RememBear

» see remembear.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The thing that killed RememBear is the same thing that kept me from ever looking at it. By April 2018 a password manager was not a decision anyone made twice. You had picked one years earlier and filled a vault with several hundred entries. The cost of moving was an afternoon of broken logins for a product that did exactly what the last one did. RememBear understood this better than most companies understand their own obituaries, and wrote it down.

It came out of TunnelBear, the Toronto VPN company whose entire design language was bears, and the password manager kept the bears. There was a cartoon bear that typed your credentials in for you and got visibly pleased about it. The beta opened in November 2017 and pulled in roughly 150,000 people; version 1.0 landed on 18 April 2018, a month after McAfee bought TunnelBear, making it the company's first release under new ownership. It ran on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, with browser extensions to match. The reviews were warm.

On 19 July 2022 at 14:31 UTC, Dave Carollo published a post titled Saying Goodbye to RememBear. "With a heavy heart, we are announcing the end of support for RememBear," it opened, and then it did the unusual thing: it named a date a full year out. Existing users could download and use the app until 18 July 2023. New accounts stopped immediately.

~ the record ~

~ too late to the game ~

The post's explanation is worth reading because so few of them are honest. "Since the release of RememBear in 2018, we've always had a tough time landing in the password manager space. We knew we had the best security, the best user experience, the best practices, and the best bears. However, we found out rather quickly that we were just a little too late to the game. By the time RememBear was released, many users had already found their password solution and switching to a new service was simply too much to ask." No pivot and no blaming of market conditions. The company said it had been late, in the first person, in its own announcement.

~ what the remaining users got ~

The second half of the reasoning is the part that should be standard and is not. Rather than leaving the app on the stores without active development, the team argued, continuing would turn a password vault into a security liability for the people depending on it. So they ended support on purpose, and kept shipping security and bug fixes for the whole final year while shipping no features at all.

Everyone still holding an account was upgraded to Premium for free. Anyone mid-subscription got a prorated refund inside five to ten business days, and automatic renewals were switched off rather than quietly left running. The one rough edge was the exit door: you could only export your vault from the Windows or macOS desktop apps, so a person who had only ever used RememBear on a phone had to find a computer before they could leave with their own passwords.

~ one year became seventeen months ~

18 July 2023 is the death date because it is the date the service stopped being supported, but the homepage tells a slightly messier story. In September 2023, two months after the advertised end, remembear.com was still serving its full marketing site, still describing itself in the present tense as the easiest way to remember passwords, with a banner underneath saying the app would stay downloadable for existing users until 1 January 2024.

So the promised one year quietly became about seventeen months. Nothing was announced about the extension, and it reads less like generosity than like the ordinary friction of turning a service off while people are still inside it.

~ the bear outlived the product ~

The marketing site outlasted the product by a long way, serving its happy bear and its download button through 2024 and most of 2025, and went to redirects late that year. Today remembear.com does not resolve. TunnelBear itself is still trading, and still selling the VPN that paid for all of this.

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