I have been using Bitwarden for around 7~ years. Subscription for this long too, at 10USD p/year. I will be switching due to lack of transparency, and would love to hear others thoughts on this.
The linked article goes into further detail, but here is a small summary that very much concern me / are sus:
- that 10USD per year has gone up quietly . I just checked and I have no email telling me it’s increased. It renews in like 2 months, so this is good timing for me
- Originally Bitwarden had values as apart of the acronym “GRIT”. Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency. They have changed the last two words to “Innovation, Trust”
- There is now a new CEO, this was not announced and the only reason people outside of Bitwarden know is that someone saw this change on LinkedIn
- The free tier momentarily disappeared from their product page for about a month (april14-may14). People were likely still able to make free accounts during this period. Bitwarden says it was a marketing mistake
The price hike is one thing, but for me the acronym change is most concerning, which is why I will be looking at another password manger (probably keepassxc)
It got bought by a company owned by Vista Equity partners, a private equity firm.
The loss of values happened at Citrix when it was Vought by Vista. They installed Tom Krauseasthe CEO to gut it from the inside out.
Everybody should have an exit plan ready to be able to leave bitwarden
Bitwarden got bought by private equity?
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/open-source-password-manager-bitwarden-raises-100m/
No, they took $100 million in VC. Never a good sign imho.
If you or someone you trust happen to have a home server, just install Vaultwarden, which is the community fork of Bitwarden without any fees, shady stuff or reliance on Bitwarden infrastructure.
If you look real close side by side there is a subtle difference…
Suuuper easy to stand up, took me about 20 minutes to get it up and running
Well, when u say supereasy to set up, i don’t know. The need for reverse proxy was driving me nuts. For someone that doesn’t expose anything to the outside world, the need for a reverse proxy is overkill in my opinion. But i did hive up fairly easily, so i’ll have another go in the future when i have time. For now my Syncthing + Keepass setup will have to do but i do find its not 100% robust. If i have keepass open on both mobile and laptop, i’m at risk of loosing changes. If the change is made on one device and i close after change, i won’t see the change until i close keepass on the other device. But by then syncthing thinks that the latter is the most recent change and marks the file of first device as conflict file. So the chsnge is not lost but its not in the most “recent” version of the database.
Yeah this is why I don’t want to bother self-hosting. There are just too many ways to fuck it up. I’d rather pay a small fee for professionals to handle it for me 🤷 If Bitwarden goes to shit, I can always move to something else - I never heard of a password manager that didn’t let us export passwords.
If you have several, it really is convenient to set up an internal reverse proxy for all your internal-only services. One place to set up let’s encrypt and set up subdomains or different paths for the different services. No need for URLs with different port numbers or IP addresses.
I know this options exists, but honestly I don’t think I have reliable enough infrastructure. It’s hardly ever offline, but my backup game is super weak, and I have had to rebuild from scratch once in the past three years.
What happens if I fuck up again and have to rebuild? Just feels like a massive potential failure point.
Your backup is all your clients. Every client has a blob. If you loose it export and then import. That is if everything else fails.
Bitwarden app is fully compatible with Vaultwarden and stores copies of all your passwords for offline access, so as long as you have access to the app somewhere, you’ll have them.
Also, Bitwarden can export your passwords as a file in several formats, readable by Bitwarden, KeePassXC etc. You can have that stored somewhere safe.
How do you use it on mobile? I didn’t find an app version
You use the normal Bitwarden app and point it to your server
Use the Bitwarden app, it is compatible. Under the email field, choose a custom server and set it up there.
This is the email I received at the begining of the year when there were multiple articles about the price increase.
I think it’s important to note that you may have missed or deleted the email, or it potentially could have gone to your junk folder, but they did send out emails letting people know.
I don’t think I received one of these. Only heard about the price increase on Lemmy before I was invoiced with the increased sum.
Yeah. I obviously can’t be positive that they didn’t mess up, but I got an email about the price increase so it was more of a “for the record” rather than a “you’re a liar” comment. I don’t work for Bitwarden so I can’t say they didn’t miss a bunch of customers or something like that when they notified people.
I got the same email with 25% discount for this year. Can’t argue with lack of transparency on that and it’s a bit unreasonable to expect no price increases ever
Yeah. If you’re using the services that might required a paid subscription, it’s not out of the realm of possibilities for there to be a price increase eventually.
I’m not discounting that there’s the potential for a pivot to less transparency and auditability going forward, I just wanted to point out that this wasn’t done with no warning.
I don’t trust the company that bought them. Private equity is almost always a bad time for consumers/users.
I’ve asked this before but does any of this enshittification affect vaultwarden?
Since we still need to use the official clients with Vaultwarden, I’d say time is running short, even if these changes don’t directly affect it yet. Definitely need some FOSS alternative clients for it.
None of the above effects vaultwarden (how could it?), but it does raise concerns about long term FLOSS-friendlyness. I got bit by the sudden price increase earlier this year and decided that is the 1 year warning to migrate to either self hosted vaultwarden or something else. I move slow, so need some time anyway.
Well since most if not all use the Bitwarden client they could lock that down. Which would suck.
The GPL3 clients? They can relicense and stop developing those, but we would still have them in their current state.
Even if it doesn’t affect it directly Vaultwarden is strongly linked to Bitwarden, for example I think you’re using official clients on your devices, Vaultwarden is not self sustainable (for now)
I think in the worst case they fork the client as well.
Sure, Go for it. I’ve been using KeePass for a long time now and I am very satisfied with it. Aside from the security and privacy (Which you know is BEST out there), It comes with many customizations too. I used to use BitWarden but now I use KeePass.
Can keepass store files?
Yes, you can add multiple files to an entry.
Great, then I will probably switch to that then.
Great to hear. One thing I liked about Bitwarden is that you change choose Aegon2id and its KDF iterations, etc. Is that standard? Can you do that in keepass?
you should get a notice no later than 2 weeks before the actual renewal
Yea this is what has likely happened to me, just haven’t got the email about it. Then I was thinking: If I never heard any news about the price hike (which I didn’t) it would be good if I got an actual email from Bitwarden - perhaps when they decided the price would be higher, therefore I could actually choose to stay with them or have time to research other options
I will conti UE to self-host Vaultwarden and use the BitWarden clients until I feel the clients are not trustworthy or they are forked.
I ran away from Bitwarden a few weeks ago due to other controversies and started using GNOME Secrets and KeePassDX. I couldn’t be happier, it’s slightly less convenient but I’m glad I did that.
Don’t be evil!!
hello, quit using centralized services
Yep seems to be the way 🙏
if you’re into self-hosting i’ve been using vaultwarden for a while now. it’s an open-source implementation of the Bitwarden server
What happens if the electricity goes out or your server craps out?
I guess it’s time to move on, I’ll check PrivacyGuides for a better alternative while I compare by myself too.
I’m not gonna allow a quiet price hike, this is scummy and anti-consumer.
Bit warden is undergoing enshittifcation in real time. It’s interesting to watch.
The price hike was announced months ago iirc and brings bitwarden in line (still cheaper) with all the other services after being the same price over years and years of inflation.
I got my eyes on em because of the vc money but the price hike isn’t out of line.
VC money is the end of the product. The enshittification has started and will never stop.
I am testing out Syncthing right now and will switch to an offline password manager
As a former subscriber since today, I didn’t get an email about it so it’s wasn’t announced enough imo.
Idk what to tell you, the price hike was announced months ago and I had to field a lot of questions from people I help with computers about it.
Another person posted the receipts for when emails got sent out and I remember warning people about this when it first “hit” the news cycle in January.
What would have been enough announcement?
Great resource. However, I remember one of them recommending straight up poor advice (and I think suspected sponsored recommendations), and the community shunned them for it. I just can’t remember if its https://www.privacyguides.org/en/ or https://www.privacytools.io/
The bad one is privacytools.
Thnx
Migrated to Keepass shortly before the price increase ( not because of it) just for the reason of wanting my vault fully offline. Seeing these changes at BW still makes me sad, was a long time paying user & truly enjoyed it
Keepass is fantastiic, my vault is pretty static so just manually copy to other device as needed. And of course, have your full backup plan in place as with all things
In the same boat as you.
I don’t like how it’s changing, I also don’t like how the UI is changing and, sadly, as a EU citizen I can’t trust it any longer since it is made in the USA.
But I’m no hurry to switch. I mean, I won’t rush or worry about paying one more year subscription if I have to. I’ll try alternatives as long as I have too. So far, there is
- the Canadian 1Password and
- the non-synced/local but free to use KeepassXC that are standing out.
Both work with Linux.
non-synced/local but free to use KeepassXC
I sync it with Synching with no issues.
Interesting! What do you use to open it on your phone?
KeePassDX-libre
didn’t KeepassXC go full into vibe coding?
https://lemmy.world/post/47036606/23815574
otherwise that would be the most appealing alternative to me too
I mean they recently posted a pretty reasonable explanation about their usage of AI (https://keepassxc.org/blog/2025-11-09-about-keepassxcs-code-quality-control/ ).
I’m not sure what the guy in your link is referring to since he didn’t provide any additional context.
thanks, I haven’t seen this before
Well that would make sense. I was actually going to switch to bitwarden back in May after keepassxc decided to corrupt my entire database along with the backup. I had to begin the lengthy process of resetting every single password I have, I was pretty furious and never wanted to touch keepassxc again. But when I went to bitwarden’s website I noticed only paid options, so I decided to continue researching alternatives.
So still has these issues. Glad I went to vsultwarden.
