In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory role, according to LinkedIn, with no announcement from the company. His replacement, Michael Sullivan, former CEO of both Acquia and Insightsoftware, touts his experience with “all facets of mergers and acquisitions” on his own LinkedIn page, including experience working with leading private equity firms.

In combination with downplaying the free plan and removing any hint of now politically unfashionable DEI-like language, what this screams to me is: Bitwarden is being prepped for a sale.

This new CEO is a massive red flag. Literally nothing about anything relevant to the product or industry, though he's apparently good at private equity and selling orgs.

Probably worth jumping ship now before it mutates into another shitty corporate org, except this one is keeping your passwords.

Years ago I used a free workout app that I really liked. After a few months of using it I recommended it to friends. I only much later found out that I was on a grandfathered version of the free plan without ads or restrictions. The company had made changes to the free plan since I joined, and all new accounts (like my friends) were subject to ads and restrictions.

It was embarrassing to have unknowingly recommending something like that.

All those people who paid half a mil on education must appear useful at the expense of us all!

Pour one out for another open source project "optimized" by VC

But I’ll probably have to rethink recommending it to people, since any type of friction is seriously harmful here.

I wasn’t paying for the code tbh, I could always self-host (VaultWarden) at home behind Tailscale, it was all about the management, uptime, and most importantly, supporting a good software I used and loved for years.

Sad, really.

I’ll either move to self-hosting it at home behind TS, or going back to keepass tbh, anyway, I’m not staying on a sinking ship.

P.S: VaultWarden had a few bad CVEs this year (like an Auth Bypass), but when I looked deeper, it wouldn’t have much of a negative effect on me as a self-hosted home user that shares everything with family.

The cherry on the shit cake is that they did not give me any heads up at all. Quite sad. Bitwarden has been consistently one of the best pieces of softwares I have ever used. Simple, just does what it does and gets out of the way.

Sad really ...

My annual renewed just a month before they did that.

I'm pretty sure I have never cared about what values a company listed on its careers page, unless I am considering working there.

The writing on the wall seems to have been when they suddenly doubled the price of a yearly subscription without notifying anyone. That struck me as skeezy as **...looks like it may just be the beginning.

I hope people are actively mirroring their GH repos, because I expect at some point they might suddenly decide to change the license to Proprietary and move to scrub the repos from the web. At which point, the community will then fork the last-free version and start to maintain a fork.

Which I really don't want to see happen, because having to move all my shit for myself and my family again after the LastPass debacle is going to be an extraordinary headache.

They also ruin software.

I use Vaultwarden right now. Part of the reason was that I wanted something where there was a minimum guarantee. In the case of Vaultwarden, I can always fall back to the web interface if needed. It wouldn't be convenient, but it guarantees no one can take away my password vault.

I really hate the per user per feature per byte per year pricing structure that everything has morphed into. I don't mind paying something for good software that I rely on, but having everything locked down and controlled by a 3rd party with continually increasing subscription fees is terrible.

I've worked in the small business space my whole life and it's being destroyed. Private investors are buying everything. I'm talking about owning all the small businesses of certain types; family doctors, dentists, optometrists, vets etc. seem to be the big target. It's terrifying and most people don't even realize it.

It's very sad to see core values that turn out to be lies. Always free is a tough spot to be in, but these companies could absolutely use a better business model that doesn't kill small businesses. And, based on what I see, increasing IT costs are killing small businesses.

What we need in the small business space is a tier of services where small businesses can self host using their own on-premise, vertically scalable infrastructure (ie: 1 server). In most cases they can tolerate some downtime and, even if they don't want to, a lack of resources usually means they don't have a choice (ex: they're not running HA network connections).

Businesses with <10-20 employees are often viewed as not being worth the effort of having as a customer, so they end up with self-serve, unsupported, non-discounted, over priced, trash subscriptions. By the time they grow enough to be a valuable customer their only experience with some products is misery.

I wish I could set up small businesses with self-hosted infrastructure that can't be rug pulled while they're still small with an easy upgrade path into a hosted service if/when they grow.

On password managers, anyone using ProtonPass want to chime in on how it is? I’ve read online that Proton (as a company) has a tendency to start working on new things all the time and let the ones they created remain half baked and languishing (to some extent).

I’m not into KeePass and other local password managers since I need a shared solution for multiple people using the same vault.

whenever i need any new feature, i just add it.

Just use KeePass.

Obviously predictable. Bitwarden is now in the extraction phase and it is now time to pay an expensive...

...$1.65 a month.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427981