From Auto-Renew to Autonomy
Nord’s Nefarious, Gregarious, Price Creep
I didn’t cancel my Nord subscriptions out of anger. Honestly, I forgot I was paying for them most of the time. They worked fine — no complaints there. It was the gradual, consistent upward price creep. Slowly at first, then sudden and drastic.
I signed up for NordVPN in late 2018 on a 3-year plan at $2.99/month — $107 total. Perfectly reasonable. In 2022, I renewed for two more years at $83.70, or $3.49/month. 17% isn’t nothing, but that 17% is fifty cents — no big deal.
Then came NordPass: $11.32 for a full year. That was an easy yes.
But in 2024, NordVPN auto-renewed at $105.45 — for just one year. That’s $8.79/month. I barely noticed. Then NordPass jumped to $38.03/year, quietly tripling in cost. And this past May, NordVPN hit me again — this time for $158.87. One year. $13.24/month.
In five and a half years, the monthly cost of NordVPN ballooned 4.4x. That’s when I logged in and shut off auto-renew. For both.
Why Vaultwarden Made Sense
By the time I started looking for alternatives, I already knew how to stand up a VPS. I’d set up servers before, configured Nginx, poked around with Docker — enough to know that I didn’t need a subscription to store a bunch of encrypted blobs. I just needed the right open-source tool. And to not be a lazy-ass.
That’s where Vaultwarden came in: a lightweight, self-hosted implementation of Bitwarden (though not associated with the company, one of the active maintainers is a Bitwarden employee, as very clearly stated on its GitHub README). It offers a clean UI, mobile support via the official Bitwarden app, and browser integration through the Bitwarden extension.
And most importantly: no oopsy-I-forgot-I-even-had-this billing cycle. No upsell. No renewal notifications. Just a container running quietly on my VPS.
After a 20-30 minute setup process, I was up and running, with all my credentials imported cleanly from NordPass.
Took Me Long Enough
I didn’t ditch NordPass because it was bad software. I ditched it because I realized I was paying a lot of money to outsource something I could run myself for zero money. Vaultwarden gave me the same core functionality — without the overhead, the billing, or the blind trust (looking at you Nord 2018 breach). And once it was up and running, I wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner. Probably had to do with the whole “lazy-ass” thing from before.