On February 16, 2021, LastPass made the announcement that their free plan would remove the ability to sync passwords between mobile devices and desktops. On March 16, 2021, current users of a free LastPass account will have to choose between either having a mobile account of a desktop account, instead of being able to use both like they used to.

By making this decision, LastPass changed their free product to make it inferior. There is just no other way to put it: this update removes functionalities from the free product, so much so that it almost loses its entire purpose as a product. By doing this, LastPass effectively transformed the free product that allowed them to compete with other password managers into a product useful only for demonstration purposes. As a result of this announcement, unsurprisingly, users started to flock to Bitwarden (my current password manager). Exporting passwords from the LastPass vault and importing them natively in Bitwarden takes 2 minutes. A free Bitwarden account has the same functionalities as the old version of the free LastPass account.

This thread trying to contain Bitwarden spam is currently pinned in the subreddit for LastPass:

I wonder… How did LastPass not see this coming? What’s their goal? Their premium account costs 4 times that of Bitwarden, for no added value that I find worth mentioning.

On the other hand, I suppose Bitwarden is laughing all the way to the bank. They get free publicity from LastPass. What was once a product that received little to no press coverage managed to overthrow the previous king of the mountain, largely in part because the previous king (LastPass) just decided to off itself.

All of this makes no sense to me, so I guess the future will tell us how right or wrong LastPass was in its decision. I’m sure the people calling the shots there are smart. What I don’t know is just how out of touch they are…