Why Your Business Should Self-Host Its Passwords (And How Vaultwarden Makes It Easy)

Your team uses dozens of passwords. Email, CRM, accounting software, cloud storage, social media accounts, vendor portals. Most employees handle this reality in one of two ways: they reuse the same password everywhere, or they keep a spreadsheet of credentials on their desktop.

Both approaches are disasters waiting to happen.

A password manager solves this. It generates strong, unique passwords for every account and stores them securely. Your team only needs to remember one master password. The question isn't whether you need one. It's whether you should pay for a commercial service or run your own.

The Problem with Commercial Password Managers

Services like LastPass charge per user, per month. For a team of 20 people, you're looking at $100-200 monthly. That adds up to over $2,000 per year just for password storage.

But cost isn't the only issue.

In 2022, LastPass suffered a major breach. Hackers accessed encrypted password vaults for millions of users. While the encryption held, attackers got metadata: website URLs, company names, email addresses. Some users with weak master passwords likely had their vaults cracked.

When you use a commercial password manager, you're trusting that company with your most sensitive data. Their security practices, their infrastructure, their employees. If they get breached, you get breached.

What Vaultwarden Offers

Vaultwarden is a self-hosted password manager compatible with all Bitwarden apps and browser extensions. You run it on your own server. Your passwords never leave your infrastructure.

Here's what that means in practice:

Complete Data Control: Your encrypted vault lives on hardware you control. No third party stores your passwords. No cloud service has access to your data.

Same User Experience: Your team uses the official Bitwarden apps on desktop, mobile, and browser. They won't notice any difference from using the commercial service.

Unlimited Users: Add as many team members as you want. No per-seat licensing. A company of 5 and a company of 500 pay the same infrastructure cost.

Enterprise Features Included: Password sharing, organizations, collections, two-factor authentication, emergency access. Features that cost extra on commercial plans come standard.

The Real Cost Comparison

Let's compare a 15-person team over one year:

With Vaultwarden, you save $500-1,200 annually. For larger teams, the savings multiply. A 50-person company saves $3,000-5,000 per year.

The infrastructure cost stays flat regardless of user count. Whether you have 10 users or 100, you're paying for server resources, not seats.

Security Benefits of Self-Hosting

Beyond cost savings, self-hosting your password manager improves security:

Smaller Attack Surface: Commercial password managers are high-value targets. Millions of users, centralized data. Your private instance? Nobody knows it exists.

Audit Everything: Access logs, login attempts, administrative changes. You control what gets logged and who can review it.

Your Encryption Keys: The master encryption happens on your infrastructure. Even if someone compromised your server, they'd need to crack each user's master password individually.

Compliance Friendly: For businesses handling sensitive data, keeping passwords on your own infrastructure simplifies compliance documentation. You can point auditors to exactly where credentials are stored and who has access.

What Your Team Experiences

The transition is smoother than you'd expect:

Browser Extensions: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge. One-click autofill, password generation, secure notes.

Mobile Apps: iOS and Android apps with biometric unlock. Your team can access passwords anywhere.

Desktop Apps: Windows, Mac, Linux applications for offline access.

Password Sharing: Create organizations and collections. Marketing team gets access to social media credentials. Finance team accesses accounting systems. Everyone sees only what they need.

Two-Factor Authentication: Support for authenticator apps, hardware keys, and email verification.

Your employees use the same polished Bitwarden interface they might already know. The only difference is where the data lives.

Common Concerns Addressed

"What if our server goes down?" Your passwords are cached locally on each device. Users can still access credentials offline. When the server comes back, everything syncs automatically.

"Do we need technical expertise?" Managed hosting eliminates server administration. Updates, backups, and security patches happen automatically.

"Is it really as secure as commercial options?" Vaultwarden uses the same encryption as Bitwarden: AES-256. Your vault is encrypted before it leaves your device. The server never sees plaintext passwords.

Getting Started

Two paths to running Vaultwarden:

Self-Managed: Install via Docker on your own server. Requires some technical knowledge for initial setup and ongoing maintenance.

Managed Hosting: Elestio offers Vaultwarden as a managed service. Deploy in minutes, get automatic backups, SSL certificates, and updates. Infrastructure starts around $16/month.

Start with a small pilot group. Import existing passwords, test the browser extensions, verify mobile apps work smoothly. Once your pilot users are comfortable, roll out to the full team.

The Bottom Line

Password managers aren't optional in 2026. The question is whether you'll pay per-user fees to store your credentials on someone else's servers, or run your own instance for a flat monthly cost.

Vaultwarden gives you enterprise password management without enterprise pricing. Your data stays yours. Your costs stay predictable. Your security stays in your hands.

Ready to take control of your team's passwords? Deploy Vaultwarden on Elestio and have your self-hosted password manager running today.

Thanks for reading!