Hello @webmaniak,
I believe this would indeed work as both Bitwarden’s SaaS cloud and the self-hosted option provide anyone the ability to sign up to a free account with limited features.
- You can limit this by making your self-hosted instance not publicly accessible or perhaps with VPN only access
and/or
- by disabling sign-ups if you chose with the configured environment variables.
Variable Description globalSettings__disableUserRegistration= Specify trueto disable new users signing up for an account on this instance via the Registration page.
I believe this post does answer this just a bit vague, as I understand the self-host and cloud versions of Bitwarden are very similar in nature with just slight differences.
With a self-hosted service, you should be able to sign up for an enterprise Organization with Bitwarden for the required number of licensed users connected to the Org and that will need sharing. Those users can be invited and will be able to create accounts on your self-hosted server, and will be connected to the enterprise Organization and will also have any Enterprise policies applied to them.
Being a member of the enterprise Organization these members would also have premium features extended into their personal Bitwarden vaults on your self-hosted server.
Any other employees or others not needing sharing capabilities should be able to sign up to your server without issue and create a free account.
I am not sure how the licensing for this would work though on an individual account if they could ultimately decide to purchase an individual premium license with Bitwarden, and then upload this to your self-hosted server to “activate” premium features for their free user without needing to be tied into the enterprise Organization.
That is if someone even decided to do that.