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)
Was LastPass open source to the same degree that Bitwarden is? It’s super easy to run your own Vaultwarden server already, and it shouldn’t be a problem for the community to fork and maintain unofficial clients either. Doesn’t seem like there’s much Bitwarden as a company can do about that, even if they wanted to.
I’m surprised that nobody has (meaningfully) forked the clients yet, it seems like all the warning signs are there
When the clients start changing for the worse I’m sure there will be forks…
Yeah for sure, I’m just thinking that it can be a little rocky to get governance and contribution processes set up, sometimes those last minute forks flop because the person who decided to advertise their fork ends up being ill equipped to handle running the project. If we can get a libre warden client project working before hand then it’ll make the process a lot more seamless when issues with bitwarden arise.