Starting today, the Obsidian Commercial license is optional. Anyone can use Obsidian for work, for free. Explore organizations that support Obsidian on our new Enterprise page.
Nothing else is changing. No account required, no ads, no tracking, no strings attached. Your data remains fully in your control, stored locally in plain text Markdown files. All features are available to you for free without limits.
They have a plenty large enough user base and have not done so. You’re literally commenting this on a post of them doing the exact opposite. The fear mongering is insane.
It was nothing personal, more of an off-handed commentary on how things usually end up going after 20 years of seeing literally every site/service I’ve used and most of the companies I once considered “the good ones” eventually get shittier in some way when the business side puts on the squeeze.
The one exception I can think of is Wikipedia.
But I don’t have any reason to think badly of these folks, their current owners seem to have their hearts in the right place and indeed have made decisions that avoid lockin and assure users, and I hope they are another Wikipedia that will endure the tides of enshittification.
But I will never again assume that such hopes will remain the reality, even in this case. This is a snapshot in time. Owners change, priorities change, pricing models change, file formats change, common sense statements of basic decency like “don’t be evil” get rescinded, scrappy fun websites created by free-thinkers become tools of fascist oppression.
That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve your business and support currently. Just make sure your off-ramp options remain acceptable if things begin to change.
If you want to sync your notes between devices, Obsidian Sync is $48 a year. But since it’s all just markdown files anyway, you could just use dropbox to sync them anyway.
I mean, that is an absolutely batshit insane price for storage. Backblaze is $6 per month for 1TB, and Hetzner is 4€ per month for 1TB, so literally 1000x cheaper, but you are also paying for development and the sync software.
I almost have my company going on putting our QMS wiki on obsidian because excalidraw with clickable objects works so nicely and it can visualize our process, but for some reason commercial was showing up as 50 USD per month per user, so they couldn’t justify getting licenses but now it is showing up as 50 USD per year which is way way way more reasonable.
Doesn’t appear so but there is that potential in a future update as they’re in control of what the software actually does. If data is indeed stored in plain text files then hopefully an alternative software could be made to display that data.
Obsidian files are just Markdown, so there is plenty of software out there today that can parse them. The only thing you might miss is plugins that don’t exist outisd of obsidian.
Fwiw, they’ve open sourced the specification behind canvas, so there’s a good chance any OSS Obsidian “forks” that pop up if they do enshittify will be able to support it.
Now that it’s free, are its users the product?
“…until we have a large enough userbase to start monetizing and enshittifying…”
At least if/when that happens all your files are in markdown, owned and controlled by you so migrating to another tool is pretty easy.
deleted by creator
They have a plenty large enough user base and have not done so. You’re literally commenting this on a post of them doing the exact opposite. The fear mongering is insane.
It was nothing personal, more of an off-handed commentary on how things usually end up going after 20 years of seeing literally every site/service I’ve used and most of the companies I once considered “the good ones” eventually get shittier in some way when the business side puts on the squeeze.
The one exception I can think of is Wikipedia.
But I don’t have any reason to think badly of these folks, their current owners seem to have their hearts in the right place and indeed have made decisions that avoid lockin and assure users, and I hope they are another Wikipedia that will endure the tides of enshittification.
But I will never again assume that such hopes will remain the reality, even in this case. This is a snapshot in time. Owners change, priorities change, pricing models change, file formats change, common sense statements of basic decency like “don’t be evil” get rescinded, scrappy fun websites created by free-thinkers become tools of fascist oppression.
That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve your business and support currently. Just make sure your off-ramp options remain acceptable if things begin to change.
What’s the catch?
If you want to sync your notes between devices, Obsidian Sync is $48 a year. But since it’s all just markdown files anyway, you could just use dropbox to sync them anyway.
dam thats a lot for a sync. I guess its supporting the project.
It’s $4 a month for 1GB of storage, not insane
I mean, that is an absolutely batshit insane price for storage. Backblaze is $6 per month for 1TB, and Hetzner is 4€ per month for 1TB, so literally 1000x cheaper, but you are also paying for development and the sync software.
I almost have my company going on putting our QMS wiki on obsidian because excalidraw with clickable objects works so nicely and it can visualize our process, but for some reason commercial was showing up as 50 USD per month per user, so they couldn’t justify getting licenses but now it is showing up as 50 USD per year which is way way way more reasonable.
Still closed source.
Seems they’ll just keep making money on sync.
Doesn’t appear so but there is that potential in a future update as they’re in control of what the software actually does. If data is indeed stored in plain text files then hopefully an alternative software could be made to display that data.
Obsidian files are just Markdown, so there is plenty of software out there today that can parse them. The only thing you might miss is plugins that don’t exist outisd of obsidian.
The canvas built in is the easiest UI I’ve used to make mind maps, I’d surely miss it if I had to migrate.
Fwiw, they’ve open sourced the specification behind canvas, so there’s a good chance any OSS Obsidian “forks” that pop up if they do enshittify will be able to support it.
deleted by creator
Essentially, just a giant W.