Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitwarden raises $100M

bitwarden.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 522 posts

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#421

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

rvz wrote: post #275
api wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bad but how else do you fund a serious software project? Polished well tested and supported software is massively expensive to produce yet we've conditioned the market to believe it should be "free," which means the only way to really do it is to do something like the above. If everyone expected a car to be free cars would be loaded with all kinds of convoluted bolted-on features to extract money from you: ad…

JetBrains has already done it for years. [0] Hundreds of millions in revenue. Profitable. Zero VC capital raised. [0] Supporting, sells and develops open-source software used by millions of developers worldwide. When I see capital raised, the treadmill for an expected return starts running and it is not for everyone. [0] https://twitter.com/chetanp/status/1205907182396395525

>JetBrains has already done it for years.

JetBrains was also founded in Eastern Europe which probably helped a lot in getting off the ground with little money as there your dollars used to go way, way further than in the west and the local job opportunities were scarce.

In the early 2000's an experienced SW dev in my corner of Eastern Europe was lucky to take home 300 USD and would not shy away form overtime as needed. Replicating the same thing in present day would be impossible as now no self respecting experienced dev here would get out of bed for less than 2k EUR take home pay and would absolutely do the bare minimum with zero overtime, or even work way less than the contracted working time.

The 90's to early 2000's was a wild west in Eastern Europe. Few job opportunities, low wages and low CoL, plus fast internet in every home, meant that everyone was hustling hard in their free time to make a great SW product using no money at all to sell on the international market and get rich.

Now things are different here. Plenty of great paying jobs at established western companies or startups means that the people here are more likely to just want to work at random big corp or new startup for good pay and WLB rather than put 50h+ workweeks in building their own product at home like their predecessors did.

My point is that JetBrains was more of an exception by catching a great wave in time and space that can't be replicated today.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#422

Post by judge2020 »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #419
vinay_ys wrote: post #415

In the next couple of years, I expect FIDO2 Passwordless Auth to be ubiquitous, natively supported by all OS platforms. Built-in authentication credentials managers within Apple and Google/Android platforms will get more focused attention to improve them significantly. I suspect this should basically render the consumer market not monetizable. So, their free forever strategy here is aligned. In corporate market, I wo…

Why is it impossible to find out what the typical user experience of FIDO2 Passwordless Auth is? Every time I try and learn it's just a sea of acronyms I've never heard of before. How do I explain FIDO2 Passwordless Auth to my mother?

When you sign up for an online account, instead of inputting a password, your login is synced via your browser profile, or more likely, an account / app on your phone. To log in, you'll always either need to be signed-in on your browser, or scan a QR code on a computer to sign in to your account (WebAuthn over BLE, or cloud-assisted Bluetooth Low Energy (caBLE)).

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#424

Post by godelski »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #412
bborud wrote: post #152

I switched to Bitwarden when LastPass started using silly tactics to make customers pay. I didn't switch because of the price - the service pricing of Bitwarden was a pleasant surprise. I switched because I lost all trust in LastPass. Managing credentials and sensitive information is all about trust. The second I lose trust in that kind of service, I don't just stop using it, I will most likely never even consider co…

LastPass pricing model is what turned me off. I am happy to pay for services I use regularly, but I remember the pricing model didn't seem appropriate for what they were offering. The short cutoff period added insult to injury. I checked out Bitwarden and it seemed like a better version of LastPass that just happened to be free. Their paid model doesn't appeal to me so I don't subscribe, but I would enjoy paying if t…

Same, I even remember paying for LastPass for a bit. It was more that I wanted to support a service I liked (same reason I pay for other services). Though I find BW's paid model a bit surprising. I know it is only $10/yr, but the only real value here is 1GB storage and yubi/fido keys. I don't have yubi keys (they seem cool but also a pain in the ass) and 1GB seems rather small.

Looking at Google, Dropbox, and Apple, storage pricings range from 4GB/$ (Apple) to 20GB/$ (Google's 5+TB plans). I'm willing to bet that offering 5GB would make it more worthwhile and a very small fraction of your users would actually use it. What are you going to store? Your passport photo and driver's license? I wonder if there would be a psychological effect here because it is really hard to tell if 1GB is enough or not. At least your average person has no idea.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#425

Post by buro9 »

The code for the server is AGPLv3 https://github.com/bitwarden/server , with only things in the /bitwarden_license/ directory being proprietary.

The code for the mobile apps is GPLv3 https://github.com/bitwarden/mobile/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

The code for the clients is GPLv3 https://github.com/bitwarden/clients

These are all copyleft... with a CLA (contributor license agreement). It's the CLA that allows them the ability to dual-license for the server.

The VCs must really believe the company can produce a product based on Enterprise sales which would deliver a value North of $1B. And perhaps they can, as Bitwarden as we know it could be considered a strong beachhead to allow them to expand into other auth markets that have high value (hello Okta, Auth0, etc).

But this doesn't seem that scary for Bitwarden users at this point.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#426

Post by themagician »

lvl102 wrote: post #423

Here comes price hikes. This is why I kept asking these guys if they had a lifetime sub.

In a world where the average hardware cycle is 1-2 years, the software cycle before obsoletion is 3-5, perpetual subscription is the only way. Software written today for consumer devices like iPhones and Android devices will break is 2-3 years if not maintained, and often much sooner than that.

It sucks. Gone are the days where you could buy Microsoft Office and run it for 10-15 years.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#427

Post by _verandaguy »

pydry wrote: post #417
_verandaguy wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually roughly what they're doing: - They have a hosted/managed version with a free tier and a paid tier. Paid adds things like MFA and support for orgs. The more you pay, the enterprisey-er the org support gets. - There's also a self-hosted version which follows a very similar scheme. You can start out for free, but if you want things like MFA or a self-hosted org, you're paying the Warden.

They could do all of that without VC. To justify 100 mil of VC theyd have to expand far beyond just being a password manager.

I agree. I'm not sure what they've got in store next. I imagine they might leverage the VC connections rather than the money to try and get a bigger foothold in the enterprise space, for one, but $100M is $100M and I've got no idea where that can go given the current state of things.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#428

Post by _verandaguy »

candiddevmike wrote: post #332
_verandaguy wrote: post #199

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.

Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on Vaultwarden?

I haven't used it, and last time I heard of it, it was still called bitwarden_rs. I like the project in principle since it capitalizes on BW's open API, and that's really good work in the spirit of open-source software.

Having said that: I haven't dug into it much. I don't know what the current state of auditing on it is, or how widespread adoption is relative to the mainline BW backend. I hope they use a database backend other than BW's default MSSQL, which has always seemed like a weird choice to me coming from mostly Linux, and so mostly Postgres and Maria/MySQL, though I skew heavily developer over DBA, and that distinction may as well be personal preference (as in, I don't have an intelligent reason to dislike MSSQL beyond my habit of using other things).

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#429

Post by elric »

Good. Maybe now they can finally get around to fixing some of the rough edges for enterprisey customers. Onboarding new users is a pain. The audit UI is a pain. There is (still!) no way to share a password with another user within the same organization (except by creating a Collection and granting access to that, that's not what you want when you're creating an email account for a user and want to give them their initial password).

That, and their UI is pretty cluttered and ugly, though the latter is subjective.

Re: Bitwarden raises $100M

#430

Post by InTheArena »

jbaczuk wrote: post #395
InTheArena wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried bitwarden, and went back to 1Password. My ecosystem needs to be a bit independent for apple, just in case Apple starts acting like google, and locking users out of their accounts forever. The apple keychain has a really awful interface (surprising for apple) and family management is poor.

Not sure I understand, why did you switch back?

Ahh. Didn't tackle that - integration and user interface primarily.
Post reply on HN