Bitwarden, the maker of a preferred free password supervisor and different safety options, is quietly making adjustments.
In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory position, according to LinkedIn, with no announcement from the corporate. His alternative, Michael Sullivan, former CEO of each Acquia and Insightsoftware, touts his expertise with “all sides of mergers and acquisitions” on his own LinkedIn page, together with expertise working with main personal fairness companies.
CFO Stephen Morrison additionally left Bitwarden in April, changed by former InVision CEO Michael Shenkman. Each Crandell and Morrison joined the corporate in 2019. Kyle Spearrin, who started Bitwarden as a fun hobby project in 2015, stays the corporate’s CTO.
In the meantime, Bitwarden has made some refined tweaks to its web site.
The web page for its personal password manager now not contains the phrase “At all times free.” Beforehand this appeared below the “Choose a plan” part partway down the web page, however that part now not mentions the free plan, although it stays obtainable elsewhere on the web page. Bitwarden made this variation in mid-April, according to the Internet Archive.
Bitwarden has additionally stopped itemizing “Inclusion” and “Transparency” as tentpole values on its careers page. The corporate has lengthy outlined its values with the acronym “GRIT,” which used to face for “Gratitude, Duty, Inclusion, and Transparency.” After May 4, it modified the acronym to face for “Gratitude, Duty, Innovation, and Belief.”
The phrase “inclusive setting” nonetheless seems below an outline of Gratitude, whereas “transparency” is talked about below the Belief heading. They’re simply now not the main target.
These adjustments arrive not lengthy after Bitwarden doubled the price of its Premium password manager plan, from $10 to $20. When the corporate revealed these changes in February, it tucked them right into a lengthier weblog publish about function updates and opted to not instantly notify clients. Bitwarden is as a substitute disclosing the worth hikes within the reminder emails it sends 15 days forward of every renewal.
Bitwarden’s blog doesn’t point out the management adjustments or new firm values, and the corporate has not issued any information releases about them. The corporate has not but responded to a request for remark.
Who’s working Bitwarden now?
On his LinkedIn web page, Sullivan, Bitwarden’s new CEO, describes himself as having “strong expertise in all sides of mergers and acquisitions, together with direct expertise with main PE companies Hg, Vista Fairness Companions, and TA Associates.”
Certainly, Sullivan oversaw main infusions of personal fairness cash into the earlier two firms he led. These included a $1 billion acquisition of cloud platform Acquia by Vista Fairness Companions in 2019 and a $1 billion investment by Hg into financial reporting software maker Insightsoftware in 2021.
Although he was lively in posting information from Insightsoftware on his LinkedIn web page, Sullivan hasn’t but commented on his new job at LinkedIn. A message to Crandell, Bitwarden’s former CEO, has gone unanswered.
Full circle
In a 2024 interview with Quick Firm, Spearrin, Bitwarden’s founder, mentioned he began engaged on the password supervisor as a pastime.
He wished to find out about creating cell apps and browser extensions, and was involved that LogMeIn’s acquisition of LastPass, his most well-liked password supervisor, would result in undesirable adjustments. (LogMeIn had beforehand killed off a free model of its distant desktop software program.)
When LogMeIn went on to impose new restrictions on the free model of LastPass—precisely as Spearrin and different customers had feared—it led to a progress spurt for Bitwarden. Spearrin attributed a lot of Bitwarden’s subsequent spikes to additional points at LastPass, together with a significant safety breach in 2022. As of two years in the past, Bitwarden had 8.5 million customers.
“I can title quite a lot of episodes the place, for those who take a look at Bitwarden’s person progress on a line chart, you may in all probability pinpoint a number of of these episodes as being peaks,” Spearrin mentioned.
Nowadays, Bitwarden’s private password supervisor faces more durable competitors, as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all constructed more and more strong free password managers into their net browsers and working techniques. They’re additionally pushing to eliminate passwords altogether and put themselves accountable for password-less logins.
Whereas Bitwarden sells a Premium model to people, it has additionally relied on the free model to funnel clients towards its enterprise plans. The corporate has expanded into different safety merchandise as nicely, together with a secrets and techniques supervisor for software program builders.
Regardless of these broader ambitions, Crandell mentioned Bitwarden’s dedication to a sturdy free tier was ironclad. “That’s a agency dedication from the corporate,” he mentioned in a 2024 interview. “Totally featured, free eternally.”
Hopefully, the most recent adjustments at Bitwarden don’t mirror a change of coronary heart.
