Genuine question, in what scenario is the self hosting setup and maintenance worth it?
I've got Vaultwarden setup on one of my servers via Docker and I've got nightly backups of my vault to Dropbox via docker-volume-backup[0], which works wonderfully.
I personally choose to self-host because I already have the infrastructure for it, so might as well put it to good use.
Personal use. Using this avoids the potential of a bitwarden hack (see: LastPass) leaking out all your passwords. You are much less likely a target than a central server like bitwarden.
Your family won't be able to add new passwords, but they can export them at their leisure.
I do find the Firefox browser extension sometimes logs me out (this is separate to the vault lock timer which just asks for a password, the extension basically resets to asking for a user ID)
I'd say if it is a problem being fixed, it is not across the board yet.
Offline access in Bitwarden client only works for 30 days. : https://bitwarden.com/blog/configuring-bitwarden-clients-for....
This was one of the main reasons why I switched from self-hosted Vaultwarden to KeePass.
I’ve made a pact with a similarly techy friend of mine that should something happen to either of us the other will step in and maintain in the short term, transition to something more hands off in the long term. But I still pay for Bitwarden for that extra level of reassurance.
For me more than anything else, it means that even if Bitwarden goes under then there always be a version I can run myself, at least until the situation becomes untenable and I find a new password manager.
A form of disaster mitigation, if you want to think of it that way.
So as a hobbyist, when you have a handful of services you are self hosting, adding another one makes more sense.
And running 5+ different services is probably cheaper in the long term.
If you have the skills, initial setup takes minutes. If you lack the skills, it is a good idea to invest your time into learning those skills, they are very handy if you work in the software development field. It certainly has become very useful at work for me.
For me personally updates, backups, restores and deployments of containers are mostly automated and on average I don't spend more than an hour per month to maintain all of the already running services.
Also I don't see the time as being wasted, since I enjoy doing it. Watching TV or playing video games is probably worse and I still do that as well, same as many other people.
Here is one scenario where self hosted could be more secure. If Bitwarden is required by a party, they can push bad code to a particular IP address and grab the master key. Not with self hosted, like that.
Perhaps there is also no limit to the total vault attachment storage (there is per password limit at 500 MB), and other limits that might be in Bitwarden.
I did this with Scaleway, took 2-3 minutes to setup.
But self-hosting scales horizontally. If you already run one service that uses postgres or MySQL, the next service often won't add much of a burden.
For a lot of people, yeah, at present it makes no sense to get started. But the ability to get inertia, to carry the effort, can grow and grow into something really fierce. And even better, there are such good references & starting places out there today. Onedr0p's home-ops is a beautiful example (one among many) of investing hard on really good tools up front, so that the incrental cost of adding and managing new things is fantastically low. Years ago we would have to diy much of this, but today onedr0p can use well known community tools like Kubernetes, Flux ci/CD, gitops, and helm to get it done, to have other smart making the tools of self-hosting better for him. He's still the self hosting, but there's a sizable % of the engineering talent of the world helping to make his self hosting better & easier. That's pretty novel, and pretty excellent imo. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops
Maybe if you're a huge org with a dedicated security team and so on, which could easily handle managing such service. I guess at a certain point it would bring cost savings at a scale in comparison to using Bitwarden, where it costs per team member or seat. Inhouse team has fixed costs in comparison.
Of course for smaller orgs or individuals there is little sense in hosting security software yourself. No way you're going to have enough time to manage the service and keep it secure, which is where almost all of such software's value is derived from.
The official server needs a lot of different services and resources, so it’s not suitable for smaller deployments.