FYI - Bitwarden took $100M in VC money last year.
At some point, the pressure to aggressively monetize will unfortunately happen.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/open-source-password-manag...
At some point, the pressure to aggressively monetize will unfortunately happen.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/open-source-password-manag...
https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/1password-series-c-funding...
At a certain point, you just have to live your life. To accept that products you use might change in the future, and you might need to migrate to something else down the road.
The alternative is just keep something like KeePass around on a thumb drive, and forgo all the cloud sync, and browser and native app autocomplete integration. But those things are really the main point to all these products. Without that, I would argue that you're better off with a pad of paper in your desk drawer.
That's not the type of service I thought I was using.
I looked up their headquarters in Santa Barbara and it's a co-working space. That doesn't sound very secure. Though that could be their corp address and they're hiding where they work.
This sounds like ageism to me. I don't know if this guy is any good or not, but calling out someone as a 'concern' just because they were successful in the past isn't a good look. Is there anything more substantive behind your concern?
Kyle Spearrin is still at BitWarden and is listed as the Founder & CTO: https://bitwarden.com/about/ It looks like he lives in Jacksonville, FL and has a lot of hobbies.
Maybe this is some internalization, but thinking about another engineer referring to me, pejoratively, as a "web 1.0 engineer" would probably leave me confused. Am I supposed to be ashamed I played in the early days of the web?
A strong negative signal as far as I am concerned.
For a consumer-oriented software startup, an “exit” is most of the time a polite euphemism for selling the userbase to a juicing machine of some sort; the second place is taken by selling the product to an enterprise-oriented business which doesn’t want the userbase and eventually will, with more or less grace, show them the door.
Therefore, when I see a consumer-oriented, VC-funded startup, I don’t see why I should consider trusting them for even a second. Dine on the free lunch while it lasts, yes; squirrel away every bit of software they’re willing to release, yes; trust, depend on, or invest even a tiniest bit of my time, no.
Based on the interview I linked BitWarden is going down a venture of trying to offer vault-like enterprise secrets management on top of BitWardens tech, which could mean they're trying to monetize the more enterprise side of their business.
Web 2.0 replaced Web 1.0, right? Is that because Web 1.0 was better or just as good? Or was that because Web 2.0 was an improvement? And we're a good decade or so beyond Web 2.0 now. Surely you're familiar with the term dinosaur in this context. Web 1.0 are the dinosaurs.
If you still think web 1.0 doesn't have any negative connotations there is nothing I can say to change your mind. But I strongly disagree.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the web 1.0 when he was in his thirties in 1989.
Tim O'Reilly and Dale Doughterty, both in their 40s, coined the concept of Web 2.0 in 2004.
Tim Berners-Lee, then in his 50s, coined the semantic or executable web aka Web 3.0 in 2006.
Web 4.0 has no known origin, but the chase for artificial intelligence and machine learning was led by many of the same people from Web 1.0 from engineers to thought leaders. Many of the people who were building back then are only now beginning to peak in their careers. Not to mention, the guy you're talking about would be "Web 3.0" because the company he founded was in 2007 - pretty much the year cloud computing started.
I think, sadly, you're incredibly far down the rabbit hole of ageism.
Ref: https://ijcsit.com/docs/Volume%205/vol5issue06/ijcsit2014050...
That doesn't make me wrong.
Is it ageism to say I'd rather have a 23 year old baseball player than a 60 year old one? What about a 23 year old model instead of a 60 year old model? Ageism? Ok. Then I'm an ageist. I'll take the 23 year olds.
'But being a model or a baseball player and working at a tech company are not the same thing'
Ya, I know. But the point stands. Crying ageism doesn't make you right or the person appealing to age wrong.
Yeah, it does. Just like racism and sexism, being ageist is wrong. You should really re-asses how you look at the world, because your current view stinks.
> Is it ageism to say I'd rather have a 23 year old baseball player than a 60 year old one? What about a 23 year old model instead of a 60 year old model? Ageism? Ok. Then I'm an ageist. I'll take the 23 year olds.
There are 60 year old models, what is wrong with that? Only somebody who is ageist thinks somebody can't be model at 60. As for the baseball player, they are not discriminated by age, but by physical condition. If a 60 year old player could have the same physical impact as a 23 year old, then why not?
When it comes to the industry we're in, physical condition is not a discriminator. We are knowledge workers. Older workers tend to (not always) have much more knowledge and experience. Which is why they are paid more and end up in leadership positions (as in this case).
Your comments assume that the guy stopped learning in 1989. How do you know that he's not keeping up with the times? How do you know that he can't understand the modern world, as you imply? And do you even know what it means to be an executive? It doesn't mean knowing all the latest features of the React. It means setting a strategy (with fellow executives) for successful growth of the business. These things are as old as time (well, as old as capitalism). Having a talented CTO paired with a shrewd/experienced CEO is a good setup. It doesn't guarantee success, but it's more likely to succeed than with inexperienced executives.
Here's another way of looking at it. Replace "old" in your original sentence with "black", "woman", or "gay":
- Now it's some black Web 1.0 guy who was the CEO of eFax in the 90's.
- Now it's some Web 1.0 woman who was the CEO of eFax in the 90's.
- Now it's some gay Web 1.0 guy who was the CEO of eFax in the 90's.
How do those sentences make you feel?
Your comments are ageist and you should realise that discrimination is unacceptable. It would be wise to stop digging.
You can try to poke holes in that with whatever isms you want, it's still true. And I'm not alone.
We don't really have a HQ since we are a 100% remote company.
Source: I am the Bitwarden founder.
I'm just a normal tech-lover guy who works in the marketing field. I have made my family & 2 agencies switch to Bitwarden and they all love it.
I have stored more than 400 passwords and more than 30 debit + credit cards in it. Though I don't need a paid plan but I'm paying $10 per year just to support the developers.
As a long time user, I'm a bit concerned as well.
Bitwarden is and has been monetized since the beginning. There are no plans to change how we monetize our products. It's working well for us.
You know, how you don't just save all of your life for a house - but get a mortgage and enjoy a house now, not in 50 years.
Until 2 years later there is a license and pricing change. One that will make it 10 times more expensive - or the free/open-source version will be crippled.
FWIW: I've been using this application for the past years. I pay 12 USD or so a year, though I self-host. I just pay as a thank you since I still use the FOSS client, and the price is very reasonable.
1Password is hardly even a competitor as it is a completely different price range, and different product. It isn't FOSS at all, there's a vendor lock-in (in contrast to Bitwarden), and it is 3x as expensive at the very least. They're miles apart.
:)
Nothing. Nothing of consequence; either way. You know, maybe that’s why?
If you had a growing popular product like this, why on earth would you raise that amount of money? This isn't a rhetorical question btw! I would honestly like to know the rationale here?!
That’s a bit worrying.
The $10/year individual plan wouldn't warrant $100M investment. But going after big companies who are going to commit to $X/year/employee or similar kinds of pricing packages might, especially if Bitwarden integrates with existing corporate directory systems and such for delegating and managing accounts.
All that to say, every time you hear someone talking about this, it's not because they want to talk crap about Bitwarden, it's because they are afraid of getting too sucked into yet another product that works well, only to have to leave when the company's leadership loses focus. Largely because they received pressure from investors trying to 10x their investment in the short term when they could have received sustainable dividends over time.
Another concerning realization is how sparingly encryption is used in (many) modern password managers. Sure, it makes search easier but it also leaks secrets stored in metadata fields without any disclosure to the user. And this is in the single-user setting! There are vastly more security considerations as soon as a common "workspace" is involved.
Surely this is the inherent benefit of using open source?
I even pay for Bitwarden and it's been great with its back-to-basics UI that just works, and not crushing page load performance with the Chrome plugin.. But 100M is a huge sum and we saw how this turns out.