Navigating the Bitnami Pricing Changes: What You Need to Know

Bitnami has provided the open-source community with production-ready container images, Helm charts, and application stacks for years, supporting quick deployment of applications like WordPress and PostgreSQL. Significant changes are planned that will alter how teams access and use these resources.

Update: Based on community feedback, Bitnami made the decision to delay removing its catalog from DockerHub until September 29th, 2025.

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What’s Changing with Bitnami?

Effective September 29, 2025, Broadcom (Bitnami’s parent company) will place most of Bitnami’s container image tags and associated Helm charts behind a paid subscription. Here’s the breakdown:

• Public (Free) Tier: Only the :latest tag for each image will remain free to use. Older versions or specific tags will be moved to a legacy repository, which will no longer receive updates or security patches.
• Paid Tier (Bitnami Secure Images): Customers who subscribe to the new offering will gain access to all versioned and LTS images, continuous updates, vulnerability scans, SBOMs, signatures, and enterprise support.

The change represents a move away from Bitnami’s model as an open community resource and will affect teams that depend on stable, versioned images for production use.

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Key Implications for Teams

Organizations that do not move to the paid tier will be limited to using only :latest tags. This has several potential impacts:

1. Loss of Control: You’ll lose the ability to pin to specific versions, which means you can’t guarantee stability across environments.
2. Increased Risk: Updates to :latest could potentially introduce changed behavior that breaks applications or pipelines. 
3. Compliance Failures: In industries where you need to prove you are running patched, supported versions of software, relying on unmaintained legacy images could lead to audit failures.
4. Mounting Technical Debt: Teams will likely spend more time firefighting vulnerabilities and stability issues, which eats into engineering resources that should be spent on innovation.

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Transition From Bitnami Paid Tier

If you’re moving from Bitnami’s paid tier to the free tier or exploring other providers, here are a few steps to guide the transition:

1. Audit Your Dependencies: Identify which Bitnami images and tags your environments rely on. Pay close attention to version-specific dependencies.
2. Update Pipelines: Adjust CI/CD pipelines to account for the possibility that :latest may not align with your tested version.
3. Evaluate Alternatives: Explore other providers of container images and Helm charts. Options range from community-driven projects to commercial vendors offering hardened, secure images.‍
4. Plan for Compliance: If your organization operates in regulated industries, consider solutions that include built-in compliance and auditing features.

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Alternatives to Bitnami: Minimus Provides Secure, Minimal Images and Helm Charts

For teams re-evaluating their container strategy, Minimus provides the same robust image library as Bitnami, with expanded security and compliance features to make development and security testing faster and easier.

Minimus takes on the burden of CVE scanning, triage, and updates with secure minimal secure container images, continuously rebuilt from source. By pruning unnecessary components, Minimus reduces vulnerabilities by 97% or more, taking the overhead of vulnerability management off your plate.

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Switching from Bitnami to Minimus

Teams have two options when switching from Bitnami to Minimus:

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Option 1: Keep Bitnami Helm Charts, Swap in Minimus Images

One challenge with switching from Bitnami images is that they aren’t configured the same way as public versions. Once teams standardize on Bitnami Helm charts, it becomes difficult to switch away, since other images don’t work as simple drop-ins.

Minimus solves this by providing one-to-one replacements for Bitnami’s images. You can swap our advanced images directly into existing Bitnami Helm charts without breaking compatibility.

For example, if you’re using Bitnami’s RabbitMQ Helm chart, you can replace the Bitnami image with our RabbitMQ advanced image. It has the same configuration and entry points Bitnami expects, but you get a maintained, secure Minimus image instead.

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Option 2: Switch Fully to Minimus Helm Charts

Users can also switch fully over to using Minimus images and hardened Helm charts. Our hardened Helm charts are aligned to CIS and NIST security benchmarks, and include integrated compliance dashboards, SBOMs, and VEX data to simplify security and audit readiness. They are available through platforms like Iron Bank and are designed to easily integrate with existing with enterprise workflows.

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Example: Using Bitnami vs. Minimus

As an example of the workflow differences between using Minimus and Bitnami, consider PostgreSQL running in a production Kubernetes cluster:

• Using Bitnami: You pull a versioned Bitnami PostgreSQL image. A new CVE is announced for a dependency. Your team must monitor vulnerability feeds, determine if the CVE impacts your deployment, rebuild or patch the image, retest it, and then roll it out to production. This process repeats whenever a new vulnerability is discovered.
• Using Minimus: You deploy the Minimus PostgreSQL Helm chart. Because the image is minimal, the vulnerable dependency may not even be included in the first place. If there is an issue, Minimus automatically rebuilds and delivers a patched version with SBOM and VEX data. Your team spends less time triaging vulnerabilities and more time focusing on features and reliability.

Minimus doesn’t just change where images come from; it changes the amount of work your team has to do to keep those images secure. Minimus hardened images are securely built from the start, contain only what’s necessary to run your applications, and have 97% fewer vulnerabilities than typical images. For the few CVEs that remain, Minimus reduces overhead by handling scanning, triage, and updates.

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Get started with Minimus by trying our hardened images and Helm charts.