Bitwarden Doubled Their Price. I'd Left. Here's What You Missed

Summary

Back in January, I was two days into setting up Vaultwarden when Bitwarden sent me their annual Data Privacy Week survey.What browser do you use? What email service? What VPN? What are your concerns about AI and your data?I filled it out. Checked every box about keeping AI away from my personal data. Sent it in. Went back to configuring my self-hosted instance. The irony wasn't lost on me — a password manager asking how I feel about AI and data privacy, while I was in the middle of moving my passwords off their servers entirely.Six days later, on January 21st, they doubled their Premium price. I found out about it recently — because someone sent me a Fast Company article from February 1st. Which itself took eleven days after the announcement for anyone to even notice it was worth writing about.That tells you everything about how quietly this was done.What Actually HappenedBitwarden's Premium plan went from $10/year to $19.80/year — their first price increase in ten years. The announcement was a blog post about new features — vault health alerts, password coaching, more attachment storage — with the price change mentioned almost as an afterthought. No dedicated email. No direct "hey, your price is doubling" communication to paying customers.I follow them on Mastodon and checked their Facebook — (yes, I know, Facebook, but when your local government refuses to use anything else for announcements, you end up keeping the account) — if they announced it on social, it wasn't given any prominence. Either it's not there or it's buried so deep it doesn't count as communication.Existing customers will find out 15 days before their renewal. Not in an email that says "your price is going from $10 to $19.80." In an email that says "$1.65/month, billed annually."Here's the thing — Bitwarden has never offered monthly billing. Not once in ten years. It has always been annual only. So if you're a paying customer who isn't paying close attention, that email looks less like a price hi...