What's a good OSS alternative that works with iOS and Linux? Anything that's audited? (perhaps that's asking for too much)
I agree, and I wish we had more power in these things than just forking. Now that I know Bitwarden took VC money, I'm also fucking out of this mess, and here I was about to renew for the 5th year in a row.
Fuck VC's, they ruin everything good. Can I say that here? It's true.
It's almost like the interests of those who want to get fabulously wealthy -- whether founders or investors -- become misaligned with the interests of the users, even steeper/faster than when you "just" have a "lifestyle business".
As a thought experiment, let's say there are 1000 people who get annoyed when a software product they use takes VC funding. For those 1000 people to sustain a software product with a team of 5 for 10 years at 150k average per head. you'd need 7.5MM dollars just to break even. That's $7,500 per user, or $750 per year. I doubt many people would be willing to pay that just to have a product that never takes VC funding.
And note that's just to cover labor costs. If you want it audited, that's a solid 25k per audit. Operating costs for website and infrastructure, etc. Now if the product was exceptional and beat out other products in the space and generally had a slice of the pie, the number of users would increase and per user cost would decrease. But also doing as much with a team of 5 is no small feat.
But once you get into VC funding or acquisitions, businesses tend to want to grow and bloat their products by adding features no one asked for to increase their perceived value. I know I'm tired of seeing this happen to beloved software time and time again.
That being said: it's unclear if anyone really understands how to build an open source product with cloud hosting covering the bills. Almost everyone either makes a deal with the devil (VC funding) or upsells too aggressively anyway.
Cloud storage and CPU usage is basically negligible per-user for a password manager. I imagine you could service hundreds of millions of users on just a couple of capable machines, similar to HN's setup. Even with hundreds of passwords, most users total mere MB's of usage -- it's even simpler than email! I think this is one of the rare cases where corporate users can pay for big accounts with special sharing features and completely subsidize a free product for individual users. Or you could charge individual users $5 a year to cover cloud costs (more than enough), with self-hosting as an option for highly technical users to save a buck.
All of those are true of Bitwarden, except for the non-profit part...
> Or you could charge individual users $5 a year to cover cloud costs
And who pays for the development?? Bitwarden already charges only 10€/year, so they're basically doing exactly what you're proposing, but paying for development with VC money.
Even if servers were literally free (they're far from it!), do you have any idea how many users they'd need to cover just the minimal amount of developers, one business person and either an in-house or external security auditor? And who would pay for all of that during the time it took them to build up that user base??
I hate the VC culture as much as the next guy, but unless the founder is already crazy rich, you need external capital to start up any large decently company - or even a non-profit.
Lots of more "modern" password managers (as well as generally other software) kinda suffer from having this weird mixed mobile and desktop interface, inheriting all the downsides of each interface while gaining the advantages of neither. (Not to mention all the issues with porting stuff between two different OSes; Mac and Windows have completely different ideas on what an interface should look like.)
KeePass's official client being windows-only is a blessing in disguise since it means that each client developer can specifically focus on making it look good on whatever specific platform they're targeting.
There are iOS and Android clients, too. Not especially polished, but they do the job.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's tired of the bait-amd-switch of companies who are all about freedom until they get acquired by a giant and then start hastily walling their garden.
Customers are members/owners.
Examples: Tessitura, NISC
Is it true that they couldn't sell out though? I imagine if the buyer offered a pile of money then the majority of the owner-workers would go for it, even at the expense of the users.
Right now I am hunting for a non-subscription note taking setup that will replace SimpleNote.
So I’ll move to the next option from BW, just like I moved to it from LP.
