$10 per year seems absurdly low for Premium. LastPass is about $36 for their offering.
I recently migrated to Bitwarden from LastPass due to a number of concerns: stagnation of the product, ownership by LogMeIn, closed source, etc. In spite of those concerns, I was paying for the $48 / year family plan and still felt the product was inexpensive.
I would pay significantly more than you’re currently charging. I get a great deal of value out of this type of product and I’m even happier to be supporting an open source project with active development than I was with LastPass.
$50 / year would still be a bargain. I want Bitwarden’s developers to be incentivized to continue actively developing and supporting the product and I want to be confident that it will still be around in the future.
I was really shocked at the costs too. For my purposes the “free” family is perfect, and I just paid the $10 for my own individual Premium.
So basically you’re saying
$50 is a lot of money in some parts of the world (people don’t make that in a whole day of work). It depends on where you’re looking from. The price will be subjective.
$50 a year would price a lot of people out of Premium entirely.
Not everyone has that kind of disposable income.
Perhaps one of two other ideas would be better:
a) Switch Bitwarden membership entirely to a “pay as you feel” model. Here the $10 premium would vanish and be replaced with a slider, starting at $0 or $1 and going up as far as you like. People such as yourself can set the slider to $50+. Others can get the service for a price they deem to be fair and competitive. Maybe here the default suggestion would stay at $10.
b) Add in a “Donate to Bitwarden” button within the Premium features area. Here people such as yourself can then set up a monthly/annual donation to your liking.
I completely agree with @Mr_FI_Fox with this one. Not everyone can afford it, and pricing people out is a terrible idea. Some people may find transitioning to password managers inconvenient and have no motivation to do so. Making a premium plan a premium price would be even more of a reason to push them away.
Lets also not forget that they make their money from paid accounts. Free accounts take up space and compute power. They want people to want to upgrade for a reasonable price so those costs are covered.
The big income source would be from their business/enterprise side of things. This pricing is tiered based on the number of users, which makes sense. If anything, this could be slightly increased, but I would like to suggest a separate option for non-profits and this option. Whether it’s half priced, x number of users for free, etc. They could partner with TechSoup and get validation through them.
They could also add a donation button, or perhaps a pay-to-vote for feature requests. Say $1 a vote that you can add to it. So if you really want a feature added, you could donate $100 to add 100 votes to it and spike its awareness. Sure, they won’t all be accepted, but it could potentially be a good, fair way to do this. This wouldn’t replace the current system, but be added to it. We should still have our free votes. This is more for businesses that may really want a feature, so they can pay to have it added (well, to increase the chance it’s added).
I think the pricing is pretty good and it’ll cater more to the masses, hence it’ll actually attract more people to even consider going from free to premium as the pricing is affordable.
“cheap” is relative to what you earn, and security shouldn’t be made expensive. Also don’t forget team pricing is pretty much out there as other vendors that’s where bw will really shine since companies specially will want their own hosted solution
I for one, hope bitwarden stays on their current premium pricing, and hope more people sign up for premium.
And for those who want to give more maybe a donate button.
I believe a Family plan with Premium for everyone costs $62, doesn’t it? $1/month for Family with 5 members plus $10/year to upgrade each member to Premium.
The pricing is actually just right, and was the reason that made me sign up without giving it a second thought. And I was already using the free KeePassXC and signed up for a free bitwarden-account just out of curiosity, and was blown away by the simplicity and solidity of the product. Sign up for Premium just a day later.
I think it is a good strategy to keep the personal (premium) price low as it makes Bitwarden the preferred solution for most, a no-brainer really. The Team and Enterprise subscription is where the money is at, and the more people who use it privately, the higher the chances that organizations will use it too.
I’m considering the Entreprise editon for my company and for our customers right now, and that would probably not have happened with i higher price point for the Premium.
FWIW, I switched to Bitwarden because Lastpass (after they got bought by LogMeIn) went from 12 EUR/year to 24 EUR/year for no reason whatsoever. I found that ludicrous. I don’t mind paying a little bit more than 10 USD/year for Bitwarden, but I want to avoid a situation like with Lastpass. Luckily, I could use CSV to migrate (though it did not work flawless due to Lastpass being at fault).
The family plan with premium included for all included members is currently $52/year. For myself, the free plan works since it’s just my partner and I, so if we wanted to both have premium, it’s $20/year. Both of these seem reasonable.
I agree - I would totally be willing to pay more for BW but not everyone can or would.
I like a pay what you want model where the price for premium is $10 but you can choose to pay more if you want to help out. Or a donate button which accomplishes essentially the same thing.
Like other users said… If you want to pay more, why not to donate instead? Bitwarden is open-source freemium anyway.
People also mentioned that paying in dollars is quite a pain for some countries’ residents. That’s my case too.
You’d have to check better and closer to the PPP of each country in order to implement a higher price, not a higher/lower currency for other people, for instance.
I think it’s good enough the way it already is. It’s affordable and accessible. If you want to contribute more, just use the donation option, that’s all.
I’m not sure what Bitwarden can do about that though. They could perhaps add the € but that may not be much help.
I have a (prepaid) multi-currency card which takes the pain out of transactions in most currencies, but whether one of those is available depends on the situation where someone lives. I don’t think Bitwarden could or should try to do something about that.
That’s funny now that you mentioned I went to search in deep, and you’re right. There’s no way to donate to it at this moment. I thought they’ve added an option for that already.
I’m not quite sure how the donations would go, but people also mentioned that hosting bounties on BountySource.com or something like that would be a great idea.
In a round-about way you can if you “Add Credit” under Settings->Billing using PayPal or Bitcoin. If you simply don’t use all of the credits then it is essentially a donation?
But that is definitely not as straight-forward as a dedicated “Donate” button would be.
I hopped on to make a donation but I couldn’t find any way to do that. I switched from Bitwarden (hosted) to self-hosted (Rust on Cloudron) a few months back but would still like to financially support development. It can’t be that hard to add a basic paypal donation button.
