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)
Sure, Go for it. I’ve been using KeePass for a long time now and I am very satisfied with it. Aside from the security and privacy (Which you know is BEST out there), It comes with many customizations too. I used to use BitWarden but now I use KeePass.
Don’t be evil!!
I will conti UE to self-host Vaultwarden and use the BitWarden clients until I feel the clients are not trustworthy or they are forked.
Bitwarden was taken over by private equity just before these changes btw
price almost doubled; it’s $19.80 a year now. Still cheaper than 1pass or lastpass, which are $3/month. I don’t think they would increase to that much, because 1pass is objectively better.
You’re quitting over some words? All this questionable shit and you’re quitting cause they changed an acronym? Sheesh…
They are quitting becuase they see another lastpass happening. The new CEO is a toxic private equity leech.
It’s true - apart from the price hike, Nothing really has happened. And yet I ask you, which are you more comfortable with:
- A company with closed communication, and still asks to be trusted at the end
- A company having open, transparent communication
I guess it’s time to move on, I’ll check PrivacyGuides for a better alternative while I compare by myself too.
I’m not gonna allow a quiet price hike, this is scummy and anti-consumer.
The price hike was announced months ago iirc and brings bitwarden in line (still cheaper) with all the other services after being the same price over years and years of inflation.
I got my eyes on em because of the vc money but the price hike isn’t out of line.
Great resource. However, I remember one of them recommending straight up poor advice (and I think suspected sponsored recommendations), and the community shunned them for it. I just can’t remember if its https://www.privacyguides.org/en/ or https://www.privacytools.io/
Bit warden is undergoing enshittifcation in real time. It’s interesting to watch.
This is the email I received at the begining of the year when there were multiple articles about the price increase.
I think it’s important to note that you may have missed or deleted the email, or it potentially could have gone to your junk folder, but they did send out emails letting people know.
I got the same email with 25% discount for this year. Can’t argue with lack of transparency on that and it’s a bit unreasonable to expect no price increases ever
Yeah. If you’re using the services that might required a paid subscription, it’s not out of the realm of possibilities for there to be a price increase eventually.
I’m not discounting that there’s the potential for a pivot to less transparency and auditability going forward, I just wanted to point out that this wasn’t done with no warning.
I don’t trust the company that bought them. Private equity is almost always a bad time for consumers/users.
If you or someone you trust happen to have a home server, just install Vaultwarden, which is the community fork of Bitwarden without any fees, shady stuff or reliance on Bitwarden infrastructure.
If you look real close side by side there is a subtle difference…
Suuuper easy to stand up, took me about 20 minutes to get it up and running
That’s it. Thank you for your service until now.
It got bought by a company owned by Vista Equity partners, a private equity firm.
The loss of values happened at Citrix when it was Vought by Vista. They installed Tom Krauseasthe CEO to gut it from the inside out.
Everybody should have an exit plan ready to be able to leave bitwarden
Bitwarden got bought by private equity?
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/open-source-password-manager-bitwarden-raises-100m/
No, they took $100 million in VC. Never a good sign imho.
The CEO apparently is a big private equity guy, and those bloodsucking ticks only know how to do one thing: Suck every last drop of money and goodwill from the company and its customers as quickly as possible.
Breaks my heart, I’ve been a massive Bitwarden advocate for years. Been happily paying for the individual paid plan. I’m now working on setting up KeyPassXC with syncthing.
Does KeyPassXC have passkey and TOTP support?
Yes. For passkey, you need to install the browser plugin and enable support in the preferences.
Do you know if I can get KeePass working on both PC and Android in sync with Syncthing?
I have been using it that way for years and it works well (for this scenario no problem). Only recently I switched from Syncthing to using mounted SMB share. I switched partly because of the Syncthing for Android maintainer switch (though I still think its safe) and because Syncthing sometimes didn’t sync on my Iodé custom rom and I got tired of having to open the app to sync.
I used to do that few years ago. It worked very well. Never had any issues. I’ve used KeePassDX on Android and KeePassXC on Linux.
didn’t KeepassXC go full into vibe coding?
https://lemmy.world/post/47036606/23815574
otherwise that would be the most appealing alternative to me too
Well that would make sense. I was actually going to switch to bitwarden back in May after keepassxc decided to corrupt my entire database along with the backup. I had to begin the lengthy process of resetting every single password I have, I was pretty furious and never wanted to touch keepassxc again. But when I went to bitwarden’s website I noticed only paid options, so I decided to continue researching alternatives.
I mean they recently posted a pretty reasonable explanation about their usage of AI (https://keepassxc.org/blog/2025-11-09-about-keepassxcs-code-quality-control/ ).
I’m not sure what the guy in your link is referring to since he didn’t provide any additional context.
thanks, I haven’t seen this before
Lol… From Transparency to “Just Trust Me Bro”.
I know right. Even in an Enterprise environment why would trust be a better word to represent your values over transparency
Migrated to Keepass shortly before the price increase ( not because of it) just for the reason of wanting my vault fully offline. Seeing these changes at BW still makes me sad, was a long time paying user & truly enjoyed it
Keepass is fantastiic, my vault is pretty static so just manually copy to other device as needed. And of course, have your full backup plan in place as with all things
Yeah, I switched to KeePass for the same reason. The only way I trust software is if they’ll show me the code, and the only reason to replace “transparency” with “trust” IMHO is because they want to go closed source. Innovation also tends to just mean 'we’re going to be charging you for features that used to be free ’
It much work to get all the names and passwords and stuff from BW moved over to keepass?
Not really, just had to install KeePass on my computer and export my bitwarden passwords BW makes that easy to do) and import them to KeePass. I haven’t set up the browser extension yet, as at a glance it says it doesn’t work with browsers installed with flatpak and that’s how I have LibreWolf installed. Setting up syncthing was also pretty straightforward.
I tested this a few weeks ago, but one thing I struggled with was having custom fields imported. Don’t know if I somehow did something wrong, but while the export data had them as expected, KeePassXC just didn’t import it all? The standard Notes did get imported, but none of my custom fields.
Whoa no flatpak support is a problem. Thanks for the heads up.
