Selfhosted

I recommend against hosting a password manager yourself.

The main reason is self hosted systems require maintenance to patch vulnerabilities. While it's true that you won't be on the main list if e.g. bitwarden gets hacked, your data could still be obtained or ransomed by a scripted attack looking for e.g. vulnerable VaultWarden servers (or even just vulnerable servers in general).

Using professional hosting means just that, professional hosting with people who's full time job is running those systems and keeping people that aren't supposed to be there out.

Plus, you always have the encryption of the binary blob itself to fall back on (which if you've got a good password is a serious barrier to entry that buys you a lot of time). Additionally vaults are encrypted with symmetric crypto which is not vulnerable to quantum computing, so even in that case your data is reasonably safe... And mixed in with a lot of other data that's likely higher priority to target.

You'll learn pretty quickly that a large chunk of self-hosting people are the types that are just terrified of having things be outside their control, which by extension means they are terrified of other people that aren't them running infrastructure. 🫠

you become fully in charge of your passwords instead of relying on someone else

TL;DR:

• you do it to gain more independence and self-reliance

Is there an easy way to export passwords from LastPass to another service, self-hosted or otherwise? I’ve been wanting to move away from my current manager but have been reluctant due to this.

I self host services as much as possible for multiple reasons; learning, staying up to date with so many technologies with hands on experience, and security / peace of mind. Knowing my 3-2-1 backup solution is backing my entire infrastructure helps greatly in feeling less pressured to provide my data to unknown entities no matter how trustworthy, as well as the peace of mind in knowing I have control over every step of the process and how to troubleshoot and fix problems. I’m not an expert and rely heavily on online resources to help get me to a comfortable spot but I also don’t feel helpless when something breaks.

If the choice is to trust an encrypted backup of all my sensitive passwords, passkeys, and recovery information on someone else’s server or have to restore a machine, container, vm, etc. from a backup due to critical failures, I’ll choose the second one because no matter how encrypted something is someone somewhere will be able to break it with time. I don’t care if accelerated and quantum encryption will take millennia to break. Not having that payload out in the wild at all is the only way to prevent it being cracked.

Lots of people like and recommend Bitwarden. I think followed by KeePass on second place.

I self-host stuff because I can, because I learn something while doing it and it gives me control. And I'm running that server anyways, so I might as well install one more service on it. If you don't want to spend your time managing and maintaining servers and services, go for the official (paid) service. That'll do, too.

If you're worried about your internet connection going down, either use a VPS in a datacenter or just use software that syncs to your devices. I think Bitwarden does that, your passwords will be available without an internet connection to your server. They just won't get synced until the server is reachable again.

I self-host Vaultwarden but I use a VPS where I keep things stable. My VPSes run Debian Stable and have unattended-upgrades installed and configured to automatically install security updates. My home server runs Unraid and is more experimental - I'm not running anything of critical importance on it.

Why not a piece of hardware instead of self hosting, cloud hosting, etc?

I've used cloud based services for password managers for work and "self host" my personal stuff. I barely consider it self hosting since I use Keepass and on every machine it's configured to keep a local cached copy of the database but primarily to pull from the database file on my in-home NAS.

Two issues I've had:

Logging into an account on a device currently not on my home network is brutal. I often resort to simply viewing the needed password and painstakingly type it in (and I run with loooooong passwords)

If I add or change a password on a desktop and don't sync my phone before I leave, I get locked out of accounts. Two years rocking this setup it's happened three times, twice I just said meh I don't really need to do this now, a third time I went through account recovery and set a new password from my phone.

Minor complaint:

Sometimes Keepass2Android gets stuck trying to open the remote database and I have to let it sit and timeout (5 minutes!!!) which gets really annoying but happens very infrequently which is why I say just minor complaint

All in all, I find the inconvenience of doing the personal setup so low that to me even a $10 annual subscription is not worth it