How do they increase their valuation 10+x without pulling those tricks.
Because that's what the VC funding demands. No VC is giving out $100mm for a 20% or even 100% return, which could possibly be achieved by simple growth. They're giving that money because they're expecting exponential return.
Maybe there is an enterprise play somewhere here which justifies this, while maintaining the core product in its current form. I guess we will see, but I'm not holding my breath.
The post mentions the plan to implement advanced business features, and also "Business users deserve consumer ease-of-use along with advanced integration and deployment features."
The way it works is if the free/small customer cost to maintain is just absolutely minuscule compared to the total costs/revenue.
I wonder, aren't the majority of HNers working at a for-profit company funded by VCs?
The hypocrisy is just intolerable at this point.
At the end of the day, engineers/programmers are the ones who implement these changes. I find it unacceptable that lots of HNers get so high minded about these issues but then go on to contribute to the problem by working at for-profit companies. Nothing wrong with either one, just choose one.
At worst, we'll have to fork a current release if BW does stupid things in the future.
Even the unofficial Rust-based server looks to have more features than I need:
Self hosted was a nice middle ground. No one else has a copy of my password database, and it's always in sync between devices. Stick nginx as a proxy in front of it for https and easy let's encrypt certificate management. The downside is that Keepass by default allowed me to have copies in multiple locations. Bitwarden is only on the server, but since the database is encrypted it's easy enough to have regularly scheduled backups of it. It just is an added step to find another docker host for it if my home server goes down, during which time I may not have access to my passwords.
What were your issues? For the browser, I have some extremely minor complaints (not always detecting the correct subdomain for my selfhosted servers mainly), none for Android with Keepass2Android.
Also, no sync issues at all, but that might be related to having only 2 devices ;)
I got tired of Lastpass's janky clients, UI, and data breaches. Now I control the security of my passwords.
Arguably, they did with Bitwarden already, no? Ie even if they don't do anything bad - they still executed steps of free users and large VC checks.
Which is to say, does it not seem like they've already executed the "trick"? Users are already there, they have cash in hand. Their motivations don't matter much here, we as users can only see their actions.
But i don't follow bitwarden at all. I avoid free products for this "trick" reason. If i'm not paying or self hosting, i'm not interested heh. Am i reading Bitwarden wrong?
I can think of a way to lower costs... :-/