I was actually ready to switch to Obsidian yesterday because I saw the new “standard sync” license.
Then I noticed “1Gb and 1 vault”. I imagine that the resource that costs is by far the storage, and the vaults are simply containers that take up space, I found that to be an artificial limitation of that licensing model.
It feels like one of those “let’s just introduce random limitations to bother people to pay more” limitations. Because we really need to differentiate the licenses.
Which I’m very unsympathetic towards.
I don’t mind paying for features or actual resource use. And yes, I realize there’s traffic involved as well as CPU cycles. I just don’t see how 1Gb of data impacts traffic depending on the number of vaults. CPU cycles for 1Gb of data can’t really change that much due to the number of vaults either.
When I encounter a licensing model that bothers me into paying more, I just ditch that product.
Proposed solution
Why don’t you just remove the “number of vaults” limitation!? Let people use the allotted space however they deem necessary.
Current workaround (optional)
Yeah I just didn’t sign up for Obsidian Sync and stayed with Logseq.
It’s actually the reverse. For a long time there was only a single sync plan, the more expensive one. The cheap plan was only introduced recently for people who complained they only had one vault and why should they have to pay so much?
Basically you can’t please anyone.
Fyi there are numerous free sync options for Obsidian, so you don’t need to pay anything.
I don’t know if I am the only one in this situation:
I don’t need sync, I pay it to support the company.
Let me explain: I started using Obsidian about six months ago, and as I had been burned by other apps not living up to the hype and leaving me disappointed, I wanted to try it without paying. But I work on three computers: Desktop at work, nice fancy destop replacement at home, and cheap-and-light-but-functional laptop. So I set it up with Google Drive, and it works seamlessly.
About three months later I realized Obsidian had integrated fully with my life, and it would be a major pain on my workflows if it went away. I use it as my task manager, as my PKM system, I even track the communications with my daughter’s teachers in Obsidian.
I thought the best way to support the company so it doesn’t go the way of the Dodo, was to pay for a plan. And I can sync it to my phone too, that I could not make it work so nicely before.
Is $5 a month or $48 a year for 1GB overpriced? Extremely so. I pay $99 a year fot 2TB and everyone in my household has access to that quota from their separate accounts. Besides, it seems the sync is not distributed but geographically related (I have not had an outage yet, though).
Is $5 a month or $48 a year for all I get from this app? Hell no.
I would preferably like to pay Obsidian, as they’re the ones whose product should be longterm viable.
It’s not about not paying anything.
It’s about paying for the right thing.
In any case: The resource used is space. Remove the number of vaults altogether then. Unless there’s a hard argument against it, it’s just an arbitrary limitation introduced to differentiate the two licenses.
But there’s already a couple of differentiators that make actual sense:
Total storage
Version history
Now that we’re at it: a filesize of 5mb won’t even let me include a lot of the study PDF’s I’m working on. Why would the company Obsidian care if I spent my 1Gb storage on 20mb PDF’s versus 4mb PDF’s?
My point here is:
STOP making licenses full of arbitrary limitations which have only 1 purpose: To force you into a more expensive tier.
STOP creating arbitrary barriers and friction to adoption.
START making me pay for actual resource use and features, but give me freedom to choose otherwise. If I buy 1Gb of space for my notes and files, stop making barriers for my use. It’s my usecase.
In the end, isn’t that the basic idea of Obsidian? To provide freedom? The licensing model isn’t a representation of that.
That’s great. I don’t throw money at anything just because.
And I don’t mind paying $5/month. I just really dislike being manipulated into a more expensive tier because of arbitrary and nonsensical limitations.
I also don’t mind paying $10/month if my usecase changes.
But what’s sold here, in the end, is storage space. Let ME worry what I want to use that storage space for, and butt out otherwise.
I’m not sure you read my post. The more expensive tier is the standard, default, only option for a long time.
You’re not being manipulated up - the cheaper tier is the new option. And if it’s not for you then you haven’t been manipulated anywhere, you’re just at the default.
I’m exactly like @djimenez81 - I pay to support, I don’t need the sync.
You not considering the fixed costs, like support. Moreover, in software companies pricing is rarely based on cost or on cost alone. All the paid services subsidize the development of the app, which is free. We don’t collect user data nor do advertisement.
We have a thread for “why obsidian costs X”. I am going to close this thread and you can keep talking about this in that thread. Thanks!