CONTEXT: This thread started a s a discussion about the announced extra storage space in the 2025.12.2 Release Notes thread, but was moved into its own topic here.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, so cynical me has to believe that this change presages a Premium subscription price to at least $25/year (4 additional GB × $4/GB/year = $16, plus the current $10/year subscription).
Frankly, I would rather that they take the extra $16 and use the proceeds to hire one or more full-time developers whose duties would only consist of implementing feature requests and fixing bugs that affect individual (non-enterprise) users. With over 10 million users, of which maybe 25%–50% are individual users (50,000 enterprise customer, perhaps with an average employee headcount of 100 users each), even if we pull a number out of a hat and assume that only 5% of individual plans are Premium (or would switch to Premium if more development resources are devoted to this user category), there is a potential for an extra $2 million in revenue, which could go towards funding a dozen or so full-stack developers at a salary of $150k/year.
Such an investment would have a real and meaningful impact. In contrast, an additional 4 GB of file space will have minimal impact, especially given how difficult attachments are to work with.
I sincerely hope you are wrong about this. 16$ just for storage I do not need is a lot of money.
That said, storage has become cheaper all the time so it is possible that Bitwarden can offer more for the same price. Even cheaper plans are not unheard of.
A recent user survey implied that the Premium subscription could increase to $20–$24/year in exchange for “phishing blocker alerts, guidance to fix weak or exposed passwords, and expanded secure storage”.
They have now implemented the second and third item mentioned in the survey (warning banners for “at-risk” passwords as of 2025.12.0, and now expanded storage as of 2025.12.2), so the only remaining shoe to drop is the “phishing blocker alert” feature — which sounds like a nothing-burger, given the inherent phishing protection of the existing URI match detection functionality (and passkeys). So I am more certain than uncertain that we should expect to see a $10–$15 price increase when the phishing alerts are implemented.
As I said before, if this comes to pass, it would be a wasted opportunity. I do feel that Premium plans are underpriced (i.e., they could sustain a price increase without significant loss in subscription rates), but I don’t think Premium users will be happy about the low value of the added Premium features in return for the apparently pending price increase — they would be much happier if Bitwarden hired a dozen developers that were devoted solely to issues affecting individual users. And I don’t think there will be any appetite for a second rate hike, so this is a unique opportunity that should not be squandered.
I was discussing the three features that were explicitly mentioned in Bitwarden’s price increase survey as being “new capabilities” that would make the rate hike feel “reasonable”. I did not see any mention of archiving in the version of the survey that I completed.
@grb I understand that. But as the “Archive” feature will be a premium feature, I guess they’ll include it in their “reasoning” here – whether it was mentioned in the survey before or not.
There is also the fact that since 2025 you have to add VAT to the subscription price if your reside in certain countries. So, this already was a price increase (of around 20%) from the perspective of the wallet of the paying customers residing in those countries.
I couldn’t agree more with all this paragraph.
In my personal preference, I would wish not so much that new features were implemented, but that:
New releases weren’t plagued with so many bugs and regressions as they currently use to be
Those inevitable bugs (current and new) didn’t take so many weeks (or months) to get fixed.
I do think new features are important, but code quality, IMHO is even more important.
BTW, I think this off-topic may deserve to be split into a thread of its own.
I agree with this — i.e., the priority for the added development capacity that could theoretically be acquired with a $10–$15 rate increase should definitely be bug fixes and quality assurance.
However, there at least several dozen popular feature requests that could significantly increase the quality-of-life for individual users, along with several low-hanging fruit (e.g., rewording a confusing error message) taht could be completed with minimal effort.
My general impression is that significant development effort is currently being invested in expansion of new features that benefit enterprise users, which makes sense if that development is underwritten by venture capital funding. However, if Bitwarden will potentially increase its annual revenue by a few million dollars by raising prices for individual Premium subscriptions (my guesstimate from above), then it seems only fair that such revenue (or a significant portion of it) should be invested in development resources that directly benefit those same individual Premium users (including implementation of new features requested by this customer base).