Use case or problem
Just a note that I am an enthusiastic user of Obsidian who would use it more and pay for it if your pricing model fit my use case.
I think it’s stupid that Sync and Publish are two separate pricing tiers, it’s not great that all collaborators on sync’d documents also have to have Sync licenses to view notes, and I think it’s unnecessarily stupid to delineate personal vs. commercial use for yet another additional stacking payment tier. People don’t like being nickled-and-dimed. Your competitors (Notion, Evernote, UpNote, and others) offer one price tier for syncing, sharing, collaborating, and publishing notes. Also not great that the Catalyst license does not grant the user any benefits in paying towards these additional stacking tier levels.
No other service I can think of restricts how paying users can use their notes like you do, restricting us to personal notes only and not bridging the line (that most people straddle) between taking personal and business notes. You need to re-form what constitutes “commercial use” of Obsidian (details below).
Proposed solution
I understand why commercial licenses can and should cost more than personal ones, but I think your commercial tier should apply when people start collaborating in Obsidian in a work environment, not when they are taking personal/private notes at work. Once a team decides to adopt Obsidian as their shared collaboration space and use it for commercially meaningful activities like publishing, collaboration, or knowledge management (that require your cloud services to operate), that’s when you can and should start charging a higher rate. I am in a position where I’d like to use Obsidian for my private productivity at work but it’s not worth the high commercial license fee for the kinds of notes I take, so I use another md editor instead. If your pricing were smarter, I would gladly be a paying customer.
This brings me to Collaboration. Sync and Publish should be one tier called Collaboration that supports more online activities – sync, publish, and shared collaborative docs online (similar to the ease with which collaborators can be added to SimpleNote). I am willing to pay a Pro tier to be able to collaborate with whomever I choose whether they have an Obsidian license or not, but it’s obnoxious to tell a collaborator “you need to pay for a Sync license just so we can work together on this very limited project”. Let paying customers on the Collaboration tier open up individual docs to free-riding collaborators. Those free-riders will see how great the service is and might be more apt to join, but at this point they’re just frozen out of the Obsidian experience and forced to use your competitors.
Current workaround (optional)
The cottage industry that’s sprung up around alternative methods to sync Obsidian notes using open alternatives like SyncThing or OwnCloud indicates that you’re leaving money on the table by having a pricing tier that doesn’t fit users like me. Apparently there are lots more of us who would pay if your licensing terms weren’t so ill-fitting.