Organization cannot add attachment despite premium plan

Hey,
I have a subscription for an individual premium membership. Within my vault, I setup an organization to share common and important info with my family. I just noticed that I cannot attach a file to a shared entry. I get a message that this organization cannot do this. What am I missing here? Do I have to grant this specifically?

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Hello @Brausepaul,

Sorry you are having some confusion here. Bitwarden offers quite a bit for users, though as you mentioned some features are premium paid features.
Bitwarden licenses these features with a premium subscription, the premium features can either go for your personal vault, or an organizational vault.

When an item is moved from your personal vault into an organization vault, that item is no longer “owned” by you individually but instead gets moved into the Organization and owned by that Org.
You can purchase a premium membership for either your personal vault, or an organization, or even both if you wanted!
Though if you license features for an organization, members of that organization should automatically inherit and gain premium status for their personal vaults as well, so you only need to purchase a single license either personal or for an organization.

You can see more here

If you decide to make the switch from a personal license to an organization license and have any billing related questions you will want to contact the Bitwarden directly here.

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Thank you for your reply, I was unaware of this licensing mechanism for organisations I founded my myself. If I understand you correctly in my use case it would suit my needs to move my subscription to organisation level, so all my family members benefit from this, am I correct?

Yup!

That’s how I do it, pay for a family organization which will license the Org for any premium features.
This will allow items in the Org to save attachments, generate TOTP 2FA codes, and much more.

Anyone who you invite as a member to the family organization also will automatically get premium features on their personal vault too so long as they are a member.

You can have up to 6 members total including yourself as the owner.
Between all of us for my family with the current price of $40/year it comes out cheaper than an individual subscription too.

I was just looking for the same answer and ended up here.
It’s disappointing that attachments are not available to Premium users.

I have two problems with the Family plan.

It’s just me and my wife, so paying double the cost is not ideal.

But the bigger problem is that the Family plan requires everyone to trust one person to maintain the plan.
This is OK for parents helping their children, but not for adults in the same family unit.
Each adult should be able to pay for their own Premium account, while receiving the same benefits as the Family plan.

The pricing/feature model for the Family plan just doesn’t quite sit right with the philosophy of Bitwarden. To access all features, 5 out of 6 people have to give up some level of ownership.
A family is not the same as a business. A family can be made up of independant users, unlike a business in which the business must manage everyone’s accounts.

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Hey Chad, 2 premiums have access to the same features as a family plan, if you are still having any issues here, feel free to reach out to bitwarden.com/contact

Thank you for the clarification. That’s not quite how it’s described on the pricing page.

I’m about to help my wife create her own premium account, and in the meantime I was moving some logins to a ‘Family’ org when I noticed I couldn’t add an attachment.

Ah, sorry for the confusion, yes I see what you mean, the distinction between 1 GB Personal and 1 GB for Organizational items. Thanks for the feedback on this one.

So when me and my partner both have a personal premium membership there is no way of sharing Secore Notes with attachements? Like photo’s of memberships cards etc?

Hey @martijnjos and welcome to the community,

Not entirely the case, the organizational vault just allows for items to be owned and controled under a common shared organization.

I believe though there is a planned feature on the roadmap under the label of “Vault Item Sharing” which should hopefully allow for better sharing of individual items in your personal vault to a specific person without the need for an organization.

While I do not believe this would allow for the item to remain “in sync” in the same way that items shared in an Organization would. As if you update an organization item that record is updated for everyone in the Org who that item is shared with and who has access.

The new Vault Item Sharing I believe would be akin to the current Bitwarden Send feature which would allow you to securely share and send someone information, but if you update your record in your personal vault the two records would not stay linked in any way, and so changes made to either in each personal vault would not be shared.


On the note of the Bitwarden Send feature, this could be a way around the sharing currently between yourself and your partner if you both choose to simply get a premium individual membership.

As a user with premium benefits, Send allows for secure and safe sharing of files as well as text.

  • You could create a Send and attach any needed files, membership cards, etc.
  • Provide the Send to your partner however you prefer
  • They would save this into their personal Vault, given if they also have premium benefits on their personal vault would also be able to upload attachments.

This is one method to have individual personal premium plans and not use a premium organization to share attachments within the Bitwarden ecosystem. Though as mentioned I believe the upcoming Vault Item Sharing will essentially make this process easier and allow for easier sharing of items from one person’s Bitwarden vault to another.

Hi Kent, thank you very much for this extensive reply, I did not expect this.
The new feature on the roadmap sounds exactly like what I’m looking for.
I recently switched from Lastpass. They had a feature where you could select any item in your Vault and simply ‘send’ it to another user. Worked perfect for us! Too bad we can’t use the ‘Send’ feature in Bitwarden straight from our Vaulted items!