I pay for their product and its totally worth. It was $10 for the longest time and much like everything in the last few years has increased price to what it is actually worth. To be honest $20 a year is still stupid cheap and worth it to keep them developing the product. Bitwarden is also one of the few password managers that hasn't had a user data breach.
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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Well, we all know how this ends...
It's a really sad day for me, I love Bitwarden, it's easily the best password manager I've used, and I'm in IT, I've used a bunch.
Fuck private equity, fuck it to death. But until then, I'll be moving my test setup for KeyPassXC into production over the coming weeks and months.
I was happily subscribed to Bitwarden for years for my personal account, I moved several people and a whole company onto it's platform. We had a good run, time to move on.
why not vaultwarden?
If I'm going to have to host my own infrastructure, I don't want it tied to Bitwarden, given the new direction of the company.
I fully support Vaultwarden though, and I wish them well.
I'll be going with KeyPassXC and Syncthing.
Vaultwarden (and all the client apps) depend on Bitwarden for the API spec. If Bitwarden introduces closed features in the API that Vaultwarden can't/won't implement, but the client apps do, it will split the spec. They can also introduce API license keys, which would render Vaultwarden mostly irrelevant.
The only way for Vaultwarden to remain relevant going forward is to own it and split ways from Bitwarden. This would in turn mean that the FOSS client apps have to decide which to support. But I think the ecosystem is going to fragment eventually anyway, so the sooner every app decides which way they want to go, the better.
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I guess we're gonna see more open-source apps soon, aimed at Vaultwarden first
@Mustachius_Grumpius “The GPLv3 OSS licensed version continues to be updated and published on GitHub
All current features are available in both versions
License details are on GitHub
Bitwarden remains committed to a robust, free forever plan for everyone”
Unfortunately, there is no historical example where this hasn't turned predatory. It's a tale as old as venture capital has been in software development:
- get free contributions from altruistic people donating their time and expertise to your FOSS project that you're selling
- make a closed-source set of extensions as optional dependencies
- slowly diverge the closed source feature set to include developer and user "must-haves" you do not contribute upstream
- slow or functionally halt open source contributions
It is an oft-repeated long con to pull off a mass heist of donated skill and time while imposing vendor lock-in on your users through a back door.
"As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, “Why did you sting me? You have killed us both!”
The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.”
Good take. I trust you on this, if you mind me asking: What is now the alternative? A system of setting up once, let it work until hardware dies etc.
- Embrace
- Extend
- Extinguish
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Yup. All CURRENT, these will start to diverge...
If there is no intention to put the screws to the user base, then why do it on the first place?
We all know how this game ends when venture capital gets involved.
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Not surprised in the slightest sadly.
Sure, it's no change for self hosters currently, but it's one more step in moving towards a more closed platform overall. I do hope more FOSS client apps end up getting made sometime soon. I've been using Keyguard on Android for some time, which means the recent several breaking changes in the Bitwarden apps to the Vaultwarden backend haven't hit me as hard, but I do still use the official apps for my laptop and desktop and Keyguard isnt fully FOSS, of course. I'd love to see some forks or brand new apps one of these days that are actually fully FOSS for both mobile and browsers. I've thought about doing some myself, but I have too many other projects and I also don't have a MAC or want to pay the fees to make an iPhone version. And I abandoned my Android Developer account when they started the identity nonsense, so none of my apps are on the official store anymore and Fdroid and similar may not be viable soon, so it would only really be for myself and a few others who use alternate Android OS's.
So, Vaultwarden it is?
This seems to be clients for the end devices, which I'm worried may actually be a move towards locking out VaultWarden which will uses the BW Clients
Heh, I'm looking at you to those people that looked at me weird because I told them I was good with Keepass!
Does anyone know if there's any chance for a fork before this situation inevitably deteriorates? I dont know the license on that software enough to know if its an option.
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Are they still going to publish the Android client app via their own F-Droid repository?
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