March 28, 2026
Password drama unlocked
Bitwarden Doubled Their Price. I'd Left. Here's What You Missed
Fans say Bitwarden ‘pulled a Netflix’ and tried to sneak it past them
TLDR: Bitwarden quietly doubled its annual subscription price and buried the news in feel-good feature talk, which many users see as a sneaky move from a company built on trust. Commenters are split between “it’s just $20, chill” and “if my password manager plays word games, I’m out,” turning a small bill into a big trust crisis.
Bitwarden, a popular password manager people trust to lock up their digital lives, quietly doubled its yearly price from ten bucks to just under twenty — and the internet is not taking it calmly. In one blog post about shiny new features, the price jump was dropped in like a footnote, and users say it felt less like a heads-up and more like a gotcha. The angriest voices aren’t even mad about the money, they’re furious about the way it was done: a vague renewal email talking about “$1.65/month” instead of plainly saying “your price is doubling.”
Comment sections lit up with people calling it a “trust tax,” saying a security company should be the last one playing word games. One camp is rage-quitting to self-hosted tools like Vaultwarden, bragging that they saw this coming and already moved their passwords off corporate servers. Another camp is rolling its eyes, saying it’s still the price of two coffees a year and people are overreacting. The memes are merciless: Bitwarden being compared to “Netflix’s evil cousin,” screenshots of the email captioned “We’re not raising prices, we’re just doing ‘math’,” and plenty of users declaring, only half joking, that the real red flag wasn’t the money — it was the sneakiness.
Key Points
- •Bitwarden increased its Premium plan price from $10 per year to $19.80 per year, the first such change in about ten years.
- •The price increase was announced in a Bitwarden blog post focused primarily on new Premium features, with the pricing change given limited prominence.
- •New Premium features mentioned with the change include vault health alerts, password coaching, and increased attachment storage.
- •Existing Bitwarden customers are to be notified of the new pricing about 15 days before renewal, via an email quoting a $1.65/month (billed annually) rate rather than stating the full annual amount.
- •The author had recently left Bitwarden for a self‑hosted Vaultwarden setup and did not receive direct, clear communication about the doubled price, viewing this as part of a broader pattern of burying negative changes.