For me, Obsidian is the first app that have ever really made me want to pay for just supporting the dev team. Yes, $8 for just syncing is expensive, but I decided to pay for Obsidian Sync just to support the team and keep this great piece of art alive as long as possible.
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While we have had many posts debating the pricing of Obsidian, this one is an attempt to bring attention to price localisation for the existing price.
Consider the price differences between countries for the monthly plans of popular services -
Apple Music:
- US - $10
- India - ā¹100 (thatās $1.2)
Netflix Standard:
- US - $15
- India - ā¹500 (thatās $6)
Evernote:
- US - $15
- India - ā¹450 (thatās $5.4)
Obsidian:
- US - $8
- India - ā¹666
Proportional to the pricing of the other services, monthly Sync pricing would have been ā¹80 (Apple Music) or around ā¹250 (Netflix/Evernote).
Price localization based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) ensures that product prices are adjusted to match the purchasing power of different regions, making services more affordable and fair globally.
From the Obsidian Manifesto:
We believe that everyone should have the tools to think clearly and organize ideas effectively. Thatās why our tools are free for personal use.
We believe that your data should be future-proof and easily accessible, no matter where you are.
The argument usually is that Obsidian itself is free and only the Sync service is charged. Or that you can setup free services like Syncthing. Or you can use something else entirely.
I am not suggesting free Sync plans; as the CEO rightly pointed out, Obsidian needs to be profitable to be actively maintained without VC funding.
In the recent Sync plan changes, it is evident that they plan to stick to the current pricing.
With these new plans, our goal is to continue offering more flexibility and speed while maintaining the price we launched with in 2020.
I do not disagree with it; I think it is not equitable to apply it to all countries.
Digital services should be more attuned to the economic realities of individual nations. There are services built on Stripe that provide localisation and VPN protection.
EpiphanicSyncronica highlighted eloquently one of the possible reasons to not do so:
They may not want the customer base of their paid syncing and hosting services to grow too quickly, even if it would mean more income, because they would need to ramp up more server capacity and spend more time on customer service and support.
But Obsidian has come a long way since starting as a two-person team (when that comment was made) and Iām hoping it makes economic sense to implement price localisation, as it has for Netflix and Evernote.
on the price/revenue curveāwhere revenue starts to drop when a productās or serviceās price exceeds a certain pointāI suspect that the current pricing is too high to maximize revenue. That is, it may actually be bringing in less income for the devs than lower prices would, because not enough people are willing or able to pay them.
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Something you may want to think in the context of your example, and what other posters have pointed out in terms of number of users (like in the linked post) is also how many employees those companies include to support however many people subscribe at the scale. Iāll list ALL employees here, even though youāll need way more people than just developers (which is the bulk of the Obsidian team right now) to provide a service at the price/cost where this makes sense:
From your example:
Obsidian: 8 (not counting the cat)
Apple (Music): 161k
Netflix Standard: 12.8k
Evernote: 400 - They also laid off a bunch of employees in February, and then July, were soldā¦ and their future is uncertain tbh.
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Yeah, I believe theyāve said that price localization is too difficult for a company of Obsidianās size to do. (I canāt find the post now ā probably buried somewhere on Discord.)
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Honestly, I do get the whole pricing matter and even agree with price localization since I am from a poor country (and definitely not proud of it), butā¦
We all have to admit this: itās admirable enough that the Obsidian team & their docs even offered free alternatives to everyone, that they allow guides on the forum detailing how to set up free sync solutions for those who cannot afford it, and that they donāt censor or ban conversations about free sync solutions like other companies would do.
[ ā¦and I didnāt even touch the point of Obsidian being the most customizable, most private and crazily super-awesome beans app out there (I thought Notion was the best, then Obsidian totally crushed it in front of my eyes!) ā¦]
That alone says a lot and even made me pay for a catalyst license today, so kudos to you Obsidian team and all the amazing work you do!
Now just make sure you donāt ever stop development, or elseā¦ 
#nopressure
P.S. (looking at you Obsidian team) I wouldāve gladly paid for the monthly sync if only it wouldāve synced in the background so that when I open Obsidian everything would be in its placeā¦ so until that happens, I have to rely on a (happens-to-be-free) alternative
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I would pay for a sync service that is absolutely p2p and/or absolutely encrypted at rest and encrypted on transit (which is how it is nowadays) and cost like $30/Ā± a year. I get the cost of running servers, I think the devs absolutely have all the rights to chrage for additional services, I just think that the world economy is in deep shit, most of us are not in positions to pay for premium prices for most services nowadays.
Users from countries that have been historically exploited, notably from the Global South, often do not have the means to afford Sync.
The Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) discount is a common strategy to address this issue for digital and scalable products. Platforms like Gumroad even have native solutions for this, and there are also dedicated solutions for companies that need to offer this type of discount.
Here in Brazil, in 2024, as an example, Sync would cost 3.5% of the minimum wage.
When we compare the pricing of other international services, this concern becomes evident:
- Spotifyās price in Brazil is 70% lower than in the USA.
- Google Oneās price in Brazil is 20% lower than in the USA.
Given this, I would like to request a purchasing power parity discount on Sync functionality.
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I love that there is lower pricing for students and non-profit offered by Obsidian for its paid services!
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Iām very disappointed itās impossible to purchase Obsidian Sync, Obsidian Publish and Dynalist in a single discounted package.
After 5 years of using Dynalist as the no. 1 software in my life, I simply had to cancel my subscription of Dynalist last month, because to pay the full Obsidian price for software that Obsidian authors no longer develop due to time constraints, is just too much for my wallet to handle.
And yes, I live in a post-Communist country where the peopleās income is roughly one third or one fourth of the typical income of people in North America or Western Europe, so I know exactly what @vinas is talking about above.
Paying for Obsidian Sync & Publish is no joke for me, itās a hefty price to pay, but because this software is so magnificent, I must somehow manage it. But paying the same price for āmaintainwareā like Dynalist is just too much to handle for me.
So, Iāve been transferring all of my notes from Dynalist to Obsidian ā even those notes that it would be wiser to continue keeping in Dynalist, but the free version of Dynalist (with no customized keyboard shortcuts, only 5 bookmarks, etc., etc.) is unusable for me, so I guess I gotta do what I gotta do. 
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Is there? Iāve searched for student pricing and canāt find anything. Do You know how it works (do people need to contact them directly)? I completely understand why itās a premium feature, but $15* per month is a bit of a pinch when youāre in grad school. It might be doable with a student discount
, though.
*Price is after exchange rate, in a country with quite a high cost of living in comparison to the US.
See the FAQ section of Pricing - Obsidian, which links to Education and non-profit discount - Obsidian Help.
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As of Obsidian version 1.5.11 and March 20, 2024, thereās a new āStandard planā to choose from:
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Those are some encouraging new subscription options! 
The cheaper Sync Standard plan isnāt for me, Iām afraid. I only started using Obsidian last December, and my vault already contains 0.25 GB of data. Sync Standard only offers 1 GB of storage space, so I guess Iāll need to keep Sync Plus for double the price. 
At least Iām enjoying the āearly birdā bonus there, with 50 GB instead of 10 GB of storage.
Whatās exciting for me is the educational discount. You see, coming to Obsidian from Dynalist, I knew there was only a Dynalist discount (50%) offered to students, but not to employees. Iām now very happy to learn that Obsidianās educational discount extends to employees as well, not just to students. I, in fact, manage the web and mail server for a fairly large school, so Iāll definitely be applying for that 40% discount.
Many thanks to everyone in the foregoing posts above who made us aware of these new subscription/discount options. 
I bought this as a yearly plan! Good to see my feedback above implemented