Comment by rsyring
7 hours ago
Very insightful blog post listed by another user as a sub-comment. Worth posting as a top-level comment:
7 hours ago
Very insightful blog post listed by another user as a sub-comment. Worth posting as a top-level comment:
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.
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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
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That's funny, Bitwarden and Namecheap are the two things I've migrated away from as well.
The switch to Vaultwarden was insanely easy.
Just curious, why Namecheap?
And gandi.net.
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.
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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.
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.
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Any good reason to use keepassxc rather than regular KeePass?
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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?
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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.
Bruce Schneier [1] thinks it’s a good idea [2] too.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier
[2]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/write_down_yo...
Don't forget to start each password with an x but don't write that on the paper.
I like Enpass
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.
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 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.
What we really need is an alternative to capitalism
There are many alternatives.
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.
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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.
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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.