321–330 of 522 posts
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…
How do they increase their valuation 10+x without pulling those tricks.
Because that's what the VC funding demands. No VC is giving out $100mm for a 20% or even 100% return, which could possibly be achieved by simple growth. They're giving that money because they're expecting exponential return.
Maybe there is an enterprise play somewhere here which justifies this, while maintaining the core product in its current form. I guess we will see, but I'm not holding my breath.
I feel like I might be grandfathered in and they switched to a new model now, but I got Enpass years ago and haven't paid since. I sync my password archive through iCloud so I don't have to trust a random company to store my password archive safely. If anything, by doing that you're centralizing a ton of user logins in a single place that would be a great target if you found a way to hack in and read them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If we take them at their word that they're committed to keeping a fully-featured free version, what options do they have to make back a multiple of that $100 million for their investors? What many other companies have done in the past is to add a lot of new features. There are many examples of a simple, no-frills application turning into a bloated, complicated one, with a tiered subscription system. Ultimately a less…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
until they aren't open source anymore and once the FOSS forks are many features behind the product, then they adjust pricing
I switched to Bitwarden after using Lastpass for years and it's pretty feature-complete for me -- it has feature parity with LP and there's a bunch of features that I don't even use. Even the unofficial Rust-based server looks to have more features than I need: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/wiki
Self hosted was a nice middle ground. No one else has a copy of my password database, and it's always in sync between devices. Stick nginx as a proxy in front of it for https and easy let's encrypt certificate management. The downside is that Keepass by default allowed me to have copies in multiple locations. Bitwarden is only on the server, but since the database is encrypted it's easy enough to have regularly scheduled backups of it. It just is an added step to find another docker host for it if my home server goes down, during which time I may not have access to my passwords.
Which has taken more time? Learning how to use gopass and a yubikey, or migrating password services every few years and paying hundreds for arbitrarily pay-walled features?
Edit: idk, maybe there's some UX aspects of the password sharing features that are more important to other folks, otherwise, the diy option is not that hard, or a UX sacrifice.
Keypassxc,keypassxc browser plug-in, strongbox app for iPhone. Cloud drive of your choice for syncing. Works well
Or SyncThing. This setup works and more people aren't considering it. The UI is great and the desktop app is not Electron based.
I had many instances of not noticing Android had killed the Syncthing backend again despite being explicitly told not to, and then I had two out-of-sync password databases and would have to go merge them again.
I'm still bitter about it, because Syncthing as a syncing layer is so much more elegant than everyone implementing their own server and sync protocol.
I strongly suspect that this new VC-funded Bitwarden will eventually close off their applications API and client applications, but with an open-source server API provided by Vaultwarden it should be possible to create new, open-source clients, too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Those tricks are not as easy to pull anymore. Arguably, they did with Bitwarden already, no? Ie even if they don't do anything bad - they still executed steps of free users and large VC checks. Which is to say, does it not seem like they've already executed the "trick"? Users are already there, they have cash in hand. Their motivations don't matter much here, we as users can only see their actions. But i don't foll…