Am self-hosting Bitwarden and upgraded to 2025.5.0 this morning. At 12:00 PM mails where sent out for my 3 family organizations that the licenses had expired. They are however valid for several months more. I could however indeed not access organization items and premium feature like TOTP.
I reverted back to a snapshot made directly before the upgrade, but this is a serious issue. Not sure if this is only my instance, but I really suspect this is not.
I would refrain from upgrading before this has been clarified.
Had opened a github issue as well, which was closed with generic text about license renewal. Not happy I must say.
Please note that I do not have an issue at the moment, as I reverted the upgrade. But this seems a bug to me and wanted to prevent other from running into it and have it solved.
have contacted via Customer Support as well, but they are not making it easy to report a bug.
No, I did not, as I had to rollback to get things working again for everybody. I doubt to be honest if that was a real question of them as the github issue was immediately closed without waiting for an answer. When I find some time, I will clone the VM, try the upgrade again and then import the license again.
Me and my colleague had same issue on our instance. Yeah it could be resolved by downloading and reuploading the license again. But still it should not happen that an upgrade disable all premium features long before the license expired. Confusing was it showed license as valid until xx date in the web app but still was disabled. This should be investigated!
I cloned my VM and was able to reproduce. The structure of the json license file has changed (between my license exported in 2024 and the one exported today). I was not able to import the 2024 one. So it looks like the old license is not accepted anymore because of the structure change. There might always be a requirement for such a thing, but at least it could have been mentioned in the release notes, so people are aware and can prepare.
Have shared all my finding with Bitwarden and will update once I hear back from them.
The whole thing is even worse!
Because of the (not yet) expired license, I no longer have any access to my authenticators via my self-hosted instance, because it says my subscription has expired.
But when I check the instance, it says it still runs until june!!!
On Bitwarden.com the system then tells me that I don’t need a new subscription because the family subscription is still valid until June.
Downloading the family license again and uploading it to the self-hosted instance did nothing.
I am now locked out of all important systems because the authenticator is tied to the subscription!
In addition, the user of selfhosted instances is forced to do the whole thing manually.
Auto-sync is only available for Enterprise users!
Individual users and families get the A-card!
Furthermore, the family subscription is automatically renewed, how am I supposed to access my banks, stock exchanges and servers now? @grb Will you compensate me for any damages or losses?
After importing the newly downloaded license did you logoff and logon again? That was needed for me. After that it worked. Hope you get your issue solved.
Since you are so active here in the forum and Bitwarden is the first thing you mention in your description, I made the wrong assumption.
Is anyone from Bitwarden officially active here in the forum?
I think I will drop Bitwarden and switch to Vaultwarden.
Here I will pay the same as with Bitwarden as a donation that I can deduct from my taxes and also get the premium features without having to rely on an external service like Bitwarden and their mercy.
Just as it should be the case with a self-hosted version.
Thanks for letting the community know how you were able to solve this problem. Hopefully, sharing will make life a bit easier for the next person to walk this path.
I do agree that adding “download a fresh copy of your license” would be a great first step to add to the release notes. @dwbit, could you pass that suggestion onto the powers-that-be.
Vaultwarden only replaces the server-side. It still uses the Bitwarden clients. By switching to Vaultwarden, you will increase the number of parties involved in supporting your password manager from two to three:
Bitwarden for the client software
Yourself for the systems management and integration, since you chose to self-host..
