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The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

blog.ppb1701.com

81–90 of 333 posts

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#81
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, where are you moving?

Apple's passwords app. It's what I use almost everywhere. I use 1password for work but I'd prefer not to mix work and personal life.

1Password for Business accounts all get an additional 1Password for Families license (5 seats), so you can absolutely keep your work and personal life separate.

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#82
I started looking for a replacement when I noticed how much RAM the extension was using. >1GB for a password manager seems ridiculous. I'm currently debating between Keepassium and Strongbox but I wonder if there is something better.

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#83
post #32

After the LastPass fiasco I switched to selfhosting a password manager (bw). Rapidly starting to think even a vibecoded solution may be a better plan relying on commercial options. High risk of don’t roll your own crypto mistakes but realistically that’s not the threat model here anymore for the random individual. It’s online breaches or perhaps a wrench attack not highly skilled crypto adversary. Plus there are prob…

Vibecoding a password manager might be the worst idea ever. You'd be better off with an encrypted Excel sheet. But otherwise, 1Password is great imo and there are other free open source password managers.

Actual password managers (eg not my old excel sheet) protect you against url doppelgänger and related phishing attacks, as well as incidentally discourage password reuse. 1Password can even now warn you if you try to paste into the wrong website (https://support.1password.com/browser-autofill-security/)

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#84
I got my parents using bitwarden a few years ago. This was a massive improvement over them writing passwords in a little notebook in a drawer (yes, really!).

But Keepass is a bridge too far for them. I'm not that enthusiastic about it myself to be honest. The UX is a bit meh (for the clients/extensions I've tried) and file syncing and handling is not something I can in good conscience push to a non technical user. It's just too many moving parts and you just have to do this, that, and the other thing. It's not really fit for purpose with normal users as far as I can see. Like much OSS stuff, UX for normal people seems to be a bit of an afterthought with Keepass.

The key selling point of Bitwarden was that it is free-ish and it is easy enough to work with for somebody that is not too technical. My father is an Android user and my mother has an iphone and ipad. They need access to each other's passwords so they share the same password manager. They are both in their seventies and I need something that is similarly useful and ideally without me self hosting a lot of stuff on their behalf. I don't want to be their system administrator. And I don't want to have to sit them down to migrate their passwords every few years either.

Right now the best move to me seems to be to stick with Bitwarden. I don't really gain anything from moving them over to some other solution and there isn't really anything out there that is materially better as far as I can see.

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#85
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some other commenter says there are Archive.org cached versions with "Start free" instead of "Always free", so they must have backpedaled on this. Maybe they realized they turned the knob a bit too much towards "hot", increasing the temperature of the proverbial water too noticeably.

I’m not willing to check all the pages on archive.org but for sure a month ago they had a big “Basic Free” tile in the plan comparison. Now it’s just Premium and Family. They are definitely downplaying the ability to use it for free. https://web.archive.org/web/20260414143334/https://bitwarden...

Seems like they want to downplay the mentally that you would never benefit from an upsell to the paid plans, even if the free plan itself stays always free

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#86
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting really tired of the enshittification cycle. Learning about android verification and captcha changes recently has been another big frustration point. I moved to android as a more open alternative to apple just a few years ago, and to bitwarden from lastpass around the same time. I would like to just have these infrastructural services work well and quietly without thinking about them for many years. Do I r…

Vendors doing a rug-pull isn't just capitalism. China is adding DRM to AM radio: old receivers won't work. Heck, Soviet WWII ration cards no longer give turmips.

They're not doing it to increase margin. "Enshittification" or "rug-pulls" aren't when things get worse or things change, they're when the conditions that were used to attract an audience are changed in order to extract more margin after that audience is captured.

The larger exampls to compare them to would be "dumping." Dump subsidized, tariff-free corn in Mexico to make it unprofitable to farm corn in Mexico, and after all of the Mexican farmers go bust, buy their land and raise the price of corn to infinity while cheaping out on the quality of seed and handling. Enshittification. Rug-pull.

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#87

When I first learnt about Bitwarden about 3 years ago, I started hosting Vaultwarden right away. Right now I have one instance for myself and another for my friend's company. Everything runs as smooth as butter. If you can self-host something, do self-host a Vaultwarden instance. If you are (like me) somewhat paranoid about the fact that Vaultwarden hasn't got a proper security audit on its codebase, just run it behi…

I'm running Vaultwarden because while on the one hand I'd like to just pay a company to make my password problem go away, I don't know who I can actually trust to not try to take advantage of the fact they have all the keys to all my kingdoms at some point. I see some people complaining about "Private Equity", with justification, and before that it was the "Harvard MBA" mindset, where businesses are encouraged to think of their customers as a resource to be stripmined rather than relationships to cultivate.

I don't like being considered a resource to be stripmined by any company, but some are worse than others by the nature of our relationship. I do not need a company greedily looking at my bank password, my Google password, my brokerage account password, and even having them be tempted to look at my set of passwords with them and start valuating which password they can "intermediate" and charge me more for using. I don't even want them pondering the question of how they can break exports ("oops, sorry, passkeys can't be exported because $SECURITY_BLATHER, guess you won't be migrating" - to be fair, while I think Bitwarden had that for a bit I believe it's no longer true, but AFAIK it is true of other things that will hold passkeys for you) so that they can extract the value of my passwords to me.

I don't trust Private Equity or the Harvard MBA mindset to be allowed to hold on to my passwords. I don't trust any company holding passwords to not eventually be acquired by PE/HMBA types looking to stripmine my passwords. I don't trust any company that is, once you trace the entire value chain down, basically taking out real debt with my passwords as collateral. They get the money, I get the risk. Hard pass.

So I'm not happy about self-hosting my password vault in some sense... but who else can I trust?

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#88
I am tired of this bullshit.

Want to raise the price? Fine, be honest about it and make sure it stays sustainably stable for a long while.

I am not leaving because of the price, but because of the dishonest behaviour around something so central and vital to my daily life.

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#89
Even if the clients go closed source and forked, there's still the very serious issue of closed app ecosystems on iOS and Android. It's one thing to self-host a Vaultwarden instance, it's another entirely to pay Google and Apple $100 a year to publish your own app.

Re: The quiet renovation at Bitwarden

#90
post #19

It still says "Always free" on the website for me. It's both on the billing page on the page linked in the article. I do share the concerns though. The change in leadership, the poor transparency, 100% price increase and the quiet change in core values. I was happy paying $10 yearly for Bitwarden. I'm still okay with $20 but there's a seed of doubt.

> It still says "Always free" on the website for me. It's both on the billing page on the page linked in the article.

Just went to the website directly: says "Get Started Free". "Always Free" is only present at the bottom of the pricing page for personal customers.

What concerns me more is that they've started using the same language that Adobe had been panned for: "$price a month, billed yearly".

To me, thats weird language for a product that (now) costs $20.00 a year. Not hundreds or thousands. Twenty dollars. For non-enterprise users.

The lack of transparency and quietly changing things around makes me wary.

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