A long-standing playbook for private equity is to buy an established brand with a lot of public trust, load up on debt, strip-mine assets, eviscerate the company’s R&D and quality control, and then pump out junk until the public catches on. At that point, the resulting corporate husk is pawned off to a troubled asset firm and PE moves on to the next victim.
This uses an old, established company’s goodwill as a Potemkin village while things are gutted behind the scenes.
Software is particularly vulnerable to this. If you get a bad pair of sneakers or a bad toaster from a company you used to trust, you can return these products and you pretty quickly know the company is making junk. But software can be trickier. If the company cuts down on new features, is slow to patch bugs, starts laying off back office people that resolve billing issues, etc., it’s not immediately apparent.
A couple pieces this week suggest that BitWarden is starting to follow the PE playbook.
FastCompany noted that BitWarden’s CEO recently stepped down, and was replaced with a PE guy. At the same time, “always free” was dropped from the product’s web pages. Hmm.
A blog post featured on HackerNews today notes:
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 monthly increments for a product that has never once offered monthly billing. Communicated to existing customers fifteen days before their renewal, not before.
If you’re a BitWarden user, it might be time to start seriously looking at VaultWarden, which is the FOSS alternative. But there’s a catch: the browser extensions are actually BitWarden extensions which talk to your self-hosted VaultWarden vault, because the protocol is open and VW can implement it. There’s no guarantee that BitWarden won’t change that protocol. Fortunately:
The real safety net is that Bitwarden’s clients are Apache 2.0 licensed. A fork would need a rebrand to stay clear of the trademark — different name, tweaked UI, same engine — but that’s a speed bump, not a wall. The web vault works through any browser regardless of what happens to the apps, so worst case you’d lose autofill temporarily while a fork caught up. Inconvenient, not catastrophic. Vaultwarden itself is already proof the model works.Watch the clients. If they go closed, the community will notice fast, and the fork will follow.
raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.
His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
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