from Hacker News

Obsidian is now free for work

by s1291 on 2/20/25, 3:23 PM with 75 comments

  • by corysama on 2/20/25, 5:28 PM

    If you like the product, but are not interested in paying for sync or publish, consider buying the one-time $25 "Catalyst" license just to support development.
  • by jjice on 2/20/25, 6:32 PM

    They have "Multiplayer" on their current roadmap [0]. I assume this is to help reduce friction in getting their Sync offering for teams.

    I personally like the move a lot and I hope this works well for them. The model of selling their add-on services seems to have worked for them well so far, and I hope it continues. It's a very functional free core with their paid add-ons being very additive and well made.

    [0] https://obsidian.md/roadmap/

  • by nbutyllithium on 2/20/25, 4:15 PM

    Excellent development! I saw first Obsidian years ago but my main use case would have been for myself at work and I wasn't willing to battle the bureaucratic hoops at my job to try a product I wasn't sure I'd actually stick with long term (like my attempts with logseq). Ended up not even trying it on a personal level. Looking forward to seeing how it goes and who knows maybe I'll end up stick with it and battle to contribute some funds.
  • by _Algernon_ on 2/20/25, 5:04 PM

    As someone paying personally for a commercial license that I use for work, I am not a fan. I like a clear business model otherwise I assume that I am the product being sold.

    Edit: They should make it open source if this is the path they take. Then users can personally verify that they (or their data) isn't being sold to the highest bidder.

  • by s1291 on 2/20/25, 3:26 PM

  • by hu3 on 2/20/25, 4:13 PM

    Can you use something like iCloud, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive to get sync for free? Does it work well?

    Many do that with Joplin.

  • by tionis on 2/20/25, 4:42 PM

    I hope this doesn't destroy their financing. I would hate to see them go down, it's a wonderful piece of software.
  • by tionis on 2/20/25, 4:41 PM

    I wonder if this is a prelude to make obsidian open-source. Would be pretty great.
  • by Derbasti on 2/20/25, 6:37 PM

    The commercial license used to be de-facto optional, now it is explicitly so. Good for them to officially acknowledge that reality. I bet they realized that payment was never enforceable, so it just didn't make sense to keep up the fiction.
  • by crooked-v on 2/20/25, 7:12 PM

    I feel like the Obsidian Publish pricing model is a bit off. Having it "per site" feels like nickel-and-diming for small things that's kept me on Notion for a lot of miscellaneous web-published projects. It would be more appealing for at least me if it was something with a higher flat rate that then doesn't care about the exact divisions between your projects.
  • by 1123581321 on 2/20/25, 5:00 PM

    This is a good change. Most people using it at work do it individually and don’t pay. But they do potentially pay for sync services.
  • by silvanocerza on 2/20/25, 5:34 PM

    Shameless plug, I'm working on a plugin to sync your vault with a GitHub repo. It's still under active development but it does the job.

    https://github.com/silvanocerza/obsidian-github-sync

    Feedback is more than welcome.

  • by dSebastien on 2/20/25, 5:10 PM

    This is awesome news for the community. With a built-in multiplayer mode, it would be epic.
  • by throw0101c on 2/20/25, 5:53 PM

    How do the use-cases for Obsidian differ from Zotero?

    * https://www.zotero.org

  • by taude on 2/20/25, 5:03 PM

    anyone have any good tips or plugins so that I can have browser plugins on all my devices and save web pages from multiple devices to it? It's basically the only reason I still use Notion. (As a former emacs guy, I like a lot about Obsidian, most of the plug-in ecosystem, including it saving my data as just text.)
  • by bjoli on 2/20/25, 6:22 PM

    I am not really comfortable relying on a tool that has a free tier and a subscription. I really like the app, but I will never again have the rugged pulled out under me with a quadrupling of license costs.

    Do the make any kind of promises wrt the free tier?

  • by whatever1 on 2/20/25, 5:06 PM

    Why guys? Let my employer pay for your work.