Great find. This blog post - and specifically the background of the new management team - convinced me to start looking for a Bitwarden alternative. I’m watching the same “boil the frog” strategy unfold at Namecheap, and erode much of the brand trust they had built up over a decade, and it’s a shame.
> I’m watching the same “boil the frog” strategy unfold at Namecheap, and erode much of the brand trust they had built up over a decade, and it’s a shame.
What's happening with Namecheap? I've been a user for a long time and haven't noticed anything.. Maybe I'm one of the frogs being boiled!
Proton Pass. I stopped using Bitwarden for a different reason, the mobile app was too slow when not connected to internet. I can't accept such slowness, the company will definitely give justifications for this. But I don't care, let me see my passwords or notes for a website immediately. Proton Pass is better in this regard.
I am using Keepass XC + Keepass DX synchronized with Syncthing. There's really nothing to self-host, other than throwing Syncthing on a NAS so you can make sure you have at least one machine online at all times. But even that isn't critical, since both Keepass XC and Keepass DX have a "Merge" option if anything falls out of sync.
ive used keepassxc forever, switched to proton pass after the release, because i was managing my db in git and it was always a pain to keep in sync, but switched back a couple of weeks ago with exactly the same setup, syncthing and KeepassDx also works suprisingly well.
mostly i was missing power user features and especially ux for the browser plugin, namely you can't operate it fully with the keyboard, with keepassxc you can
As as self-hoster, I recommend vault warden. Supports 2fa, written in rust, works pretty well, is easy to backup, and you can use bitwarden's phone client.
I'm curious why other self hosters think it's a bad idea.
For me, vaultwarden's RSS is ~45 MB, with ~13MB of that being shared. I have it running as a secondary thing on a 512 MB machine and don't notice it's there. Is there a reason you presume it's a memory hog?
I'm surprised, actually. I expected at least an order of magnitude more. In my humble opinion, this is still a lot of memory -- probably an order of magnitude (or even two) more than what is realistically required for the task. But this is just my own philosophy, and I do realize that the days of careful memory utilization are long gone.
For me, RSS 35 MB, SHR 23 MB. The vaultwarden executable is 38 MB (typical Rust executable that links Rust code statically, and only dynamically links libssl.so and libc.so dynamically).
So probably its RSS usage is just mostly its own executable code?
I don't see much reason not to self-host a properly built password manager like Vaultwarden or something similar? The clients keep a local encrypted copy of the vault, so the server only needs to be up for syncing. If it went down for a week, you probably wouldn't even notice unless you were saving new logins. And even if the server got hacked, everything on it is encrypted. Why do you think it should not be selfhosted?
Thanks, on these topics I feel like I’m fucking crazy for not wanting to self host.
If you believe that the technology works, that encryption is happening and that the decryption is only happening on your local machine then why in the fuck would I host this myself?
You need to believe that it does not work when they do it, but does work when you do it.
It should be something like, well, git (but likely not directly git): something that replicates easily, so that you'd have a remote copy accessed via internet ("hosted"), and local copies where you see fit.
Keepass people always in these topics with ”offline rules!! … now let me tell you how I use it with a copy on my phone and sync it with Dropbox and a backup on a git repo”
Not sure if still the case but normally you have to not only 'sign in' but also feed them information (e.x. salary at a position, write a review, etc.) in order to be able to view much of anything.
They also do not give a shit about obvious 'juicing' (i.e. when it is obvious that upper management and/or HR is adding reviews where the 'con' reads like one of those softball warning phrases in a job description.)
This is the fate of every online review site. Every single one. Including IMDB as I realised yesterday while trying to find something to watch.
The most egregious example I've found was that the Danish postal service had something like a 4,8/5,0 rating on Trustpilot. You'll be hard pressed to find a more inept, corrupt and universally hated company. So in an attempt to improve their public image, they decided to game the ratings, instead of actually delivering mail properly.
In the specific case of Glassdoor, leaving a review about an organization sometime requires a proof that you work there, e.g. receiving a pass code sent to a work email. I'd say that this is reasonable, and makes gaming the reviews much harder.
Yes they can. But then you see which account as took part of the DDOS scraping, and delete all accounts that match the pattern and site gets back under control.
Fundamentally it's all a game of whack-a-mole for admins unless some kind of microtransaction system is invented. Then a DDOS scraping event is just extra revenue.
This post is what triggered me to cancel my subscription and migrate away from Bitwarden in July. I’ve seen too many repeats of this show. This has completely soured me from cloud-backed critical software. Slowly moving toward offline alternatives wherever possible and self-hosting when it isn’t.
Is there any writing on it that was written by a human? This blog post is clearly AI.
It's somewhat concerning to me that none of the security conscious people in this thread seem to notice that they are changing their privacy practices based on the advice of a language model pretending to be a person.
SSO is the feature many companies put behind their most expensive plans. It's exactly why the personal software revolution will take over SaaS.
The argument here is always why would people spend all this time and money to build custom software when they can just pay a company $20-100 bucks a month? Because that product will become enshittified. It's not a question of if, its a question of when. I thought open-source SaaS would be immune, but clearly not.
SaaS is what killed open source. "OSS SaaS" is just the resurrected undead abominations that somehow manage to trick the peasants and pass off as living.
Ok this is doing some damage. What's a possible alternative that works on both mobile and desktop, doesn't require yourself to run a server, and doesn't have worse reputation?
keepassxc works across any major platform, mobile platforms have keepass2android and KeePassium. You don't have to run your own server, but you do need some type of file sharing system to keep them synced. I personally run a webdav share on a vps with some sync scripts to keep a backup on devices otherwise. OneDrive, google drive, dropbox, and others work.
I specifically moved away from KeePassXC to Bitwarden with self hosted vaultwarden because the Linux desktop experience and mobile syncing was so terrible. While I love KeePassXC, using it on an immutable Linux distro where everything needs to be Flatpak means the browser extension doesn't work because it doesn't support Flatpak'd browsers back when I switched. Auto type is a security nightmare and is not an option. Syncing does not exist and with the constant death and forking of Syncthing on Android, it became unusable to randomly find out my db hasn't synced for a week and now I have to reset everything with a new fork yet again.
Bitwarden was the no nonsense choice because it just worked.
I used to use gnupass and its variants (including passforios on mobile), but what brought me to bitwarden was being able to make changes on two clients and merge the results cleanly / usefully without needing to do anything manually at all.
How does this work with keepassxc? Does it depend on your file syncing primitive?
When I stopped using KeePassXC, there was no merging. You configured each client to save immediately and reload when detecting the file changed. If you used a tool like Syncthing then you had to monitor for conflicts (which stopped syncing) and manually fix them. If the major clients on Linux, Android, and browser extensions all supported proper syncing on their own, I might switch back.
At the time I decided to go with regular keepass, it was because setting up OneDrive sync (directly to OneDrive, not depending on a mapped folder because I use as little MS software as possible) and browser extension was easier. And the cross platform UI on KeePassXC just didn’t look and feel good on windows.
I already have "Proton Unlimited" as a subscription but until now I never used Proton Pass. I thought about giving up on Bitwarden for some time and probably will try it now. AFAIK you can even import your Bitwarden logins.
FWIW I moved to Proton Pass after I read the blog post months ago. The switch was seamless except for passkeys (had to enroll new ones; back then I only found a tool to convert Proton Pass passkeys to Bitwarden, but not the other way around)
For me, Pass works much better, especially passkeys on Android. Bitwarden was very flaky in that regard, Proton Pass "just works".
I use Pass for personal logins and sharing family-related accounts with my wife.
I'm really happy that Proton Pass provides an option to copy the username/password when you right click on an item. In the Bitwarden macOS app you have to click a dedicated copying button which feels so unintuitive and I had to consciously think about this every time I needed to copy a username/password. And Bitwarden has so many other things that could be improved in its UI, but due to muscle memory I forgot that there exist other password managers out there. So far Proton Pass seems to be much more polished than Bitwarden. Except it took me a while to find how to enable 2FA, which is in "Account and password" (not "Security and privacy") in the account settings.
Proton Pass has a good backend, but their clients are so-so. Specifically, the auto-fill feature in both browser extension and Android client. The browser extension is also pretty buggy, keeps forgetting settings, and occasionally logs me out.
Keepass on pc, keepass2android on mobile and the file is stored on onedrive. I'm starting to use macos so I'll install onedrive on it. Now onedrive's reputation is Microsoft's but I haven't heard of massive security breaches like many online password manager had.
Proton ticks all good-company boxes. E2ee, majority owned by the Proton foundation, all client-side code is OSS, and some other structures in place to protect themselves from corp greed. Best I could find.
Didn't it recently come out that the ceo of proton was donating to far right groups interested in dismantling privacy and security, let alone their racist policies?
In so far as google translate and my adhd filter can tell, he donated to political party that support marxism … maybe people are figuring-out that authoritarian happens on both sides to the 1 dimensional political spectrum
Writing password down on paper and keeping them in your wallet.
Seriously. About as secure, if you're honest about the actual threat model (vs one security aficionados would like you to assume), and paper can't be enshittified.
I hate this. So much software I love keeps doing this. redis, docker, now bitwarden. I was so happy with bitwarden. Been a premium subscriber for many years. I have helped convert many people, including whole companies, to use this. Now they are doing us such a disservice. We need a completely free, no-nonsence, alternative. I wonder if it is possible to do a ipfs/torrent version without a central authority to permanently prevent this type of issue.
I wonder that too, perhaps by encrypting the data with a key generated from a long passphrase meaningful to the user, that nobody could possibly guess. Then just store the data in a permanent cloud like IPFS, pinned with 4EVERLAND, Filebase and/or Pinata:
Maybe someone could write a provably private client-based browser decryption script, hosted on various websites. We might need a new browser spec that sandboxes pages until they're unsandboxed, allowing them no egress/ingress or even local storage or cookies.
Or better yet, take that choice away from browser vendors, and create a runtime in the browser that simply can't be observed, perhaps by using zero-knowledge proofs.
Writing this out, I wonder if the issue is due to longstanding incomplete browser architecture, going back to when the web went mainstream in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it's still just an open problem.
Solve private distributed durable storage, along with a base level of secret computation eventually running about the speed of a 6502, 286 or 68000, and we wouldn't need free services that inevitably get privatized and ensh!ttified.
I have no idea if something like this already exists, I'm just speculating as to what base functionality it might need from first principles.
Also I wonder if similar techniques could be recruited to build an OS around cryptocurrency. That way a meta economy could run alongside the corrupt economy, and shield users from currency devaluation and other wealth inequality drivers used by the ultra-wealthy to increase the value of the means of production that they own relatively, so that they can buy more.
Arguably the process of wealth concentration is so fundamental that it puts a countdown on capitalism, driving it towards the late-stage capitalism that we've had since about 1970 when productivity diverged from wages, and eventually revolution which results in socialism/communism or even permanent authoritarian dystopia like on Star Wars. In a way, it's in the best interests of the ultra-wealthy to build meta economies, which of course makes those economies suspect and probably vulnerable to exploits, especially in the AI age. We've seen how crypto has created black markets capable of capturing governments, so maybe we should be careful what we wish for.
But really I just don't want to type my password anymore.
Nit: IPFS is never a "permanent cloud", even with pinning services - you stop paying, eventually the data will be gone as no one will serve it anymore. You might be looking for Arweave for better permanence, which 4EVERLAND also supports as a storage target (although there is no way to "update" the data as well)
I think most people don't mind paying for software, they just mind situations like having to rent software forever (subscriptions), or software companies being ran by people who are only focused on increasing revenue at the expense of actual making good/better software.
I think subscriptions are fair if you want updates, which for anything security related you do. The alternative (from decades ago) is to re-buy it every few years.
The information is there, and could fit one paragraph.
Everything else is just a nonsense, watermark and fluff, scamming from time and attention - there's NO value in the filler.
To reiterate: there's no value in this sort of the LLM garbage. There's value in the information, especially when formatted and provided in the humane format.
Unfortunately, any "insight" it might contain is ruined by the fact it's clearly written by an LLM instead of a person.
> And it never comes in a single dramatic announcement. It comes in layers. A feature post with a price change inside it. A LinkedIn update nobody made a press release about. A values page that says something slightly different than it did last week. If you’re still on Bitwarden cloud and this is giving you pause — it should. [...] Whether self-hosting stays viable long-term is the real question worth sitting with.
I actually find this somewhat understandable; and I'll be continuing my subscription; as long as all source continues to be available and personal self-hosting remains a viable option.
Yes, I'd much prefer full open source, but "all source available; some restrictions on commercial use" is still miles better; the OSS funding and incentives problem is still unsolved.
Just look at Elasticsearch -> AWS ElasticSearch; or Redis -> ElastiCache; etc.
It's like leeching: a big corporation, with far more distribution and brand takes your codebase; and their structural advantages (in terms of distribution) makes it an extremely difficult uphill battle for you to compete.
I struggle to think of solutions: yes, they are doing everything by the license; so the main viable solution seems to be... changing the license.
I was at redis when they changed the license (the first time). I begged the new leadership to not change the core license but to do a few things instead.
1) bundle the "source available" modules as part of redis source distribution
2) enable people who only want bsd code to be able to build a "redis_core"
3) commit to the community that the core will remain BSD licensed and that they are committed to making it the best key/value store.
4) increase the amount of source available code that until then had been kept closed (including what we called big redis/RedisOnFlash/MultiTier)
5) Require anyone using the redis trademarks in a commercial setting to ship the entire Redis (which includes the source available portions, so Amazon et al would no longer be able to use the Redis trademarks without a license deal.
Another alternative was to simply go to AGPL (which they went to anyways awhile later).
I failed to convince the leadership about this. I honestly think they squandered huge value in community engagement, but perhaps that's what they wanted. I left a bit after these changes were made as it became clear that the new US led leadership of the company wasn't particularity interested in what was the soul of redis. (previously was heavily Israeli led and a critical mass there was invested in redis as an open source product).
Funny story, the then new/current CEO used to be the head of WebEx at Cisco. We had a Q&A when he was hired and I asked, what did he learn from his time at WebEx about how to maintain market position (as they lost everything to zoom et al). His response at the time wasn't that convincing, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I feel its fair to ask if the same thing occurred again.
> His response at the time wasn't that convincing, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I feel its fair to ask if the same thing occurred again.
Business will have to try different things at different points due to external & internal pressures. Some decisions are reversible (at cost), some aren't. Decisions (chaotic / complex / complicated ones, at least) are not made merely based on available data and analysis, but also based on intuition, experiments, and predictions. Then, to look at the outcome rather than the process is missing the point. When the circumstance / situation isn't clear-cut, the feedback (the outcome of a decision) is in itself more valuable to the organization (than never having taken the decision, at all), especially when the costs (to reverse / change it) are bearable.
I’m conflicted. On one hand I’m grateful for the years of trustworthy (and pay-what-you-want) password management. On the other this feels like an attempt to EEE the free version.
That's my concern as well. I have no problem with the current license change if they continue to publish all the code as they claim. My concern is that this is usually step 1 in a boil-the-frog strategy to eventually split and break off enterprise features. I'll give them some trust until they give me a reason not to (I think they've earned it), but the concern remains.
The thing I always think about is that they wouldn't have to change the license and tighten the screws if people paid for it. Getting mad that the free hosted password manager has changed the deal a little bit I find to be quite arrogant.
Pay the $20/yr or whatever to have them host it and the whole world keeps turning.
Hosted password manager is equivalent to publishing all your passwords outright.
Now, given the general ignorance on infosec I'm suprised that people actually refused to pay to upload their passwords. The world has some hope after all.
People are going to try much harder to break into the main Bitwarden servers than they are my little Vaultwarden instance. Plus, I have the ability to lock it behind a VPN so it isn't even publicly exposed.
But even if they do all that, they still have to break my password. Nobody is going through all that for a one user password manager.
I'm not sure where your sentiment comes from here.
> But even if they do all that, they still have to break my password. Nobody is going through all that for a one user password manager.
A PW manager relying on only a single password as the encryption key - and one that you type in frequently, mind you - has always been a little of a design issue to me. I much prefer 1Password's approach where they have a usually-hidden second secret (the "Secret Key") that both (A) isn't shown unless you're setting up another device, and (B) acts as extra data needed to form the decryption key for your vault.
The main threat model I'm thinking of protecting against is a 1password vault data breach of some kind (or possibly cooperation with government agencies) + password exposure in some way (be it from CCTV-extracted password entries, over-the-shoulder watching, etc), as even with both of those factors, they would somehow need to get your secret key to decrypt vaults.
Like, all of those lastpass vaults obtained during the Lastpass hack would be de-facto useless even with a correct password if their design included some sort of hidden secret secret.
I'm not sure that calculus is going to be true for much longer – with the costs of AI falling, it's going to be much easier to throw tokens at the problem even tiny targets that wouldn't have been worth it before. Can you guarantee your VPN is patched and secure at all times?
I mean, no it's absolutely nothing like "publishing all your passwords outright" but fine. Pay the $20/yr and don't have them host it, host it yourself. Just pay them the $20.
Sorry but the elasticsearch thing was a big stupid take of elastic. It was big corpo against big corpo not the poor elastic company.
Changing licenses is a sick move and companies doing that should be fucked over, because the license made them big. Changing it later on means that they got greedy nothing more nothing less.
Without oss bitwarden would be a paid cloud like all the others that probably would’ve had a hard time getting trusted.
We’ve seen it countless times over the last decade. OpenSolaris was the first big one. The open source side isn’t going to change, it’ll just get abandoned. They’re committed to open source… for now. Nothing is going to change… for now. They’ll maintain compatibility with compatible servers… for now.
Everything will get chipped away piece by piece. It’s been happening continuously for well over a decade at this point and everyone should understand the strategy by now.
As a loyal Bitwarden user, I think this is great news.
I love that Bitwarden exists, but as an "open source" project, it's always been a trad-corporate type code maintenance, rather than community-driven source contributions (exactly why we've seen things like Vaultwarden pop up) & that has generally just left all of their clients in that really awkward space where they're just good enough to be able to imagine their potential, but their maintenance is stagnant enough to ensure they'll never reach it.
Imo the community needs this kick to motivate the development of alt vaultwarden clients. Bitwarden gives us a great starting point but we need to break away.
Okay, it’s good they have the open source because if you rewrite the Chrome extension you can get it to load in under 100 ms after you click the button. If you use the standard Chrome extension you’re not having that happen on an M1 Max. Their stuff is far too heavy. Full JS framework to display a small box.
In today’s day and age I read the OP as saying that threw an LLM at the extension repo and had it reimplement/improve upon for a private fork of theirs.
IMO Bitwarden really isn't that well engineered software, and I now use Keyguard on Android/Vaultwarden server instead. Reminds me of Subsonic, with many competing clients/servers. Hopefully someone will write a third party browser extension as the current one is quite slow/buggy.
It's all just slow and mediocre. The Windows desktop client is a massive almost 400MB-download behemoth (and is electron-based), and if you have SSH keys you want to store in it you have no choice but to use it. Oh and you can't log into the browser extension automatically from the desktop client.
Admittedly the mobile clients have since been rewritten to be native (they were _really_ slow before), but Keyguard is still much faster/lighter.
I started using 1Password at work and it's just a.. nicer experience? It does all this and more. Everything is fast, the browser extension is more proactive/recognises fields better (Bitwarden can't really do multi step logins), and the desktop client isn't a chore to use.
The best comparison I would give is comparing Immich and Jellyfin (if you've used these), they are miles apart in terms of end user experience/polish/efficient design. One is engineered, the other feels like it's been hacked together by hobbyists.
Same goes for the bitwarden cli (`bw`).
Its super slow and if you use it in scripts to pull multiple values (username, password), it takes ages. I personally switched to rbw (https://github.com/doy/rbw) and its day and night.
Syncing is iffy. Saving credentials associated to a shared org fails randomly. Rendering (x11/Firefox) sometimes fails completely, but is predictably slow. Auto fill can be buggy. Opening vaults on iOS can be remarkably slow.
Besides being slow, I found it buggy as hell. For instance, I wanted to log in with my Yubikey on my phone, and it flat out refused to let me in despite the master password and the PIN being 100% correct. There's even an open issue on Github about this, that they're doing absolutely nothing about, demonstrating the incompetence further at some really grand scales.
Yup, instant nope here (That and not having a browser addon, passwords in the browser is 99% of my password-use).
All other stuff is mostly SSH keys / ssh-agent.
Circa earlier this year I found this blog post, and have – as a paying customer nonetheless, mind you – continued to expect a 180-degree turn (which to be clear, this not yet is) ever since:
Everyone is mentioning Vaultwarden, but self-hosting this kind of service comes with quite a strong requirement of keeping it secure. Many might prefer letting a trusted actor take care of that.
Then the community says it's okay, people are going to fork their clients, but that's gonna take trusting the future maintainers.
Also, even though they commit to keep maintaining an open source channel, we won't be able to verify the builds anymore.
Why does the title of this submission say "Dual License"? The linked page doesn't use that term anywhere, and it's also not an accurate description of what this change is.
Instead of overlaying its own UI on top of form fields, I'd like Bitwarden (or any other PW manager) to act as a provider for the underlying system's native fill service, usually the browser, or Android, or OSX. They will always work much better than any 3rd party app.
I use it on Android and it's always been a Bitwarden-specific pop-up that shows up on password fields. Maybe with accessibility mode it would work as you mention? Ok that's a new thing to test.
I’ve been a premium subscriber for 10+ years and I have to admit I don’t really care about this license stuff. As long as it keeps working well I’m happy.
i dont know how many years ive been a subscriber -- the oldest email ive got from them is switching my email 8 years ago, and i know for certain i used it on another email before that... but emails on that previous domain were never long lived, so theyre gone.
anyway, the bigger issue ive with this is the doubling of the price right from the get-go.
with private equity on the steering wheel, i suspect this will keep going up every year from now on, so ... while i too have been a loyal customer to date, i suspect ill be driven out within the next 1-2 years, because if they double the price again next year, its gonna be way beyond the value i get out of it given how decent the alternative have become since.
The latest macOS/native UI refresh is horrible though. It really hasn't improved in terms of speed either after regressing during the UI refresh before the latest.
Is there any reason to? It's kinda nice that they all stick to the same contract. I don't really like the Bitwarden desktop app, but because there's so much code out there, it was pretty easy to have an LLM write a detailed spec for a client and then implement something that works for me.
The Bitwarden web client has actively broken Vaultwarden compatibility at least once <https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/issues/7607>. It’s reasonable to expect they’ll do so more, carelessly or deliberately. They already have features and UI that don’t make sense for Vaultwarden, and the rate of such things feels to me (as a mere user) to have increased. When Bitwarden continues in the direction they’re going, I think a hard fork of the entire ecosystem for Vaultwarden is fairly likely, and it will almost certainly be a good thing, and in hindsight we’ll probably wish the fork branched off earlier.
The question is, what structure can protect this in an ongoing way? Say you setup a non-profit foundation, even those seemingly can be perverted to become for-profit businesses with corporate shenanigans (see OpenAI), so if you wanted to somehow "guarantee this group always release things this way", is there any legal structure that can enforce this somehow, "forever"?
This is enshittification but I'm not gonna drop Bitwarden unless they do something really bad. I'm already on the F-Droid version from their GitHub for my GrapheneOS phone because that one has no Google services/telemetry.
One of the family members I set up with Bitwarden has said it changed their life and they can't imagine not using it. I would guess that would apply to any crossplatform password manager but Bitwarden is quite good and the one that stuck.
I probably wouldn't move to one of these [1] because I don't like the UI of Proton Pass, the convenience of KeyPass, and 1Passsword is obvious. I'm interested in AliasVault as it seems to be a more privacy-focused password manager, which is cool, but I'd have to look more into it.
Bitwarden is one of the few subscriptions I have in a patron sense - eg: I've never actually needed any of the premium feature's, but I chose to pay anyway as I felt that was a way to contribute to the long term viability of the project.
I'm not immediately upset about the licensing change - I get the need to protect from low effort/value add reselling and things like that. I do still worry if this is a canary for future changes that run counter to the reasons I migrated to bitwarden in the first place (open, robust, trustworthy).
Counter to many other commenters I personally prefer bitwarden over 1password, and certainly over lastpass and roboform, etc.
My only gripe is having to unlock the desktop app separately from the browser extension, which after adopting the ssh agent functionality became kinda annoying.
Not desktop only, KeePass uses an encrypted file, all you need is a way to decrypt it. You can store it in iCloud or whatever you like to sync files between devices.
iOS has a good open source app KeeForge to open the encryped password files. I use SyncTrain on my phone to connect to my SyncThing network.
You can see it as fragmentation, or you can look at it as having a choice. You can pick and choose how you access your data, without any corporation screwing you over the first chance they get.
I get needing to price more, but it really feels like a slow shift to M&A, when they couple it with license changes and “case by case basis” to make it back to OSS.
I’m not sure why growth at all costs needs to be the business model for every company?… make a great product, if you need to charge more over time cool, but don’t rug pull.
Well seems like Bitwarden is dying. A clear move towards enshittification. I was fine with the premium subscription existing while i was self-hosting Vaultwarden, but now every step seems to make that worse.
Now new features will be under the commercial license an everything else will be slowly neglected. Time to jump ship.
I do not like the idea of self-hosting VaultWarden because I generally do not like the idea of application software requiring so much random access memory for even the simplest tasks. So, my idea was to use something like pass[0] or passage[1] (pass[0] + age[2]) on a remote server, but the problem arises when Yubikeys come into play.
I am in no way, shape, or form, endorsing this PonyApp thingy and cannot vouch for it as I haven't audited it. But judging by what it says on the tin, it does appear like a candidate to solve the specific problem I have.
They had/have(?) cybersale recently but did not offer the lifetime version. Otherwise I would have bought it. It is not open-source but it is damn convenient.
But how does this lead them there? It's really badly explained. They already have a paid version that has extra features. (For years now.) Like the SSO integration. What will be different now?
Licensing changes aside, this is why I've never been enthused for hosted password management, it's too easy for the terms of the agreement to change. (And in the case of LastPass, endless breaches). Honestly, plain KeePassXC and an arrangement to sync the password database has served me well because I can use any compatible client I can trust with it.
why do I always feel like "this is where the enshittification begins" when I hear about license changes, even though these seem kind of harmless? But I'm not a lawyer so my hackles always hackle. And yes I am a paying customer, currently
I’ve used vaultwarden and the official bitwarden macOS and iOS clients for a few years now, but it’s probably not wise to stay with it as a server long term, unless VW released their own apps.
I’ve put up with the minor annoyance of Bitwarden iOS app auto-updates breaking compatibility with my server, which requires me to update the docker instance.
It’s likely I’ll just switch to Apple, since I believe they support importing standard password DB formats. I have less enthusiasm now to maintain the link between these ecosystems, especially if one is on a downward enshittification trajectory.
I'm a bit confused what they're actually doing. Their code is now covered by two different licenses with each file licensed under one of the two and they claim the resulting application is using the commercial Bitwarden license and not the GPL license?
How on earth does that work? Is that something the GPL license even allows?
This sounds like they're just taking a GPL licensed application and using it for themselves to make money.
It's how a lot of open-core products work. Basically, when you hold the copyright, you can apply whatever license you wish when distributing the software at any time. People can use existing copies of the code under their old licenses, but they must follow the new terms if they acquire the code through the new channels.
To get any PR merged in Bitwarden, you are forced to sign a CLA that reassigns copyright to Bitwarden Inc so they can relicense as they wish.
> How on earth does that work? Is that something the GPL license even allows?
GPL doesn't apply in this case, since the copy that you are acquiring is entirely under the commercial license.
VC money gonna get their returns one way or another
> Some future components will be published under the commercial license and will exist only in that build. Newly developed features will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis for which license applies to them.
by which it means "no new features will land in OSS versions", as is tradition for open core development
Bitwarden was my go to a while ago before moving to self hosted, even tho my password in the vault can get leaked anytime they won’t matter (2fa not in the same vault), but still, I don’t trust saas or anyone anymore, all crucial things are self hosted.
I don't see hours this business strategy works post LLMs. Someone's just going to immediately prompt into existence any commercial feature you make into the open source side.
The problem with this license change is that it is unenforceable, now that developers believe they can vibe-code their own.
Only a matter of time until we see "OpenWarden", just like we saw the migration from Redis to Valkey.
But let's be honest. "enshittification" here really means "I don't want to pay for my tools and I want it completely for free forever."
Just look at the reactions towards the single UI change made in Firefox on HN [0] and already the complaints are there. Even if you charge your users $1 to remove tracking it is somehow "enshittification" because $1 is too much to pay for software maintenance.
The real cost of maintenance is the amount raised in VC capital (Bitwarden raised $100M) or $600M a year (Google paying Firefox). Donations won't cover the capital needed to fund Firefox or Bitwarden's development at all.
"Open source" is only sustainable when someone else is paying for that maintenance. Small donations will only take you so far until one core developer says that they are underpaid.
Thunderbird is a rare counter-example of an open source project that manages to maintain a significant staff through donations. Although affiliated with Mozilla, they are not funded by Mozilla. (I am no longer affiliated with Thunderbird, but I managed the project in the dark years after Mozilla suddenly dropped all funding and tried to get us to leave Mozilla.)
> But let's be honest. "enshittification" here really means "I don't want to pay for my tools and I want it completely for free forever."
That is completely the opposite of what is happening here. Lots of us pay premium Bitwarden subscriptions and are not happy with the way the company is headed, especially for a security company that holds the keys to many of our kingdoms.
"enshittification" here means a company that we trusted is now started to make decisions which erode that trust. Its happened before and it will happen from here unto eternity.
Ran Vaultwarden for a team of ~15 for years and that's the part I'd watch here, the clients are the leverage, not the server. If the mobile apps stop being buildable from source the self host story gets a lot thinner.
Very insightful blog post listed by another user as a sub-comment. Worth posting as a top-level comment:
https://blog.ppb1701.com/the-quiet-renovation-at-bitwarden
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163389
Great find. This blog post - and specifically the background of the new management team - convinced me to start looking for a Bitwarden alternative. I’m watching the same “boil the frog” strategy unfold at Namecheap, and erode much of the brand trust they had built up over a decade, and it’s a shame.
> I’m watching the same “boil the frog” strategy unfold at Namecheap, and erode much of the brand trust they had built up over a decade, and it’s a shame.
What's happening with Namecheap? I've been a user for a long time and haven't noticed anything.. Maybe I'm one of the frogs being boiled!
Same question, I use CloudFlare for alot of API DNS stuff but register with name cheap because it's been a a good service provider so far.
Have you settled on a BitWarden alternative, or a short list you’re considering?
Proton Pass. I stopped using Bitwarden for a different reason, the mobile app was too slow when not connected to internet. I can't accept such slowness, the company will definitely give justifications for this. But I don't care, let me see my passwords or notes for a website immediately. Proton Pass is better in this regard.
Proton Pass cannot be self-hosted.
I am using Keepass XC + Keepass DX synchronized with Syncthing. There's really nothing to self-host, other than throwing Syncthing on a NAS so you can make sure you have at least one machine online at all times. But even that isn't critical, since both Keepass XC and Keepass DX have a "Merge" option if anything falls out of sync.
ive used keepassxc forever, switched to proton pass after the release, because i was managing my db in git and it was always a pain to keep in sync, but switched back a couple of weeks ago with exactly the same setup, syncthing and KeepassDx also works suprisingly well.
mostly i was missing power user features and especially ux for the browser plugin, namely you can't operate it fully with the keyboard, with keepassxc you can
As as self-hoster, I recommend vault warden. Supports 2fa, written in rust, works pretty well, is easy to backup, and you can use bitwarden's phone client.
I'm curious why other self hosters think it's a bad idea.
> and you can use bitwarden's phone client
What will you use when this stops working in the near future?
You use Keyguard (https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app).
Presumably, it's a memory hog. What is your RAM usage?
For me, vaultwarden's RSS is ~45 MB, with ~13MB of that being shared. I have it running as a secondary thing on a 512 MB machine and don't notice it's there. Is there a reason you presume it's a memory hog?
I'm surprised, actually. I expected at least an order of magnitude more. In my humble opinion, this is still a lot of memory -- probably an order of magnitude (or even two) more than what is realistically required for the task. But this is just my own philosophy, and I do realize that the days of careful memory utilization are long gone.
Thanks for sharing.
For me, RSS 35 MB, SHR 23 MB. The vaultwarden executable is 38 MB (typical Rust executable that links Rust code statically, and only dynamically links libssl.so and libc.so dynamically).
So probably its RSS usage is just mostly its own executable code?
I think the memory hog you're thinking of is the official Bitwarden self-hosted backend. Vaultwarden is pretty light on resources.
As a self-hoster, I don't think password managers should be self-hosted.
On the contrary. If there's one thing you should self-host is definetly password manager.
Why, you can of course self-host it, too, but the infrastructure should be entirely separate.
I don't see much reason not to self-host a properly built password manager like Vaultwarden or something similar? The clients keep a local encrypted copy of the vault, so the server only needs to be up for syncing. If it went down for a week, you probably wouldn't even notice unless you were saving new logins. And even if the server got hacked, everything on it is encrypted. Why do you think it should not be selfhosted?
you just listed all the reasons why you don't need to self host yourself
Thanks, on these topics I feel like I’m fucking crazy for not wanting to self host.
If you believe that the technology works, that encryption is happening and that the decryption is only happening on your local machine then why in the fuck would I host this myself?
You need to believe that it does not work when they do it, but does work when you do it.
I have not seen any evidence of that.
Can’t relate. If you’re worried about you’re own reliability to keep it online, just keep paper backups
What? Why not?
password managers should not involve hosting at all, use something file-local, keepass(xc) or alike
It should be something like, well, git (but likely not directly git): something that replicates easily, so that you'd have a remote copy accessed via internet ("hosted"), and local copies where you see fit.
pass can use git
https://www.passwordstore.org/
Keepass people always in these topics with ”offline rules!! … now let me tell you how I use it with a copy on my phone and sync it with Dropbox and a backup on a git repo”
What’s wrong with self hosted vaultwarden ? I guess there isn’t a FLOSS extension client/app?
Presumably the bitwarden apps will stop working with them eventually
addig Vaulwarden compatibility to already FOSS mobile password managers might be the path of least resistance
or pooling together tokens and asking Claude nicely to make a mobile app
Or just fork the OSS bitwarden client?
With android changes this year how do you deploy it?
That's funny, Bitwarden and Namecheap are the two things I've migrated away from as well.
The switch to Vaultwarden was insanely easy.
And gandi.net.
Just curious, why Namecheap?
GlassDoors reveal the other side of the story
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Bitwarden-Reviews-E4337610...
Wow, another site that now refuses to play ball unless you sign in.
Guess I'll never be visiting Glass Door again then.
GlassDoor has been gross about this for years.
Not sure if still the case but normally you have to not only 'sign in' but also feed them information (e.x. salary at a position, write a review, etc.) in order to be able to view much of anything.
They also do not give a shit about obvious 'juicing' (i.e. when it is obvious that upper management and/or HR is adding reviews where the 'con' reads like one of those softball warning phrases in a job description.)
This is the fate of every online review site. Every single one. Including IMDB as I realised yesterday while trying to find something to watch.
The most egregious example I've found was that the Danish postal service had something like a 4,8/5,0 rating on Trustpilot. You'll be hard pressed to find a more inept, corrupt and universally hated company. So in an attempt to improve their public image, they decided to game the ratings, instead of actually delivering mail properly.
With the AI(?) bots doing a DDOS on on public websites via residential proxies the future is all website will require login.
In the specific case of Glassdoor, leaving a review about an organization sometime requires a proof that you work there, e.g. receiving a pass code sent to a work email. I'd say that this is reasonable, and makes gaming the reviews much harder.
Can't the bots just sign up for accounts?
Yes they can. But then you see which account as took part of the DDOS scraping, and delete all accounts that match the pattern and site gets back under control.
Fundamentally it's all a game of whack-a-mole for admins unless some kind of microtransaction system is invented. Then a DDOS scraping event is just extra revenue.
I can kind if understand how forcing everyone to add on to the pile of content, from a business point of view.
However they may have proved that they are indeed.. trash. Maybe even a few times.
One such case was https://www.forrester.com/blogs/glassdoors-mishandling-of-cu...
In my eyes they are in the same class of Facebook, uservoice, Pinterest, Quora etc.
Ironic, given their name.
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All but one of the reviews for my company are completely fake (at Glassdoor).
it goes into an infinite redirect loop for me. lol.
Excellent now I have to find something else again. You can’t fucking trust anyone not to chase money these days.
Fuck bitwardens creators for selling out. I want them to know they fucking suck.
This post is what triggered me to cancel my subscription and migrate away from Bitwarden in July. I’ve seen too many repeats of this show. This has completely soured me from cloud-backed critical software. Slowly moving toward offline alternatives wherever possible and self-hosting when it isn’t.
Is there any writing on it that was written by a human? This blog post is clearly AI.
It's somewhat concerning to me that none of the security conscious people in this thread seem to notice that they are changing their privacy practices based on the advice of a language model pretending to be a person.
Thank you for linking this, the price increase was indeed communicated to me directly via email but not very clearly
> The price is updating to $1.65/month, billed annually.
Followed by a 25% discount for this reveal only.
Have to go back to my old invoice to see it was $10/y and now the new one $19.80/y
I never liked that I needed to pay premium just for 2FA but this abuse of trust is definitely the end of it.
Too bad I won't get a refund for my Oct 1st renewal but I'll happily cancel as soon as I get vaultwarden hosted.
One benefit of the current self-hosted option via vaultwarden is that you get 2FA and the other premium features by default.
But it is worrying that they might intentionally break vaultwarden in the future.
SSO is the feature many companies put behind their most expensive plans. It's exactly why the personal software revolution will take over SaaS.
The argument here is always why would people spend all this time and money to build custom software when they can just pay a company $20-100 bucks a month? Because that product will become enshittified. It's not a question of if, its a question of when. I thought open-source SaaS would be immune, but clearly not.
SaaS is what killed open source. "OSS SaaS" is just the resurrected undead abominations that somehow manage to trick the peasants and pass off as living.
If you excuse a Warcraft-y metaphor.
Ok this is doing some damage. What's a possible alternative that works on both mobile and desktop, doesn't require yourself to run a server, and doesn't have worse reputation?
keepassxc works across any major platform, mobile platforms have keepass2android and KeePassium. You don't have to run your own server, but you do need some type of file sharing system to keep them synced. I personally run a webdav share on a vps with some sync scripts to keep a backup on devices otherwise. OneDrive, google drive, dropbox, and others work.
Also protonpass.
I specifically moved away from KeePassXC to Bitwarden with self hosted vaultwarden because the Linux desktop experience and mobile syncing was so terrible. While I love KeePassXC, using it on an immutable Linux distro where everything needs to be Flatpak means the browser extension doesn't work because it doesn't support Flatpak'd browsers back when I switched. Auto type is a security nightmare and is not an option. Syncing does not exist and with the constant death and forking of Syncthing on Android, it became unusable to randomly find out my db hasn't synced for a week and now I have to reset everything with a new fork yet again.
Bitwarden was the no nonsense choice because it just worked.
I used to use gnupass and its variants (including passforios on mobile), but what brought me to bitwarden was being able to make changes on two clients and merge the results cleanly / usefully without needing to do anything manually at all.
How does this work with keepassxc? Does it depend on your file syncing primitive?
When I stopped using KeePassXC, there was no merging. You configured each client to save immediately and reload when detecting the file changed. If you used a tool like Syncthing then you had to monitor for conflicts (which stopped syncing) and manually fix them. If the major clients on Linux, Android, and browser extensions all supported proper syncing on their own, I might switch back.
Any good reason to use keepassxc rather than regular KeePass?
https://keepassxc.org/docs/#faq-keepass
At the time I decided to go with regular keepass, it was because setting up OneDrive sync (directly to OneDrive, not depending on a mapped folder because I use as little MS software as possible) and browser extension was easier. And the cross platform UI on KeePassXC just didn’t look and feel good on windows.
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Proton Pass?
I already have "Proton Unlimited" as a subscription but until now I never used Proton Pass. I thought about giving up on Bitwarden for some time and probably will try it now. AFAIK you can even import your Bitwarden logins.
FWIW I moved to Proton Pass after I read the blog post months ago. The switch was seamless except for passkeys (had to enroll new ones; back then I only found a tool to convert Proton Pass passkeys to Bitwarden, but not the other way around)
For me, Pass works much better, especially passkeys on Android. Bitwarden was very flaky in that regard, Proton Pass "just works".
I use Pass for personal logins and sharing family-related accounts with my wife.
I'm really happy that Proton Pass provides an option to copy the username/password when you right click on an item. In the Bitwarden macOS app you have to click a dedicated copying button which feels so unintuitive and I had to consciously think about this every time I needed to copy a username/password. And Bitwarden has so many other things that could be improved in its UI, but due to muscle memory I forgot that there exist other password managers out there. So far Proton Pass seems to be much more polished than Bitwarden. Except it took me a while to find how to enable 2FA, which is in "Account and password" (not "Security and privacy") in the account settings.
Proton Pass has a good backend, but their clients are so-so. Specifically, the auto-fill feature in both browser extension and Android client. The browser extension is also pretty buggy, keeps forgetting settings, and occasionally logs me out.
I think Proton Pass is currently the best non-self-hosted option, and Proton's corporate structure offers some protection against enshittification.
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Keepass on pc, keepass2android on mobile and the file is stored on onedrive. I'm starting to use macos so I'll install onedrive on it. Now onedrive's reputation is Microsoft's but I haven't heard of massive security breaches like many online password manager had.
Proton pass.
Proton ticks all good-company boxes. E2ee, majority owned by the Proton foundation, all client-side code is OSS, and some other structures in place to protect themselves from corp greed. Best I could find.
Didn't it recently come out that the ceo of proton was donating to far right groups interested in dismantling privacy and security, let alone their racist policies?
You might be mixing them up with Mullvad.
Can you be more specific? A lot of things called "far right" in 2026 are Democrat policies from 2016.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
In so far as google translate and my adhd filter can tell, he donated to political party that support marxism … maybe people are figuring-out that authoritarian happens on both sides to the 1 dimensional political spectrum
Writing password down on paper and keeping them in your wallet.
Seriously. About as secure, if you're honest about the actual threat model (vs one security aficionados would like you to assume), and paper can't be enshittified.
Don't forget to start each password with an x but don't write that on the paper.
I like Enpass
I hate this. So much software I love keeps doing this. redis, docker, now bitwarden. I was so happy with bitwarden. Been a premium subscriber for many years. I have helped convert many people, including whole companies, to use this. Now they are doing us such a disservice. We need a completely free, no-nonsence, alternative. I wonder if it is possible to do a ipfs/torrent version without a central authority to permanently prevent this type of issue.
What we really need is an alternative to capitalism
There are many alternatives.
I still use docker and redis for free and it seems like I'll be able to continue using bitwarden for free. I don't see what I've lost.
I wonder that too, perhaps by encrypting the data with a key generated from a long passphrase meaningful to the user, that nobody could possibly guess. Then just store the data in a permanent cloud like IPFS, pinned with 4EVERLAND, Filebase and/or Pinata:
https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/persistence/#pinning-service...
Maybe someone could write a provably private client-based browser decryption script, hosted on various websites. We might need a new browser spec that sandboxes pages until they're unsandboxed, allowing them no egress/ingress or even local storage or cookies.
Or better yet, take that choice away from browser vendors, and create a runtime in the browser that simply can't be observed, perhaps by using zero-knowledge proofs.
Writing this out, I wonder if the issue is due to longstanding incomplete browser architecture, going back to when the web went mainstream in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it's still just an open problem.
Solve private distributed durable storage, along with a base level of secret computation eventually running about the speed of a 6502, 286 or 68000, and we wouldn't need free services that inevitably get privatized and ensh!ttified.
I have no idea if something like this already exists, I'm just speculating as to what base functionality it might need from first principles.
Also I wonder if similar techniques could be recruited to build an OS around cryptocurrency. That way a meta economy could run alongside the corrupt economy, and shield users from currency devaluation and other wealth inequality drivers used by the ultra-wealthy to increase the value of the means of production that they own relatively, so that they can buy more.
Arguably the process of wealth concentration is so fundamental that it puts a countdown on capitalism, driving it towards the late-stage capitalism that we've had since about 1970 when productivity diverged from wages, and eventually revolution which results in socialism/communism or even permanent authoritarian dystopia like on Star Wars. In a way, it's in the best interests of the ultra-wealthy to build meta economies, which of course makes those economies suspect and probably vulnerable to exploits, especially in the AI age. We've seen how crypto has created black markets capable of capturing governments, so maybe we should be careful what we wish for.
But really I just don't want to type my password anymore.
Nit: IPFS is never a "permanent cloud", even with pinning services - you stop paying, eventually the data will be gone as no one will serve it anymore. You might be looking for Arweave for better permanence, which 4EVERLAND also supports as a storage target (although there is no way to "update" the data as well)
Why stop at a free password manager? Why not free food, clothes, cars, and everything else while you’re making demands?
Or is it just software that has zero value to you because it’s intangible and you intentionally ignore the time and effort other people spend on it?
I think most people don't mind paying for software, they just mind situations like having to rent software forever (subscriptions), or software companies being ran by people who are only focused on increasing revenue at the expense of actual making good/better software.
I think subscriptions are fair if you want updates, which for anything security related you do. The alternative (from decades ago) is to re-buy it every few years.
Someone has to pay for ongoing maintenance.
Firefox comes with a password manager built in. Gratis.
Did you even read what I wrote?
I feel like this blog post deserves its own submission to HN
Four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163389
Thank you
Started humany but degraded into LLM speak towards the end. Especial the Vaultwarden section.
It's all LLMese, start to finish. I found it hard to get through. Could have just been a bulleted list and it would have been better.
Over 1k words for something which fits in two paragraphs. Painful.
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So? It was useful information, who cares how it was written.
The information is there, and could fit one paragraph.
Everything else is just a nonsense, watermark and fluff, scamming from time and attention - there's NO value in the filler.
To reiterate: there's no value in this sort of the LLM garbage. There's value in the information, especially when formatted and provided in the humane format.
I bet most people that reads blogs care about how they are written.
If people dont like how something is written they can move on, they are not being forced to read it.
Of course. Or, as we see here, they can critize the content that they thought was badly written. That's also allowed.
Unfortunately, any "insight" it might contain is ruined by the fact it's clearly written by an LLM instead of a person.
> And it never comes in a single dramatic announcement. It comes in layers. A feature post with a price change inside it. A LinkedIn update nobody made a press release about. A values page that says something slightly different than it did last week. If you’re still on Bitwarden cloud and this is giving you pause — it should. [...] Whether self-hosting stays viable long-term is the real question worth sitting with.
I actually find this somewhat understandable; and I'll be continuing my subscription; as long as all source continues to be available and personal self-hosting remains a viable option.
Yes, I'd much prefer full open source, but "all source available; some restrictions on commercial use" is still miles better; the OSS funding and incentives problem is still unsolved.
Just look at Elasticsearch -> AWS ElasticSearch; or Redis -> ElastiCache; etc.
It's like leeching: a big corporation, with far more distribution and brand takes your codebase; and their structural advantages (in terms of distribution) makes it an extremely difficult uphill battle for you to compete.
I struggle to think of solutions: yes, they are doing everything by the license; so the main viable solution seems to be... changing the license.
I was at redis when they changed the license (the first time). I begged the new leadership to not change the core license but to do a few things instead.
1) bundle the "source available" modules as part of redis source distribution 2) enable people who only want bsd code to be able to build a "redis_core" 3) commit to the community that the core will remain BSD licensed and that they are committed to making it the best key/value store. 4) increase the amount of source available code that until then had been kept closed (including what we called big redis/RedisOnFlash/MultiTier) 5) Require anyone using the redis trademarks in a commercial setting to ship the entire Redis (which includes the source available portions, so Amazon et al would no longer be able to use the Redis trademarks without a license deal.
Another alternative was to simply go to AGPL (which they went to anyways awhile later).
I failed to convince the leadership about this. I honestly think they squandered huge value in community engagement, but perhaps that's what they wanted. I left a bit after these changes were made as it became clear that the new US led leadership of the company wasn't particularity interested in what was the soul of redis. (previously was heavily Israeli led and a critical mass there was invested in redis as an open source product).
Funny story, the then new/current CEO used to be the head of WebEx at Cisco. We had a Q&A when he was hired and I asked, what did he learn from his time at WebEx about how to maintain market position (as they lost everything to zoom et al). His response at the time wasn't that convincing, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I feel its fair to ask if the same thing occurred again.
Thank you for trying to do something to prevent it, many people wouldn't bother.
> His response at the time wasn't that convincing, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I feel its fair to ask if the same thing occurred again.
Business will have to try different things at different points due to external & internal pressures. Some decisions are reversible (at cost), some aren't. Decisions (chaotic / complex / complicated ones, at least) are not made merely based on available data and analysis, but also based on intuition, experiments, and predictions. Then, to look at the outcome rather than the process is missing the point. When the circumstance / situation isn't clear-cut, the feedback (the outcome of a decision) is in itself more valuable to the organization (than never having taken the decision, at all), especially when the costs (to reverse / change it) are bearable.
I’m conflicted. On one hand I’m grateful for the years of trustworthy (and pay-what-you-want) password management. On the other this feels like an attempt to EEE the free version.
That's my concern as well. I have no problem with the current license change if they continue to publish all the code as they claim. My concern is that this is usually step 1 in a boil-the-frog strategy to eventually split and break off enterprise features. I'll give them some trust until they give me a reason not to (I think they've earned it), but the concern remains.
They don't?
"Some future components will be published under the commercial license and will exist only in that build."
(From that thread)
I would be with you if they didn't change the owner to private equity in the last year.
Wasn’t it just a minority stake?
The thing I always think about is that they wouldn't have to change the license and tighten the screws if people paid for it. Getting mad that the free hosted password manager has changed the deal a little bit I find to be quite arrogant.
Pay the $20/yr or whatever to have them host it and the whole world keeps turning.
Hosted password manager is equivalent to publishing all your passwords outright.
Now, given the general ignorance on infosec I'm suprised that people actually refused to pay to upload their passwords. The world has some hope after all.
you have no idea how bitwarden works, do you...
by that logic, every time you send a password over a TLS connection, you're publishing it outright too
People are going to try much harder to break into the main Bitwarden servers than they are my little Vaultwarden instance. Plus, I have the ability to lock it behind a VPN so it isn't even publicly exposed.
But even if they do all that, they still have to break my password. Nobody is going through all that for a one user password manager.
I'm not sure where your sentiment comes from here.
> But even if they do all that, they still have to break my password. Nobody is going through all that for a one user password manager.
A PW manager relying on only a single password as the encryption key - and one that you type in frequently, mind you - has always been a little of a design issue to me. I much prefer 1Password's approach where they have a usually-hidden second secret (the "Secret Key") that both (A) isn't shown unless you're setting up another device, and (B) acts as extra data needed to form the decryption key for your vault.
The main threat model I'm thinking of protecting against is a 1password vault data breach of some kind (or possibly cooperation with government agencies) + password exposure in some way (be it from CCTV-extracted password entries, over-the-shoulder watching, etc), as even with both of those factors, they would somehow need to get your secret key to decrypt vaults.
Like, all of those lastpass vaults obtained during the Lastpass hack would be de-facto useless even with a correct password if their design included some sort of hidden secret secret.
Are you aware of Yubikeys?
I'm not sure that calculus is going to be true for much longer – with the costs of AI falling, it's going to be much easier to throw tokens at the problem even tiny targets that wouldn't have been worth it before. Can you guarantee your VPN is patched and secure at all times?
Can you guarantee the hosted servers are patched and secure at all times?
I took it to mean non-self hosted is like publishing your passwords online, which I agree with.
AI will do it
I mean, no it's absolutely nothing like "publishing all your passwords outright" but fine. Pay the $20/yr and don't have them host it, host it yourself. Just pay them the $20.
Your comment is generally ignorant on infosec.
Do you have a quantum computer from the future and a file of passwords that haven't been changed in 50 years? Complete nonsense.
Sorry but the elasticsearch thing was a big stupid take of elastic. It was big corpo against big corpo not the poor elastic company.
Changing licenses is a sick move and companies doing that should be fucked over, because the license made them big. Changing it later on means that they got greedy nothing more nothing less.
Without oss bitwarden would be a paid cloud like all the others that probably would’ve had a hard time getting trusted.
> Changing it later on means that they got greedy nothing more nothing less.
Or just trying hard to keep the company afloat?
Just because they published Open Source code at some point, you feel that you're entitled to free updates for the rest of your life?
elastics cloud offering was awful
That's not what's happening here. They're making their app closed source with closed source features. Time to find a new provider.
Per their public discussion on the topic, the non-OSS licenses will still be public and accessible for review.
We’ve seen it countless times over the last decade. OpenSolaris was the first big one. The open source side isn’t going to change, it’ll just get abandoned. They’re committed to open source… for now. Nothing is going to change… for now. They’ll maintain compatibility with compatible servers… for now.
Everything will get chipped away piece by piece. It’s been happening continuously for well over a decade at this point and everyone should understand the strategy by now.
[flagged]
As a loyal Bitwarden user, I think this is great news.
I love that Bitwarden exists, but as an "open source" project, it's always been a trad-corporate type code maintenance, rather than community-driven source contributions (exactly why we've seen things like Vaultwarden pop up) & that has generally just left all of their clients in that really awkward space where they're just good enough to be able to imagine their potential, but their maintenance is stagnant enough to ensure they'll never reach it.
Imo the community needs this kick to motivate the development of alt vaultwarden clients. Bitwarden gives us a great starting point but we need to break away.
Okay, it’s good they have the open source because if you rewrite the Chrome extension you can get it to load in under 100 ms after you click the button. If you use the standard Chrome extension you’re not having that happen on an M1 Max. Their stuff is far too heavy. Full JS framework to display a small box.
Any more details on this? Like did anyone build a better extension or are you just guessing?
I’d be interested in hearing about this too.
In today’s day and age I read the OP as saying that threw an LLM at the extension repo and had it reimplement/improve upon for a private fork of theirs.
How could you trust a third party (or even you own promoted AI) on this?
While keeping feature-parity, right...?
It would be nice if the forked client apps & extensions also avoided BC breaks, unline the mainline clients
OK, don't leave us hanging like this.
IMO Bitwarden really isn't that well engineered software, and I now use Keyguard on Android/Vaultwarden server instead. Reminds me of Subsonic, with many competing clients/servers. Hopefully someone will write a third party browser extension as the current one is quite slow/buggy.
What about it isn't well engineered?
It's all just slow and mediocre. The Windows desktop client is a massive almost 400MB-download behemoth (and is electron-based), and if you have SSH keys you want to store in it you have no choice but to use it. Oh and you can't log into the browser extension automatically from the desktop client.
Admittedly the mobile clients have since been rewritten to be native (they were _really_ slow before), but Keyguard is still much faster/lighter.
I started using 1Password at work and it's just a.. nicer experience? It does all this and more. Everything is fast, the browser extension is more proactive/recognises fields better (Bitwarden can't really do multi step logins), and the desktop client isn't a chore to use.
The best comparison I would give is comparing Immich and Jellyfin (if you've used these), they are miles apart in terms of end user experience/polish/efficient design. One is engineered, the other feels like it's been hacked together by hobbyists.
Same goes for the bitwarden cli (`bw`). Its super slow and if you use it in scripts to pull multiple values (username, password), it takes ages. I personally switched to rbw (https://github.com/doy/rbw) and its day and night.
The main thing is it's just slow as molasses, just clicking the extension icon can sometimes take over a second to show anything.
And it frequently fails to detect login fields, or does detect but fails to fill them with a generic error.
Syncing is iffy. Saving credentials associated to a shared org fails randomly. Rendering (x11/Firefox) sometimes fails completely, but is predictably slow. Auto fill can be buggy. Opening vaults on iOS can be remarkably slow.
Besides being slow, I found it buggy as hell. For instance, I wanted to log in with my Yubikey on my phone, and it flat out refused to let me in despite the master password and the PIN being 100% correct. There's even an open issue on Github about this, that they're doing absolutely nothing about, demonstrating the incompetence further at some really grand scales.
exactly this. and their autofill sucks so much on chrome desktop. It's bloated and slow. Even lastpass has a better and faster extension
Try to bring it up on bitwarden reddit sub, they will eat you alive
Slow as hell, it's like what happened to LastPass. Nobody gave a shit about UI/UX issues.
Isn't Vaultwarden using the same clients?
Keyguard appears to be alternative Bitwarden compatible clients.
https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app/blob/master/LICENSE
> All Rights Reserved
unfortunately
Yup, instant nope here (That and not having a browser addon, passwords in the browser is 99% of my password-use). All other stuff is mostly SSH keys / ssh-agent.
Yes but this person is using an alternative Android client as well.
This was always inevitable when they took funding.
Correct.
Circa earlier this year I found this blog post, and have – as a paying customer nonetheless, mind you – continued to expect a 180-degree turn (which to be clear, this not yet is) ever since:
https://blog.ppb1701.com/the-quiet-renovation-at-bitwarden
Everyone is mentioning Vaultwarden, but self-hosting this kind of service comes with quite a strong requirement of keeping it secure. Many might prefer letting a trusted actor take care of that.
Then the community says it's okay, people are going to fork their clients, but that's gonna take trusting the future maintainers.
Also, even though they commit to keep maintaining an open source channel, we won't be able to verify the builds anymore.
Something like TailScale, HeadScale, or NetBird makes it dead simple to securely access and sync
Isn’t the server end of VW zero knowledge?
Why does the title of this submission say "Dual License"? The linked page doesn't use that term anywhere, and it's also not an accurate description of what this change is.
Instead of overlaying its own UI on top of form fields, I'd like Bitwarden (or any other PW manager) to act as a provider for the underlying system's native fill service, usually the browser, or Android, or OSX. They will always work much better than any 3rd party app.
Is that possible, does that exist?
I think they do that on Android but also have the accessibility based option.
I use it on Android and it's always been a Bitwarden-specific pop-up that shows up on password fields. Maybe with accessibility mode it would work as you mention? Ok that's a new thing to test.
Just to clarify, you mean something like it is done in iOs?
I’ve been a premium subscriber for 10+ years and I have to admit I don’t really care about this license stuff. As long as it keeps working well I’m happy.
I’m the same. It’s a paltry price for an outstanding product with great features that improves my life/security greatly
i dont know how many years ive been a subscriber -- the oldest email ive got from them is switching my email 8 years ago, and i know for certain i used it on another email before that... but emails on that previous domain were never long lived, so theyre gone.
anyway, the bigger issue ive with this is the doubling of the price right from the get-go.
with private equity on the steering wheel, i suspect this will keep going up every year from now on, so ... while i too have been a loyal customer to date, i suspect ill be driven out within the next 1-2 years, because if they double the price again next year, its gonna be way beyond the value i get out of it given how decent the alternative have become since.
The latest macOS/native UI refresh is horrible though. It really hasn't improved in terms of speed either after regressing during the UI refresh before the latest.
I’m willing to commit money to a project committed to release free builds without these shenanigans.
Bitwarden is still releasing free builds but yeah you'd need a new project with a new name to use it from the Play Store or App Store.
Turns out Keyguard, an alternative Bitwarden client is already on the Play Store.
https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app
Edit: turns out Keyguard is source available but fully copyrighted.
So if we now have Vaultwarden + keyguard can these things move away from Bitwardens api and pursue their own?
Is there any reason to? It's kinda nice that they all stick to the same contract. I don't really like the Bitwarden desktop app, but because there's so much code out there, it was pretty easy to have an LLM write a detailed spec for a client and then implement something that works for me.
The Bitwarden web client has actively broken Vaultwarden compatibility at least once <https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/issues/7607>. It’s reasonable to expect they’ll do so more, carelessly or deliberately. They already have features and UI that don’t make sense for Vaultwarden, and the rate of such things feels to me (as a mere user) to have increased. When Bitwarden continues in the direction they’re going, I think a hard fork of the entire ecosystem for Vaultwarden is fairly likely, and it will almost certainly be a good thing, and in hindsight we’ll probably wish the fork branched off earlier.
The question is, what structure can protect this in an ongoing way? Say you setup a non-profit foundation, even those seemingly can be perverted to become for-profit businesses with corporate shenanigans (see OpenAI), so if you wanted to somehow "guarantee this group always release things this way", is there any legal structure that can enforce this somehow, "forever"?
Don't be evil. Always.
In case you are all-Apple, there is no reason to use either 1Password or Bitwarden – since a few years ago Apple Passwords have everything you need
This is enshittification but I'm not gonna drop Bitwarden unless they do something really bad. I'm already on the F-Droid version from their GitHub for my GrapheneOS phone because that one has no Google services/telemetry.
One of the family members I set up with Bitwarden has said it changed their life and they can't imagine not using it. I would guess that would apply to any crossplatform password manager but Bitwarden is quite good and the one that stuck.
I probably wouldn't move to one of these [1] because I don't like the UI of Proton Pass, the convenience of KeyPass, and 1Passsword is obvious. I'm interested in AliasVault as it seems to be a more privacy-focused password manager, which is cool, but I'd have to look more into it.
[1] https://www.privacyguides.org/en/passwords
[2] https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/aliasvault-open-source-e...
Bitwarden is one of the few subscriptions I have in a patron sense - eg: I've never actually needed any of the premium feature's, but I chose to pay anyway as I felt that was a way to contribute to the long term viability of the project.
I'm not immediately upset about the licensing change - I get the need to protect from low effort/value add reselling and things like that. I do still worry if this is a canary for future changes that run counter to the reasons I migrated to bitwarden in the first place (open, robust, trustworthy).
Counter to many other commenters I personally prefer bitwarden over 1password, and certainly over lastpass and roboform, etc.
My only gripe is having to unlock the desktop app separately from the browser extension, which after adopting the ssh agent functionality became kinda annoying.
This seems like the beginning of the end, what password manager is recommended now?
KeepAssXC + SyncThing works well if you don't mind tinkering and like independence from corporations
Otherwise 1Password if you like paying money
Keep Ass XC? Is it a fork?
KeePass XC :)
1Password has the whole thing of providing money to Omarchy's foundation. For some, that is a hard blocker.
1Password is not open source in the first place
> KeepAssXC + SyncThing works
From a quick look, that seems to be Desktop only.
Not desktop only, KeePass uses an encrypted file, all you need is a way to decrypt it. You can store it in iCloud or whatever you like to sync files between devices.
iOS has a good open source app KeeForge to open the encryped password files. I use SyncTrain on my phone to connect to my SyncThing network.
I use syncthing for my Linux devices but though it didn’t work on iOS. Will check out SyncTrain, thanks!
It's unfortunate that its a bit fragmented but there are Android / iOS complements as well - respectively keepassDX and keepassium.
You can see it as fragmentation, or you can look at it as having a choice. You can pick and choose how you access your data, without any corporation screwing you over the first chance they get.
There are several good Android Keepass clients, and Syncthing apps too.
Look longer :)
I get needing to price more, but it really feels like a slow shift to M&A, when they couple it with license changes and “case by case basis” to make it back to OSS.
I’m not sure why growth at all costs needs to be the business model for every company?… make a great product, if you need to charge more over time cool, but don’t rug pull.
Well seems like Bitwarden is dying. A clear move towards enshittification. I was fine with the premium subscription existing while i was self-hosting Vaultwarden, but now every step seems to make that worse. Now new features will be under the commercial license an everything else will be slowly neglected. Time to jump ship.
I have been eyeballing PassPony[0] as a replacement.
The fact that they still do not support Yubikeys is holding me back from switching, but I expect this to be ironed out soon.
[0]: https://passpony.app/
Looks far too sloppy for me to trust this software with my passwords...
I do not like the idea of self-hosting VaultWarden because I generally do not like the idea of application software requiring so much random access memory for even the simplest tasks. So, my idea was to use something like pass[0] or passage[1] (pass[0] + age[2]) on a remote server, but the problem arises when Yubikeys come into play.
I am in no way, shape, or form, endorsing this PonyApp thingy and cannot vouch for it as I haven't audited it. But judging by what it says on the tin, it does appear like a candidate to solve the specific problem I have.
[0]: https://www.passwordstore.org/
[1]: https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage
[2]: https://github.com/FiloSottile/age
Any suggestions or ideas for where to?
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/passwords
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/aliasvault-open-source-e...
I use enpass.io, the free version.
They had/have(?) cybersale recently but did not offer the lifetime version. Otherwise I would have bought it. It is not open-source but it is damn convenient.
So is there an alternative that i can migrate my business to with sso and zerotrust?
I don't understand the point or the motivation. They don't list any.
It's very badly explained what actually changes
They want money
But how does this lead them there? It's really badly explained. They already have a paid version that has extra features. (For years now.) Like the SSO integration. What will be different now?
Rust based vaultwarden awaits.
if you like maintaining servers that are exposed to the web in the age of AI rogue agents
Licensing changes aside, this is why I've never been enthused for hosted password management, it's too easy for the terms of the agreement to change. (And in the case of LastPass, endless breaches). Honestly, plain KeePassXC and an arrangement to sync the password database has served me well because I can use any compatible client I can trust with it.
Vaultwarden is a self-hostable protocol-equivalent alternative.
why do I always feel like "this is where the enshittification begins" when I hear about license changes, even though these seem kind of harmless? But I'm not a lawyer so my hackles always hackle. And yes I am a paying customer, currently
I’ve used vaultwarden and the official bitwarden macOS and iOS clients for a few years now, but it’s probably not wise to stay with it as a server long term, unless VW released their own apps.
I’ve put up with the minor annoyance of Bitwarden iOS app auto-updates breaking compatibility with my server, which requires me to update the docker instance.
It’s likely I’ll just switch to Apple, since I believe they support importing standard password DB formats. I have less enthusiasm now to maintain the link between these ecosystems, especially if one is on a downward enshittification trajectory.
I'm a bit confused what they're actually doing. Their code is now covered by two different licenses with each file licensed under one of the two and they claim the resulting application is using the commercial Bitwarden license and not the GPL license?
How on earth does that work? Is that something the GPL license even allows?
This sounds like they're just taking a GPL licensed application and using it for themselves to make money.
It's how a lot of open-core products work. Basically, when you hold the copyright, you can apply whatever license you wish when distributing the software at any time. People can use existing copies of the code under their old licenses, but they must follow the new terms if they acquire the code through the new channels.
To get any PR merged in Bitwarden, you are forced to sign a CLA that reassigns copyright to Bitwarden Inc so they can relicense as they wish.
> How on earth does that work? Is that something the GPL license even allows?
GPL doesn't apply in this case, since the copy that you are acquiring is entirely under the commercial license.
> To get any PR merged in Bitwarden, you are forced to sign a CLA that reassigns copyright to Bitwarden Inc so they can relicense as they wish.
Ah I see, yes that would explain it. That makes this a bit more concerning I suppose.
VC money gonna get their returns one way or another
> Some future components will be published under the commercial license and will exist only in that build. Newly developed features will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis for which license applies to them.
by which it means "no new features will land in OSS versions", as is tradition for open core development
that's what it always seems like. buy a viable company, load it up with debt until it bankrupts, take your fees, declare bankruptcy.
Bitwarden was my go to a while ago before moving to self hosted, even tho my password in the vault can get leaked anytime they won’t matter (2fa not in the same vault), but still, I don’t trust saas or anyone anymore, all crucial things are self hosted.
I don't see hours this business strategy works post LLMs. Someone's just going to immediately prompt into existence any commercial feature you make into the open source side.
For most software, sure, but I wouldn't really trust a vibe-coded password manager.
I'll be moving to PearPass ... there's really no reason for any company to hold my passwords for me.
Unless they pull the LastPass crap, this is not a big deal for regular users.
Which LastPass crap?
Them not understanding how PBKDF2 works?
Them leaking all the encrypted user vaults?
Then raising prices and being impossible to work with as corporate customers?
Straight up fuck LastPass.
The problem with this license change is that it is unenforceable, now that developers believe they can vibe-code their own.
Only a matter of time until we see "OpenWarden", just like we saw the migration from Redis to Valkey.
But let's be honest. "enshittification" here really means "I don't want to pay for my tools and I want it completely for free forever."
Just look at the reactions towards the single UI change made in Firefox on HN [0] and already the complaints are there. Even if you charge your users $1 to remove tracking it is somehow "enshittification" because $1 is too much to pay for software maintenance.
The real cost of maintenance is the amount raised in VC capital (Bitwarden raised $100M) or $600M a year (Google paying Firefox). Donations won't cover the capital needed to fund Firefox or Bitwarden's development at all.
"Open source" is only sustainable when someone else is paying for that maintenance. Small donations will only take you so far until one core developer says that they are underpaid.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49892721
Thunderbird is a rare counter-example of an open source project that manages to maintain a significant staff through donations. Although affiliated with Mozilla, they are not funded by Mozilla. (I am no longer affiliated with Thunderbird, but I managed the project in the dark years after Mozilla suddenly dropped all funding and tried to get us to leave Mozilla.)
> But let's be honest. "enshittification" here really means "I don't want to pay for my tools and I want it completely for free forever."
That is completely the opposite of what is happening here. Lots of us pay premium Bitwarden subscriptions and are not happy with the way the company is headed, especially for a security company that holds the keys to many of our kingdoms.
"enshittification" here means a company that we trusted is now started to make decisions which erode that trust. Its happened before and it will happen from here unto eternity.
> Only a matter of time until we see "OpenWarden", just like we saw the migration from Redis to Valkey.
Vaultwarden already exists
I "new Firefox design" is hardly "single UI change"
If it was only one change I doubt there'd be much pushback
Yet another elasticsearch. Or terraform. Or redis. I guess?
Oss trying to protect itself from scalpers?
The new owners are just seeing how gradually they can boil the frog before the userbase moves elsewhere. Gotta maximize returns.
Ran Vaultwarden for a team of ~15 for years and that's the part I'd watch here, the clients are the leverage, not the server. If the mobile apps stop being buildable from source the self host story gets a lot thinner.