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by VariousPrograms 609 days ago
If you're mooching the free tier of something with a Pricing tab on the website, you're always on borrowed time. It's worth finding a slightly less polished non-commercial FOSS program you're happy with for simple applications (notes, password managers, TOTP, etc.) so you don't have to worry about the impending VC heel turn.
2 comments

FWIW, Bitwarden itself has been a less polished set of applications for a long time (Electron on desktop and MAUI on iOS, with the latter only changing recently to native). One advantage with Bitwarden was (and currently still is) that the yearly pricing starts low enough ($10 a year for premium). But this will likely not be around for much longer.

I knew I was on borrowed time when Bitwarden got the VC funding. I’ve also been using KeePassXC (on desktop), Proton Pass and the built-in password manager on iOS. So far, Proton Pass also seems to be slow on its development pace, just like Bitwarden. I’m looking at KeePass apps on iOS, but haven’t decided on them (the contenders seem to be MiniKeePass, KeePassium and Strongbox). I won’t miss Bitwarden though.

I'll never understand people who act like they're entitled to free, perpetually maintained software, and then are surprised when the software owners try to make money.

I moved to Bitwarden years ago (as a paid subscriber) from LastPass after their breaches and everything went to hell there.

And Bitwarden HAS innovated, or at least evolved with the times. They support passkeys now. They've had security key support for a while. They allow you to save your OTPs (though the wisdom of having your OTPs for MFA and your password in the same entity is questionable). I use their secure file send every other day. Password managers don't have to stagnate any more than any other applications.

I'd say this guy should just install Keepass or Passwordsafe on his PC.

It sucks that Bitwarden is apparently moving away from open source, but I'll probably stick with them for now. LastPass and their competitors aren't even pretending to be friendly to the open source community.

I also keep a backup of my Bitwarden vault in KeePass on my PC, and a plaintext version on an encrypted drive, just in case.