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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Pricing is truly annoying with password managers. I know this is an edge case but I volunteered for my kid’s school PTA and discovered to my horror that all the passwords were stored in a single Google Sheet. But the pricing for the number of users we were looking at (a very small core number of staff but a large number of volunteer parents) made pretty much every password manager service unaffordable, even with non profit discounts. Per seat pricing doesn’t work out for everyone.

We ended up using Dashlane because its free tier allows sharing between users but the administration is so much more work than it needs to be.

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Hi! could you please explain what is this admin work that is bothering you? Thanks! (working at Dashlane, and happy to forward feedback to product team. I'll already forward your comment on pricing)

It’s not really your fault, it’s us bending your free tier into something it isn’t intended to be. Maximum number of passwords shared, only logging in to one device at a time etc.

It’s a really weird edge case but eye opening for me as someone who is usually in a very well resourced tech environment. Google offers a great free tier for non profits and in the ideal world we’d have a password manager that plugs into our Google organization without a second thought. But that’s a premium tier feature and any money not spent on enriching the kids education has to be justified to the nth degree. We have people who are go-tos for a two factor auth code because their phone numbers are the ones attached to the accounts… people will go to surprising lengths!

There isn’t a good business case for it as such but volunteer organizations (as opposed to well resourced non profits) would make good use of a free tier and it would generate goodwill with people who are sometimes responsible for purchasing decisions in their day jobs.

You could self-host bitwarden on a $5 a month instance (or free-forever, if you choose to trust oracle or gcp), and then put TOTP 2fa into your bitwarden instance. Still requires a little maintenance on the instance, but this can be 99% automated.

Yeah, the thought has occurred to me. But I’m only going to be there for a few years, the responsible thing is to do something that’ll survive long after I’m gone.

I've volunteered for and served on the boards of several small, youth-oriented nonprofits. They all had this weird idea that you can't spend any money on operational stuff. Yeah I get that you want to minimize it, and you should. But payments for necessary services should just be part of the budget. There is overhead to running these orgs and not every penny can go straight through to the kids. If you make things a PITA for the volunteers, eventually you won't have any volunteers. People are giving their time freely to help, but most are busy and don't want to f*ck around with complicated solutions that waste that time.

Completely agree. The kind of people I've encountered in non-profits and charities as an IT Sales Professional over 20 years is that they expect great products and services should be as close to free as possible. They don't seem to understand that the tax breaks and incentives are there precisely to help soften the costs of running such an organisation. To expect even MORE than that from vendors is unrealistic. I watched an interview with Naveen Jain (Viome CEO) on a podcast once and he said that a non-profit entrepreneur or CEO is more often than not "just a sh*tty entrepreneur". I couldn't agree more based on my experience selling tech since 2001!

Oh, I totally agree. But I’m in the minority in that view and have come to accept that it’s just the nature of the beast.

A strength that is often overlooked at NGO's is their people power, so don't forget to leverage that. For instance, cctv, each unit, each chief and his 4 indians, could simply use wyze to monitor their immediate environment, worst case scenario, the chief leaves in a bad way and someone else has to reprogram the wyze cams to a new chief. Same with passwords, if you don't want to pay for centralized admin, then create multiple self-sufficient micro-environments with one central IT as tier 2 for advise and rescue. Think of it as vlans, but in admin terms. This method, opens up a lot of free tiers out there for each tribe/unit to leverage, as long as IT/CENTRAL, get's informed of the master-pwd (ex. bitwarden etc.).

Why not just use something like Keepass in this scenario for free (forever) ?

I know very little about PTAs, but... why would a PTA need to share passwords anyways, instead of having separate logins?

Immediate example that comes to mind: there’s a paid-for Canva account that multiple people need to use. Can’t use separate logins because then you’d need multiple subscriptions.

This is in breach of the tos though, right? Great example to set for the kids.

Pretty sure the kids aren’t aware of the PTA’s use of Canva.

Moral argument is that a PTA are part time organizations and if canva doesn't cater to that business model, then shared credentials is fair use, commercial and for profit use is a horse of a different color.

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