Family subscriptions “expired” after upgrade to 2025.5.0 (self-hosted)

[spiezmaestro]

Steps To Reproduce

Am self-hosting Bitwarden and upgraded to 2025.5.0 this morning. At 12:00 PM mails where sent out for my 3 family organizations that the licenses had expired. They are however valid for several months more. I could however indeed not access organization items and premium feature like TOTP.

Message in web vault:

License info:

I reverted back to a snapshot made directly before the upgrade, but this is a serious issue. Not sure if this is only my instance, but I really suspect this is not.

Expected Result

No "expiration" and therefore suspension of features

Actual Result

"Fake" license expiration

Screenshots or Videos

No response

Additional Context

No response

Build Version

2025.5.0

Environment

Self-Hosted

Environment Details

Ubuntu 24.04
Official Docker Container

Issue Tracking Info

• I understand that work is tracked outside of Github. A PR will be linked to this issue should one be opened to address it, but Bitwarden doesn't use fields like "assigned", "milestone", or "project" to track progress.

[Neonwarden]

Hi there,

To update your license file, log in to the Bitwarden web application at https://vault.bitwarden.com or https://vault.bitwarden.eu, depending on your server's geographical location. For additional details on server geography, please check here: https://bitwarden.com/help/server-geographies/

Navigate to Admin Console > {YOUR ORG NAME} > Billing > Subscription, where you can download your new license file. To generate this file, you will need your Installation ID, which can be found in the ./bwdata/env/global.override.env configuration file on your server. Alternatively, you can retrieve it from the Bitwarden System Administration Portal at https://{YOUR URL}/admin

Once you have obtained the new license file, log in to your self-hosted web application and go to Admin Console > {YOUR ORG NAME} > Billing > Subscription to apply the update. After applying the new license, log out and then log back in to ensure the changes take effect.

If you encounter an error stating “Version X not supported”, verify that your server is running the latest version. If an update is required, ensure you have a backup, clone, or full copy of the bwdata directory before proceeding. You can follow the official update procedure outlined here: https://bitwarden.com/help/updating-on-premise/

We use GitHub issues as a place to track bugs and other development related issues. If your issue persists, please write us back using our “Contact support” form located on our Help Center (https://bitwarden.com/help/).

You can include a link to this issue in the message content.

Alternatively, you can also search for an answer in our help documentation or get help from other Bitwarden users on our community forums (https://community.bitwarden.com/c/support/).

The issue here will be closed.

Thanks!

[spiezmaestro]

Sorry, but did you read my issue at all? My license is running until September, but straight after upgrading to 2025.5.0 it was listed as expired. This has nothing to do with the license itself (and mind you, 3 licenses all at once), but with the upgrade to 2025.5.0. Instead of posting some generic text as soon as you read license, maybe this time it is worth looking into it.

[spiezmaestro]

Since I can't re-open the issue, I guess more people with run into this issue. Not sure if this is the experience you want to give your users.

[dwbit]

Hey @spiezmaestro for this particular issue, some community members have been able to resolve the issue by re-sycning or manually re-uploading the license again, can you let me know if either of those steps worked for you?

[joshuabeny1999]

Me and my colleague had same issue on our instance. Yeah it could be resolved by downloading and reuploading the license again. But still it should not happen that an upgrade disable all premium features long before the license expired. Confusing was it showed license as valid until xx date in the web app but still was disabled.

This should be investigated!

[CirnoT]

2025-05-18 00:30:00.432 +00:00 [Information] Validating licenses for 1 organizations.
2025-05-18 00:30:00.515 +00:00 [Information] Organization a049ecd1-7035-41b6-ad65-b20e00d23e80 ("i32.pl") has an invalid license and is being disabled. Reason: "Invalid signature."
2025-05-18 00:30:07.749 +00:00 [Information] Finished job "ValidateOrganizationsJob" at 05/18/2025 00:30:07.

The likely cause is #5569 which introduces new property UseAdminSponsoredFamilies without updating license version hence making all legacy property-based licenses invalid. @Neonwarden as I understand it, the agreement on introducing claim-based licenses was that legacy licenses still continue to function?

Pinging @cyprain-okeke as author and @cturnbull-bitwarden as reviewer of PR in question. Also pinging @BTreston because their recent PR #5834 bumps version.

---

For reference, the above log comes from instance running license that was generated on 2024-10-19T12:27:45.6010386Z (version 14).

[SergeantConfused]

Hello everyone,

Thank you all for your input. This matter has been raised internally, and I will now reopen this GitHub report for the time being whilst it is being examined. Please feel free to post additional information, such as screenshots or a screen video recordings, if you wish.

Thank you all again,

[grafnull]

I have exactly the same issue. Reuploading the license fixed it for now.

bitwarden.sh version 2025.5.0
Docker version 28.1.1, build 4eba377
Docker Compose version v2.35.1

[spiezmaestro]

More info can maybe be found in the community issue I created as this issue got closed previously.

https://community.bitwarden.com/t/family-subscriptions-expired-after-upgrade-to-2025-5-0-self-hosted/84857

[joshooaj]

I was also impacted by this. Downloading a new license json and importing it solved the problem for me. I couldn't work out why I got the email about my subscription being expired. Everything worked fine until today when I could no longer enter TOTP codes. If I had used my self-hosted bw server to store a TOTP code for my cloud bw account, it would have made it a big pain to download a fresh copy of my license json.

[keliansb]

We also faced the same issue, but we have an Enterprise subscription, not a Family one.
Downloading and reapplying the license also fixed the issue for us.

[jWeck-Software]

I had the same problem on the weekend, except that the clients did not recognize the new license until the following day and only then was it possible to use TOTP and Passkey again.