- The Bitwarden free plan lost its ‘Always free’ commitment language in April — then quietly got it back after backlash.
- Bitwarden’s new CEO has a history of acquisitions and asset sales, raising fears about the Bitwarden free plan’s future.
- Premium pricing doubled in March 2025, buried inside a feature announcement with no dedicated notice to users.
- Experts recommend moving passwords to an open format like KeePass now, before any further changes lock you out.
The Bitwarden Free Plan Problem Nobody Officially Announced
If you rely on the Bitwarden free plan to manage your passwords, you should probably be paying close attention right now. Over the past few months, a series of quiet, seemingly unrelated changes at Bitwarden have stacked up in a way that paints a pretty clear picture — and it’s not a comfortable one for users who chose Bitwarden precisely because of its long-standing commitment to a genuinely free tier.
None of this came via a blog post, a press release, or so much as a tweet. No announcement. No transparency report. Just a steady drip of changes that, individually, might seem minor — but together, they tell a story worth paying attention to.
A New CEO With a Very Specific Track Record
In February 2025, Bitwarden brought in a new chief executive. That alone isn’t unusual — companies change leadership all the time. What matters is who they brought in and why. According to Patrick Boyd, who first surfaced many of these concerns, the new CEO comes with a background rooted in mergers and acquisitions, with a history of entering companies, restructuring them aggressively, and selling off the pieces.
That’s a very particular skill set. It’s not the profile of someone hired to deepen a product’s open-source roots or double down on a free-tier user base. It’s the profile of someone hired to extract value — and that should make anyone currently depending on the Bitwarden free plan uncomfortable.
Leadership changes of this kind aren’t unprecedented in the password manager space. LastPass went through years of ownership shuffles under LogMeIn before its catastrophic 2022 breach, and users who had stayed loyal through the transitions paid the price. The pattern of a beloved security tool getting acquired or restructured, then quietly degraded, is well established at this point.
The Price Hike Nobody Told You About
In March 2025, Bitwarden doubled its Premium subscription price. That alone would be news. But the way it was communicated — or rather, wasn’t — is what’s really telling. The price increase wasn’t announced in a dedicated post. It wasn’t emailed to existing subscribers ahead of time. Instead, it was buried inside a feature announcement, the kind of update most users skim or ignore entirely.
Doubling a price is a significant move for any SaaS product. Hiding it inside unrelated release notes is a choice. It suggests whoever made that decision either didn’t want scrutiny, didn’t think users deserved a straight conversation, or both. For a company that built its reputation on transparency — more on that shortly — it’s a jarring shift in tone.
When ‘Always Free’ Stops Meaning Always Free
Here’s where things get genuinely strange. Sometime in mid-April, the phrase “Always free” quietly disappeared from Bitwarden’s personal password manager page. It had previously sat prominently under the plan selector — one of those trust signals that free users point to when recommending the product to others. Gone, with no explanation.
The Bitwarden free plan itself wasn’t removed. The free tier still exists. But the commitment language — the part that said, in plain terms, that this would always be free — vanished. That’s a meaningful distinction. Products get away with a lot when there’s no explicit promise on the table.
The removal was spotted and spread rapidly across Fediverse communities. The backlash was immediate enough that the phrase did eventually reappear on the site. But the fact that it disappeared in the first place, and that nobody at Bitwarden explained why, doesn’t exactly restore confidence. Anyone relying on the Bitwarden free plan should treat that silence as a signal, not reassurance.
Inclusion and Transparency, Deleted
The values rewrite might be the most revealing signal of all — precisely because it’s so easy to dismiss as corporate window dressing. For years, Bitwarden defined its internal culture through an acronym: GRIT, standing for Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency. After May 4th, 2025, GRIT was quietly redefined. Inclusion and Transparency were replaced by Innovation and Trust.
Two words were dropped: Inclusion and Transparency. Two words that, for a security-focused open-source company, aren’t just internal HR language — they’re implicit promises to users. Transparency in particular is foundational to why open-source security tools earn trust. You audit the code. You read the changelog. You believe the company when it says what it’s doing, because it has historically shown its work.
What makes this change especially uncomfortable is how it was implemented. Bitwarden didn’t publish a new values page and acknowledge the update. They went back and edited a four-year-old blog post written by the company’s former CEO — quietly rewriting history rather than owning the change. That’s not an oversight. That’s a decision.
What You Should Actually Do Right Now
The Bitwarden free plan may survive all of this. The company may turn out fine. But if you’ve built your digital security around a single proprietary service — even a well-regarded open-source one — you’re accepting a dependency that can change without warning. Recent events have made that risk very concrete.
The practical recommendation here is straightforward: export your passwords now, while it’s easy, and move to an open format. KeePass and its .kdbx file format is the obvious choice — it’s an open standard supported by dozens of applications across every platform, from KeePass itself on Windows to Strongbox on iOS and KeePassDX on Android. Your passwords live in a file you control, not in a cloud account tied to a company’s continued goodwill.
Bitwarden does still allow exports, and the process is simple. There’s no technical barrier to leaving today. The question is whether you’ll do it before something forces your hand, or after.
The Bitwarden free plan situation is also a reminder of a broader tension in the open-source SaaS world. Licensing something under Apache 2.0 — as Bitwarden has done — is not the same as making a permanent commitment to free access. The code can stay open while the service wraps around it gets quietly monetised, restricted, or sold. Open source protects the software. It doesn’t protect the product.
Password managers sit at the absolute core of personal digital security. They’re arguably the one tool where trust and stability matter more than anywhere else. When the signals around that trust start shifting — leadership, pricing, language, values — paying attention isn’t paranoia. It’s just good sense.
Source: https://www.osnews.com/story/145029/get-your-passwords-out-of-bitwarden-while-you-still-can/
