I mean, fair take, but sometimes more thoughtful and forward-looking companies aren't looking for fast return on investment.

It could be argued similarly for Valve that all their investment in Linux ecosystems and open source in general when Linux desktops account for just over 3% of all desktop installations while Windows sits comfortably at 70% of the desktop market, just isn't a lucrative investment.

While in the long-term it frees Valve from the restrictions of the Microsoft environment and from the risk that Microsoft would make it more and more difficult for Steam to integrate as they try to make their own game store and Game Pass the premiere gaming experience on Windows, those are future risks that are speculation, even though they are rational speculation.

Investing so deeply in open source isn't a lucrative thing for Valve to be doing, but they're looking at long-term goals.

In other words, I could see the goal here being something like protecting the Bitwarden brand and making sure more people are using their official client than unofficial with the goal of making it easy to use and enticing people into the general Bitwarden ecosystem long-term. Ten years from now, people who have been running Bitwarden Lite might have a lot more options for integration and paid services than people simply using Vaultwarden.

Is that lucrative? No, but it's still pursuing brand-name dominance and keeping people officially within their ecosystem as a way to grow userbase and give users more features (including paid ones) that may not be immediately available or easily integrated with Vaultwarden.

It's probably not but if all the system admins are using vault warden at home then they may consider using vaultwarden at work and that would cost bitwarden money.

VaultWarden has contributors working on paid BitWarden features. For instance I've been following the LDAP PR for a while now. If they pull users away, they may have users who are unaware when those features release.

That being said, I won't complain when for-profit companies based on FOSS support self-hosters. It's good for the industry.

Edit:

This is why I won't switch to it, though:

My homelab only has one home to phone, and it's not someone else's home.

I switched to vaultwarden back when it was bitwarden_rs due to the crazy overdone bitwarden docker setup.. and then started using some of the licensed features. I have a home organization that I use to share passwords with my family. So now I can't switch back to bitwarden official (even lite) unless they provide me a way to handle that.

I'm not opposed to paying them, but I am opposed to subscriptions for access to something I'm hosting on my own server. So a subscription license isn't happening. I don't see a reason to leave vaultwarden at this point

It's a lightweight self-hosted option for home and small businesses. Otherwise the licensing options are the same as in other self-hosted options.

Same here. I have KeePass database set to read only by default on my phone. This minimizes the risk of conflict and I add new passwords on my desktop most of the time.

The nice thing about Bitwarden is that all vaults are locally saved on every device where you access it. So even if your NAS, server and whole house burn in fire you still have all the keys on your phone.

You'd need a good backup somewhere. But that's the same for bitwarden cloud. You cannot just assume it will never have issues

Probably worth storing the key in another place as well, like keepass on your phone or just print it out on paper and store it.