Back in March, I wrote about Bitwarden doubling their Premium price — and specifically how they did it. Buried in a feature announcement. Priced in fake...
Whether self-hosting stays viable long-term is the real question worth sitting with.
Right now it works because Bitwarden’s clients are open source and the server API is public. Vaultwarden implements that API, and the official apps can’t tell the difference. That depends on Bitwarden continuing to publish open source clients and not restricting which servers they’ll talk to — neither of which is guaranteed under new management.
The brake on the worst case: self-hosting is a listed Enterprise feature that generates real revenue. Killing it upsets paying business customers. That matters.
The catch: what Bitwarden sells to enterprises is their own official server stack, not Vaultwarden. Vaultwarden exists in a space they’ve tolerated but never endorsed. If the calculus shifts, the tolerance ends without any announcement. Just let the API drift until compatibility breaks on its own.
Starting to plan my next migration : Vaultwarden, or completely separate alternative like Psono or AliasVault?
It’s really straightforward to fork a client, when all you have to do is plug in your own server anyway. In a worst case scenario from the company, you can continue using your current BitWarden clients (maybe something extra horrendous will happen and you’ll have to downgrade), and talented people will start forking it within a reasonable timeframe.
Starting to plan my next migration : Vaultwarden, or completely separate alternative like Psono or AliasVault?
KeePassXC, or ChiPass if you don’t like LLMs in your password manager, but there are no precompiled binaries for this fork yet so you’ll need to build it from source. That way you’ll have your passwords entirely locally-hosted and won’t have to worry about whether or not a cloud provider will rugpull you. I should advise, that if you do move to KeePass, you’ll need to export your Bitwarden passwords in a way that KeePass will recognize when you go to import them.
As for KeePassXC’s involvement in LLMs, this blog post covers that.
And here’s KeePassDX for mobile users.
I use KeePassXC/DX with Syncthing for 5ish years now. I think I had one database sync conflict in all that time.
Super solid, never have had to worry about these shenanigans with LastPass or 1pass or bitwarden or whatever
would it be also plausible for say vaultwarden to make it’s own client and just completely fork over if bitwarden becomes less open?
It’s really straightforward to fork a client, when all you have to do is plug in your own server anyway. In a worst case scenario from the company, you can continue using your current BitWarden clients (maybe something extra horrendous will happen and you’ll have to downgrade), and talented people will start forking it within a reasonable timeframe.
Vaultwarden is its own client
Vaultwarden has its own website. It uses the Bitwarden client though. There is - so far - no (dedicated) Vaultwarden client yet.
A new client specifically for Vaultwarden will show up if Bitwarden becomes hostiles against it and purposely sabotage the API.
Sorry I meant android/iphone apps and browser extensions. It would seem to me that’s the easier part with all the work done on making the client.