I'm not particularly worried about Bitwarden going belly up because it has already have such a well-established open-source replacement. The worst-case scenario is that Bitwarden make the clients incompatible with Vaultwarden, and like how OP already mentioned in the post, somebody in the community will fork them as soon as this happen.

I like 1password, it is by far the highest quality product I've used in this category. I moved from BitWarden back then because their browser integration was quite poor.

I think I'll move to something custom, or a selfhosted keepass server, with the rugpulls, incidents, and whatnot, it is becoming too high of a risk.

[1]: https://keepassxc.org [2]: https://www.keepassdx.com

The enterprise version never went beyond password management so I'm not sure how this could have generated a viable ROI.

It's still on the pricing page, albeit not as prominently. "Just getting started? Get basic password management today. Always free."

Overall it's not a problem for me if Bitwarden wants more money, but I have to draw the line at replacing top leadership with randoms from private equity and secret price hikes. I'm glad this is being highlighted and it's motivating me even more to find suitable FOSS-friendly alternative.

I'd really, really like them to not to ruin it or make it massively more expensive.

I do share the concerns though. The change in leadership, the poor transparency, 100% price increase and the quiet change in core values.

I was happy paying $10 yearly for Bitwarden. I'm still okay with $20 but there's a seed of doubt.

I just don’t want to self-host if I can avoid it.

Staying on top of managing the application and the environment is a whole different level of diligence when the thing I’m self hosting is the keys to my life. At a minimum it would have to be behind something like a wireguard tunnel to a trusted machine, and that’s an added headache for daily use.

Rapidly starting to think even a vibecoded solution may be a better plan relying on commercial options. High risk of don’t roll your own crypto mistakes but realistically that’s not the threat model here anymore for the random individual. It’s online breaches or perhaps a wrench attack not highly skilled crypto adversary. Plus there are probably ready made crypto modules so wouldn’t be a true handroll

Holy smokes has that's not just -> THAT IS become one of my trigger words.

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

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

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

I think this is tentatively good for bitwarden - making money means you can more easily invest in the team and product. Counter to the prevailing notion in comments here, I much prefer a vc/paid product for security-critical tools.

Hope they didn't wait too long before deciding to kill the free tier.

The web interface I'd never use: I have no guarantee that my passphrase does not leave my computer. Same for the import feature: this also requires the passphrase to be sent to their servers.

Needless to say I move to the next ethical e2ee password manager if BitWarden turns it's back on open source.

I'm not too worried, if bitwarden changes their price somebody is going to vibecode a decent enough solution for pennies on the dollar, or there's always apples built-in product.

I'm sure if BitWarden ever went closed source, it would be forked and maintained by the community and that most would migrate to the open source solution.

BitWarden being open source and auditable is one of the main reasons I use it, no hidden backdoors from them or three letter government agencies.

Waiting for everyone to understand this.

One of the only exceptions to this I can remember is the founder of Whatsapp, who gave an interview pretty critical of Meta some years back after it acquired Whatsapp.

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/91542655/bitwarden-scrubs-always...

edit: s/of/and

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

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