA. With Bitwarden you can do security questions, a notes field, etc.

Sharing with family is another big feature. Sharing your cable login, wifi password, streaming services, etc.

There's a whole list of them, but I think those are sort of the top 3 for me.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#195

Post by nacs »

MaKleSoft wrote: post #185
12ian34 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying Bitwarden user here. This doesn't worry me that much. In the event that incentives get skewed (which isn't certain), I guess I could just stop updating the app before that happens, or fork the last good version? I'm interested in your alternative. I hadn't heard of it, went on your site and it looked decent, I think if I had seen this before going with Bitwarden I'd have seriously considered it, BUT now that I…

> This doesn't worry me that much. In the event that incentives get skewed (which isn't certain), I guess I could just stop updating the app before that happens, or fork the last good version? This is easily said, but remember you're talking about a security-sensitive application. Do you really trust yourself to keep your fork secure? I know it doesn't look like it on the surface, but password managers have become wi…

> Do you really trust yourself to keep your fork secure?

No, but I don't need to. Considering how many people are already contributing to Bitwarden's Github in the form of PRs and such, if worst comes to worst, there should be plenty of people who can maintain it.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#196

Post by FollowingTheDao »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #129
cmeacham98 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did I have to scroll this far down to find someone who's actually read the post? Everybody seems to think the money is purely for expanding the password manager, while in the post they call out adjacent markets they want to expand to. I'm cautiously optimistic that this could mean we won't see the end of Bitwarden, as those are areas where companies will pay big money.

The road to terrible software is paved with companies trying to expand to “adjacent markets”.

Greed kills like speed kills. It’s all very fun and exciting until you crash.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#197

Post by burntalmonds »

MaKleSoft wrote: post #125

If you're a Bitwarden user and this doesn't worry you, you haven't been paying attention to the history of almost every company that has accepted VC funds. It doesn't matter how well intentioned the founders are - once you accept that kind of money, it's not your product anymore. You are now in the business of making money, nothing else, and those skewed incentives will start bleeding into their product and business…

Yeah, that's why I have just stuck with Apple's keychain.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#198

Post by jbotz »

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?

They'll probably aim for competing with the likes of Okta in delegated authentication and identity management, which is a huge market which need some more competition. I'm in favor, and it really doesn't need to have any negative impact on their existing user base, at least so long as they can manage their growth and don't become a dysfunctional org because of it.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#199

Post by _verandaguy »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #131

I'm not referring to Bitwarden here but isn't this the standard M.O. of any SV startup? 1. Release great product for free 2. Attract as many free users as possible to signal growth to investors 3. Keep running the unprofitable free tier at a loss as long as possible using your massive VC war chest, while locking in your users with various gotchas 4. Once you reach critical scale and gained mass user adoption and you'…

Full disclosure, I'm a paying user of Bitwarden.

I think for BW this kind of falls apart at #3. The main draw of this product for me and many others is that it's actually pretty no-frills. It's also broadly compatible with importing and exporting between dozens of other password managers.

That said, this could be a blind spot for me. Let me know if there's any gotchas I should know about here.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#200

Post by chrismorgan »

xani_ wrote: post #115
chrismorgan wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Vaultwarden for just myself for at least a couple of years now, and it’s at 32MB of disk space ( That’s feature. (As a matter of fact, it’s grown quite a bit since I started using it; it used to be under 20MB of disk space and 10–15MB of RSS.)

Also running on PostgreSQL, not having to spin MSSQL instance

Well, you can opt into using PostgreSQL, but by default it’ll use SQLite, and that’s how I use it. More convenient and probably more efficient in general too.
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