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.
While that’s technically possible, it’s very difficult, and in my opinion, highly unlikely.
All notes are stored in markdown, which is compatible with any other markdown-compatible app. It’s not just a note format, it’s a fire exit.
Even the canvas files are now having an interoperable format created, with other industry-leading canvas style software, and that whole process was started by the Obsidian team voluntarily
All plugins must be open-source unless explicitly and clearly stated, and such plugins are only listed on a case-by-case basis, which makes even additional plugin-specific functionality added to Obsidian easier to port over to other software if Obsidian ever does lock things down
They don’t have VC investors, and have mentioned a few times that they won’t be accepting investment in the future, since they don’t exactly have very high costs. They’re explicitly anti “VCware.” Features like Sync that depend on their server hosting bill being paid are only used by paying users, and most users will never have to use Obsidian servers past downloading and updating the app, and installing a few plugins of a few megabytes in size. Costs aren’t likely to rise in any substantial way, and their team is small enough to make it profitable to operate at their existing scale.
Actions like this are literally proactively recognizing that something wasn’t in line with their manifesto, and wasn’t beneficial for users, so they’re removing it. Companies planning to enshittify don’t usually remove enshittified/negative features they already have before re-enshittifying. They want you used to the enshittification from the start.
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.
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.
“…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.
While that’s technically possible, it’s very difficult, and in my opinion, highly unlikely.
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.
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.