Comment by kepano
4 months ago
Obsidian makes money from its add-on services Sync and Publish. Commercial license is joining the Catalyst license as an optional ways to support Obsidian.
The problem with the Commercial license is that it wasn't clear. Many organizations were out of compliance without any way for Obsidian to enforce it, since the app is local and doesn't require sign up.
I thought it pretty clear. If it makes you money, you pay for it. And it's so inexpensive, I've never bothered to negotiate with my employer to fund it as I could easy pay it myself.
So now I am less incentiviced to pay and I have no path forward to negotiate with my employer to front money.
Regardless, I love the tool and your general approach, trying to keep things in publics hand (e.g. publishing and opening the canvas format) - so probably will still pay for it :D
I prefer using my own syncing though, as otherwise it's too expensive for "just syncing".
Thank you Steph! Your product is awesome, used continuously, and works well on all platforms (laptop, phone, etc).
I am grateful and happy that I got the opportunity to thank you here.
So, while you're almost certainly right about the impossibility of enforcement, I imagine many big organisations would purchase licenses anyway because they fear any minor risk of not doing so. Indeed, your Enterprise [0] page lists a number of big orgs with decent outlays.
Do you anticipate those companies to keep purchasing Obsidian now that it isn't a mandatory purchase for compliance?
(As a huge fan of Obsidian, and someone who personally purchased an Enterprise license to use within their company: god I hope so.)
[0]: https://obsidian.md/enterprise/
> Do you anticipate those companies to keep purchasing Obsidian now that it isn't a mandatory purchase for compliance?
I don't know. We'll see. It's somewhat unknowable, in the same way we don't know how many users didn't buy a license but should have. My guess is that for every person who bought a commercial license there are 9 who were out of compliance. We anecdotally know that many tech companies have way more Obsidian users than they report. This change will remove a lot of admin work for our team of seven.
What I do know is that even without any Commercial revenue, our other revenue streams (Sync, Publish and Catalyst) are enough to keep the lights on, and we really mean what we say in our Manifesto: "We believe that everyone should have the tools to think clearly and organize ideas effectively."
The bet is that this increases the number of people who discover Obsidian and end up buying one of our add-ons. In the future I can also see us creating add-ons that are more focused on organizational use. This change makes the pricing much clearer in that regard. I expect much fewer questions like "does Commercial include Sync?" which has been a point of confusion for years.
Awesome to hear. Best of luck!