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Comment by craigmart | Hacker News Reader

This is an incredible overraction over a minor change that did not even happen. You can still find "Always free" in the pricing line of the very same page everyone keeps linking as proof https://bitwarden.com/products/personal/#whats-the-differenc...

Edit: it actually disappeared for some time but they put it back on May 18

snapshot from May 15: https://web.archive.org/web/20260515190646/https://bitwarden...

snapshot from May 18: https://web.archive.org/web/20260518183728/https://bitwarden...

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Well it did happen - and then unhappened when people noticed.

I had checked as soon as I found out about the news the other day and it was there. I just checked on wayback machine and you're right, it was removed for some time. However, if they're willing to put back that claim immediately, I doubt that their intention was to drop the free plan anytime soon, but probably it was to incentivize people to use the paid plans. Enshittification must happen sooner or later afterall, but fortunately vaultwarden exists and the export feature is highly unlikely gonna be removed immediately as the free plan disappears, so people could just switch to a third-party or self-hosted backend as soon as that happens.

> Enshittification must happen sooner or later afterall

There are a fair amount of multi-hundred year old companies out there.

most of them seem to be falling into the "or later part"

Any out there still doing what they originally were?

Companies can enshittify without dying, ahem microslop. Bitwarden likely isn't large enough to survive though.

>Enshittification must happen sooner or later afterall...

No it absolutely must not.

You're right, pardon my cynical remark. I'm just disillusioned by the promises of most tech companies

Pardon my tone, as well - the enshittification is exhausting.

There have been plenty of cases like this over time too. Company makes controversial change. Company rolls it back after outrage. Company slowly shifts over time until they've restored what's essentially the original controversial change.

When a company tells you their intention by announcing a change, it's often a good idea to listen. Even if their PR department does some good cleanup work in the aftermath.

Yeah exactly. When a company announces some money making scheme and it gets backlash they don't think "oops that was a mistake we won't do that"; they think "oops that was a mistake - we'll have to do it in a way that gets less backlash".

Another recent example is GitHub charging for self-hosted CI. They backtracked, but they're still going to end up doing something. They kind of have to because of all the "get 10x cheaper actions runners by changing one line" people.

So what does it matter?

If they are going to make it not free, they can just remove it right before they make it not free.

If it was somehow a binding promise, then it doesn’t matter if they remove it or not, the promise was already made.

If it isn’t a binding promise, then it doesn’t matter if they remove it or not, the promise was not binding anyway.

I dont think its an over reaction. It's pretty common to lock in users by removing or imposing cost on exports. Having an export from today is a lot better than having nothing in 5 years when bitwarden disables exports

> in 5 years when bitwarden disables exports

i think this is the overreaction - getting worked up about these sort of risks in general isn’t worth your time.

Otherwise you’d end up self-hosting everything strictly on OSS from maintainers you personally know and trust.

This is like someone saying, “don’t use AWS because they might raise prices some day”

I've had the argument so many times with eng managers about how this password manager or that password manager will get hacked or get enshittified and I've been right 100% of the time.

With the escalating abusive practices on display, going towards ‘self hosting everything strictly on OSS’ at least is exactly where this is all going.

This is like the tech version of being a prepper

Can you name a single password vault that has removed the ability to export, I would say it is a bit of wild speculation to assume this would happen. Even more so as there seems to only be anecdotal and speculative evidence this would happen.

Between the law suits, and the brand damage, there is likely very little upside for a company entertaining this idea.

I'm not seeing "Always free" on that page browsing from mobile. Also, it breaks my back button. Yeah... I'm going to need to switch.

My last job was for a product which launched with a promise of a free tier forever, which they removed a year or two ago.

It is not an overreaction at all to them replacing the principled leader who promised things with the vulture leader whose job and job history is primarily to enshittify things and sell them off.

The page addresses this:

> The “Always free” motto quietly reappeared on the site after its removal was uncovered and went viral on Fedi.

(And the linked article gives evidence: <https://blog.ppb1701.com/the-quiet-renovation-at-bitwarden#:...>.)

How is it an incredible overreaction? It's not like switching password managers is particularly arduous or expensive.

I need to: - Replace the extension and login on all of my browsers on all my devices - replace the desktop application/app on all my devices - go through and rework all the scripts that I use to automatically pull passaords from Bitwarden using the API and hope that the replacement has a good API

Nah, I think I'll stick with and keep paying/supporting Bitwarden.

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