With Obsidian Mobile being released to everybody, pricing questions are bound to come up and some additional clarity is warranted. Obsidian Desktop and Obsidian Mobile are FREE. The Catalyst license and Obsidian Unlimited are donation tiers to support the development of this FREE technology. You don’t get any extra features. The Catalyst license holder uses the same Obsidian those that contribute nothing have, except for receiving early insider builds of the app before they’re released to everyone else. And if you like, you may also claim snazzy forum and Discord badges identifying you as a sponsor of the technology, plus gain access to developer channels to stay in the know.
Obsidian Sync is a paid service enabling you to sync the desktop application with your mobile devices, all with end-to-end encryption. Unlike other services, Obsidian doesn’t monetize your data. It doesn’t even keep your data on its servers. All it does is look for file changes between your devices, ensuring that the file on your desktop is the same file on your phones and/or tablets and vice versa. You get up to five remote vaults and each of those may contain up to 4GB of data. That means you get a total of 20GB of data being synced between your desktop and mobile devices 24/7/365.
Obsidian Publish is also a paid service for those of you wishing to have your notes, or a portion of them, hosted in the cloud. Like Sync, your privacy is assured. You decide which notes are published, all from within the Obsidian app itself. If you want a custom domain, or SSH, set it up. Custom JavaScript, do it. Want to tell search engines like Google to stay out of your business, or password protect access to your website entirely, no problem. And with Cloudflare CDN built in, you can be sure whatever you share is delivered all around the world, reliably, securely, and with blazing fast speed.
Make no mistake though, I left out a bunch of other features built into Sync and Publish. There’s just too many to list here, and more are being developed. Still, you don’t need to use either of them. If you prefer another service, such as iCloud, use it. You’ll even find extensive details about how to set other services up in the Obsidian help files, forum or Discord. Obsidian will never lock you in to its paid services because it wants to earn your business by providing exceptional value and versatility with tools purposely built and optimized for Obsidian.
If you don’t need any of Obsidian’s add-on services, or can’t afford to sponsor development of the technology, that’s fine too. Personally, I purchased a Catalyst license at the Supporter tier for $50 because I couldn’t afford $100 at the VIP tier. Yet, I derive far greater value from Obsidian than what I’ve paid. But there are all sorts of ways to contribute to its development, like helping people on the forum or Discord, or simply by passing along word of Obsidian to a friend. Hopefully, I’ve been able to clarify some things while conveying my excitement and appreciation for these amazing products.