Bitwarden: the free tier is the product

In December 2022, LastPass disclosed that an attacker had copied encrypted customer vault backups, along with some fields that were not encrypted, like site URLs. I was three months into the Amazon job and still getting texts from old MSP clients, and for about six weeks every one of those texts was some version of "get me out of here." Most of them landed on Bitwarden. Two years later they're still on it, and nobody has asked to leave.

I use it myself. Free tier for years, then Premium at $1.65 a month, billed annually at $19.80, mostly so I could put TOTP codes in the same vault. Here's what I'd tell someone before migrating their vault, including the parts that made me say no to a couple of features.

the part everyone gets wrong

People assume "open source" means "nobody checked it," and that a free password manager must be the demo version of a real one. Both assumptions are backwards.

The free tier is not crippled. Unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, apps on every platform, end-to-end encrypted sync. What Premium adds is convenience: the built-in TOTP authenticator, encrypted file attachments, vault health reports, emergency access. I paid the $19.80 for TOTP and consider the rest decoration.

The trust argument is the one worth having. Bitwarden's clients and server code are public, and third-party audits have been published, which is more than you can say for the closed-source managers people paid for and then watched get breached. The mechanics matter too. This is a zero-knowledge design: your master password never leaves your device, the vault is encrypted client-side, and the server stores an encrypted blob it cannot read. The key derivation, the step that turns your master password into the encryption key, defaults to PBKDF2 at 600,000 iterations, or Argon2id if you switch. Those are numbers you can check, not marketing.

how the sync actually works

You type the master password. The client derives a key, pulls the encrypted blob from Bitwarden's servers, and decrypts it locally. The server participates in authentication, never in decryption. If their infrastructure vanished tomorrow, the cached copy on your phone and desktop would still open offline, which I have tested by accident on a plane with wifi that cost $8 and didn't work.

For the homelab crowd: the official self-host image exists, but most people actually run Vaultwarden, the community rewrite, and it is unofficial software holding your passwords. I run Vaultwarden for lab accounts and keep everything real on Bitwarden's servers. That split is deliberate. A password vault is not the place to practice ops, because the blast radius is every account you own.

where it breaks

The master password is the entire threat model. Forget it and there is nothing to reset. Phish it out of someone and the second factor is the only thing left, which is why I'd treat "enable 2FA on the vault account" as mandatory rather than a suggestion. Premium lets you require a hardware key, which pairs nicely with the YubiKey I wrote about last week.

The browser extension is where I lose hours. Autofill on page load is the convenient option and the dangerous one, because a page can load fields you didn't intend to match. I turned it off after watching the extension cheerfully fill a test credential into an iframe on a client's vendor portal, a credential that was for a different site entirely. Fill on demand, keyboard shortcut, every time. It costs two seconds per login.

Other friction, briefly. Attachment storage starts at 1GB and expansion costs extra. Sync depends on their servers unless you self-host, and during one outage I remember, cached desktop copies opened fine while the extension sulked. And the apps talk to a lot of surfaces: the extension can read every page you visit, which is how autofill works and also the honest description of what you granted it.

One admission, because it costs me something: I have never once done a scheduled quarterly encrypted export. The "I'll test it quarterly" plan lasted one quarter in 2023. Backups are not real until you have restored from them, and my own rule lives in the same drawer as everyone else's.

what to do

1. Pick a master password you can't reconstruct from your social feeds. Six random words from a diceware list beats a clever symbol pattern.
2. Turn on 2FA for the vault account immediately, TOTP on free, hardware key if you pay.
3. Set the KDF to Argon2id if your devices can handle it, and be patient on the old ones.
4. Turn off autofill on page load in the extension settings.
5. Export an encrypted copy now, not later, and put it on a drive that isn't always connected. Schedule the next one for a real date and tell me if you keep it, because I didn't.

I did the LastPass migrations in a converted garage office in Katy that smelled like epoxy, on a desktop whose E key stuck, so the ticket notes from that week all say "custoer" somewhere. The clients kept the candy bowl stocked with the good individually wrapped kind, which is why I agreed to Fridays.

Export once this week. It takes eleven minutes.