To say that Obsidian “sucks” because it costs users $100 a year for a quick and seamless cross-platform sync experience – and then to say that this is not cheap, and not acknowledging that there are other solutions available like Dropbox or Github – is, frankly, preposterous.
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It does.
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The Obsidian developers need & deserve an income - and if we, the users of obsidian love the product, we should help them as much as we can.
I do have a question about subscription cost elasticity. If the subscription cost was halved but this led to twice as many subscribers → cash flow would remain the same and this would encourage more people to subscribe due to lower cost → a win-win. There is an interesting wikipedia page about the mathematics of this type of decision making - but cant for the life of me find it. I read it a few years ago when I only had one brain 
Keep up the good work !
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The reason that Sync is not free is because it costs money to maintain the servers that store and sync files, to pay our team, and to pay for other costs associated with running Obsidian. The Obsidian app is free for personal use. Our paid services Sync and Publish help us continue to actively work on the app.
Many software companies, including the ones you mentioned, have raised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. They often use this money to offer their services for “free”, or at a subsidized price, and operate at a loss. These companies are eventually forced to raise their prices or limit the functionality of their product because they need to become profitable. At this point, they are hoping you are locked in, or too heavily invested in the product to switch.
Unlike those companies, Obsidian is 100% user-supported. We have not raised any funds from investors. We think this is a better model, because it allows us to stay true to our values. You should want the businesses you support to be profitable, so that your favorite products can continue to be maintained and improved.
Furthermore, our paid services (Sync and Publish) have multiple free alternatives that are compatible with Obsidian. We think those free alternatives are an important part of creating a resilient and long-lasting ecosystem around plain text files, so we’re glad those options exist — and you’re free to use them if you wish!
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Also with free storage of any kind it’s almost guaranteed you’ll be flooded with bot created accounts trying to abuse your offer for all kinds of illegal file sharing not only increasing costs but also with a chance of reducing the quality of the service for you’re actual users.
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I love how seamlessly Obsidian sync works across devices, but $8 is a lot to pay per month ($10 if paying monthly) for “just syncing”. Could there be a cheaper tier added?
For instance, Obsidian sync includes the following “features”
- End-to-end encryption
- Unlimited devices
- 5 vaults & 10GB data
- Priority email support
What about: $2.50/month for “Obsidian sync lite”
- End-to-end encryption
- Up to 10 devices
- 1 vault & 5GB data
- No priority email support
What I’m basically saying is I only need to sync a single vault and I would love it if I could pay less than $8/month for my single vault, low data note syncing.
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Considering the income levels and costs in the USA, an $8 monthly charge for the sync service might seem reasonable. However, this perspective changes when analyzing the situation in Brazil, where many, like myself, find themselves facing a price that is effectively 6 times higher due to currency exchange rates and average income disparities.
To illustrate, charging $8 in Brazil would equate to a $48 monthly fee for an American, making it disproportionate in value per feature and potentially too expensive. If we assume that the majority of the $8 isn’t allocated to server costs or other overheads, then implementing a flat rate across all countries may prove to be a non-optimal strategy for monetization.
A nuanced approach that considers both the economic conditions and unique market dynamics of different regions could lead to a more fair and potentially profitable pricing structure. This argument isn’t merely theoretical; I can provide the detailed calculation to demonstrate the disparity if required.
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I don’t know if people are aware that there are many free sync solutions …
Personally, I feel lucky that Obsidian even allows people to use their own sync service, unlike SiYuan or RemNote, or a multitude of other online-only services.
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It isn’t like AWS or any other cloud provider gives Obsidian a discount for having customers in Brazil. A Brazilian user incurs the same overhead in infrastructure and R&D costs as a user in the USA or Canada.
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I used Obsidian but I abandoned it. Right now I use The Brain. A $200+ piece of software. I personally agree with people saying the pricing is steep for entry level. Since I already owned a cloud service, I tried using that but it resulted in a lot of duplicates which made it unusable. Therefor I abandoned Obsidian.
I don’t think paying $8 is much if you’re completely sure about your personal use case, but if you’re not… well… it’s a high barrier of entry and it’s the only entry.
Paying developers is important. With such a vibrant community there are other options for funding which don’t involve selling out the mission. Aside from that tier based pricing is never a bad thing to hook people up to your service. Just get them hooked on the free/low tiers and let them gradually climb up to the higher plans. Seems like a no brainer to me. Simple 101 pricing mechanics. Apple, Google, Dropbox… they all do it. It’s all about the baby steps.
In retail, if you want to sell a high margin bottle of wine, you don’t just put that one on the shelf. You surround it with a cheaper one and a more expensive one. Nobody wants to be cheap (for long) and the higher value ticket item makes you feel less guilty and justifies the purchase of the middle item. Just the one you make the most profit on.
We all know shit costs money. Letting people pay for a service makes good business sense. Nobody argues with that. Inflating your only tier to “support the developers” is just dumb. Sorry. I support Wikipedia once in a while without any extra’s in return and I’m sure Obsidian has such a big fan base that they would be able to gather some patreons to support the cause so that the developers can have a decent pay. Just give them a face, show their effort and struggles.
I really liked the idea of Obsidian. Although TheBrain is more user friendly imo, it’s also more demanding and (for me) it’s only usable on my pc. Obsidian is not.
I’m here because my son was talking about an obsidian stone in Minecraft and it made me think about the program. Looking it up again made me notice that Obsidian is at version 1.0 now and out of beta. Congrats to the team. Honest (former) customer opinions are rare, so I hope you’ll appreciate my small blog (
) here.
Comparing apples-to-apples, TheBrain’s sync service is $15/mo vs Obsidian’s $8/mo.
This might have been an easily solved issue. I have synced Obsidian through Dropbox and Google Drive between 2 Windows laptops and 1 phone without any duplicate issues. Now I use their sync purely to support the development team, as the free sync options work perfectly well.
I did use TheBrain some years ago (had a paid licence) but it never really clicked. Obsidian was like a breath of fresh air after years of using Evernote, OneNote, and a brief time with Notion. If your only complaint with Obsidian is that syncing for free caused you duplicate notes - I am extremely confident this is an easily resolved issue, and you could successfully use Obsidian with free cloud sync.
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Hi,
I’m happy to see this subject, I’m in kinda the same situation… 8 dollars for “just” a sync while I already pay for my 1To OneDrive is a kind of “mental barrier” for me, while I would be happy to pay 2 or 4 dollars for this.
In fact, the problem is not really the price but the functionnalities. To compete with all the concurrent services we need a lot more of “just a sync”. The major cons of Obsidian when I’m advices friends of collegues is always the lack of web access to the notes (with a browser) and the lack of sharing capabilities. I found a plugin to share a link but I need to work with my collegues, on a shared note.
Considering the technologie behind obsidian I imagine it wouldnt be that hard to create a little internet app, even if the functionnalities are not the same, synced with an account. Not as hard as creating a canva functionnality One of the main argument for Obsidian is the controle over our knowledge base, but as the software become more and more complex, my notes are no longer is an “open source” mode with a standard markdown behind. So I just have a proprietary software, editing proprietery formated note… but without all the functionnalities notion of onenote propose for the team work.
Thank you for all the work done. Obsidian is an amazing software. I’m really happy to use it and I will wait for the future updates
- R&D are fixed costs with relation to number of paying customers. They don’t necessarily increase whether you have less or more paying users.
- Infrastructure costs increase as users increase, and must be considered.
The point I was trying to make, though, is if it wouldn’t be more profitable, after accounting for the infrastructure cost, to have tiered pricing for different countries. It’s very common currently, for services, as far as I know, Microsoft, Spotify, Adobe, Netflix, Twitch (Amazon), all have localized pricing. It probably makes business sense if they are doing this. I don’t know the realities of Obsidian, though, so it might not make business sense.
And why do you think Obsidian hasn’t done localized pricing if it makes business sense?
Same here. I currently use onedrive to keep my stuff synced on the cloud. I want to use obsidian sync so then I can use the obsidian android app to read and edit my notes. But for some reason on my phone the obsidian app can’t see my onedrive folder so I have to painfully click 10 times to read my notes through the onedrive app. I would love to pay obsidian for sync and support their work, but $96 a year is too much just for sync for my small use case. I would pay $36 a year happily.
Microsoft is doing such a bad Job for that… I’m using Obsidian on my android and it’s ok, but you need an app called OneSync to get your files up to date when opening Obsidian.
BUT the sync should be a basic function in an Obsidian app, and we shoundnt be facing this kind of problem.
Obsidian Team: keep doing what you’re doing. If I weren’t piss-poor at the moment, I would pay those bucks just to support you, and I don’t need those features.
I even think that you should have something like a Patreon, for those of us who could pay a bit just because we want to.
Thank you for everything.
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I am fed up with pricing garbage from every company. I want to use your service. But I already have other monthly bills to pay just to have Music, Pro Tools, Adobe. And Yearly from Filmora, and a weather widget. Maybe you can understand why I can’t afford 100$ a year for notes to transfer back and forth between a laptop and a computer. You need to lower this insane rate. I would personally pay 35$ a year, or 4$ a month
We all have decisions to make on what we pay subscriptions for. You’ve clearly made yours. The Obsidian team already provides the application for free (unlike ANY of the other things you listed) and are under no obligation to do any such thing as you suggest (“lower this insane rate”). There are many other options for syncing notes between a laptop and another computer. That said none of those options are close to the built-in option for reliability, privacy, and version history.
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