Comment by Sytten
1 day ago
I really don't want to critisize OP since building stuff for yourself is always a good mentality. But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing.
It will always cost more if you consider your own time for maintenance long term. Obsidian is one of the most consumer friendly business for note taking out of there, they are not VC so the Evernote comparison is unwarranted IMO.
> But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing
Where is the limit ?
While $100/year maybe doesn't sound like much, it's hardly the only subscription service you have, and they all add up, from your mail provider, office suite, cloud storage, streaming services, phone bills, internet service, etc.
Personally I find $100/year to edit notes on my phone to be a bit much, but then again, I just use iOS Notes.
I am so fed up with everything turning into subscriptions, that I've just completely stopped buying things that are subscription based.
I understand developers need to make a living, but simply throwing a subscription on top of it won't convince me to buy your product. You convince me by making a compelling product, and by continuously updating it, adding new features, which will convince me to buy another version.
Yeah I just wanted to chime in here on what i see as a world view problem that might need to be updated with the times. I see your point about everything being subscription based.
There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based. But there are some developers that I think should be supported on a regular basis. Especially obsidian because they develop one product and continually work on it to make it better. IMHO they deserve the money.
On side note I wish there was a way for it to be open source, and the team's reasons for not supporting open source seems a little iffy. They could still make money of of Obsidain Sync or other features that does not need to be part of a Open Source Release. Commercialism of a project this important worries me because people that depend on it can be easy side-lined if the team decides to sell out. Look what happened to the Atom editor. Microsoft brought it then killed it. I know with Obsidian you can walk away from it and thats good, but I always worry about commercial domination of a market causing limited choice.
I know your point was about subscriptions, and I guess I am saying im more supportive of that model, based on the times we are in, for developers that have genuine passion for a project that they want to continue developing.
Heck I know am realizing I need to support open source projects with regular donations because I want them to thrive long term
> There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based
My personal experience with software switching to a subscription model is that often that means you will now only get "bugfixes", and new features are usually few and far apart.
There's no longer any incentive to produce major versions with new breaking features, and instead it just turns into a maintenance product, if you even get that.
An Example could be Sublime Text, that while not traditionally subscription based, the license expires after 3-4 years, and needs to be renewed, so it's just a 3-4 year subscription. It was released in May 2021, and receives 1-2 updates yearly, and every update since 2021 has been "fixes" or "improvements". Nothing new has been added for 4 years.
Another example could be Arq Backup. Version 7 was released in February 2021, and while the changelog does have some "new feature" entries, those are mostly just "added the possibility to backup to X service". It does however see much more frequent updates than Sublime Text.
Don't get me wrong, bugfixes and improvements are great, but I expect new features as well. I expect the product to be moving forward, keeping up with current "best practice" standards, and not just turn into a money pit for the developer, just pushing out the obligatory "yeah, we fixed a few bugs" releases.
There are of course also various projects that do things "well enough" that new major releases are not required, like NextDNS. NextDNS works well, and is priced cheap enough to rival the electricity consumption price of a Raspberry Pi running at home. They don't have big releases, are mostly doing maitenance releases, but for the cost, and function of the service that is OK.
And no, not all software falls into this category, and there are plenty of great software that i pay for, which is actively maintained.
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Personally, I just set myself a budget of $100/month for subscriptions. I was going to drive myself crazy judging every one all the time, so I decided as long as I’m under this threshold I’m not going to stress.
I track the ones I have so I can compare the cost, looking at either daily, monthly, or yearly cost. Sorting by price, I can look them over to judge if one of them seems unusually expensive for what it is, and regularly review to see if there are and I’m not using and need to be cancelled.
My most expensive is the could backup for my NAS. $8/month is about what I pay for Proton, which offers a lot more than just note syncing. So $8 for notes does seem like a lot. Looking at Obsidian’s pricing page[0], the $8/month is for publishing… hosting a website with your Obsidian data. Just syncing is only $4, and there are many free ways to do it. That part of the article felt like the author was trying to justify writing their own tool due to cost. That doesn’t feel justified, and they were stretching… but the good thing is there doesn’t need to be any financial justification at all. Just make your own tool for the sake of making your own tool. That’s good enough.
[0] https://obsidian.md/pricing
I think that no matter that they do you will always find people complaining. That is humanity's favorite sport. Even when it's free and open source people still complain.
Making software for individual consumers is freaking hard. My own perspective as a founder shifted from "this is a viable method to build a sustainable business" to "let's use it as the base for B2B sales, but it is not viable".
Obsidian is not free and not open source
> 1000$ over 10 years is nothing
It's a non-trivial amount of money to a lot of people (myself included). I spend way more than that on Free Software, but I'm not throwing money to a proprietary program if I can choose.
FWIW, I’d be more concerned about the implications of the company having my notes in lieu of the pure cost perspective. But the thing is, you can avoid that entirely too by implementing your own sync
FWIW unless they are outright lying this is a choice, one of the choices when setting up a vault is E2E that you have to enter whenever setting up a new sync, but they are really clear that if you lose this password you are at the whims of your own backups.
They do also publish the “verify the encryption steps” for this.
Of course, depending on your threat model this could be insufficient, but then you probably wouldn’t trust obsidian in the first place.
And implementing local sync for obsidian is just running on docker container
even better: Obsidian is only $480 over 10 years!
I think the author point still stands though: Obsidian won’t probably be here in 20 years.
I’m a time traveler from 2046 and I hate to break it to you but it’s still running strong.
Couldn’t avoid the computation panic of 2038 but it got by
For me that's one of the great points about obsidian's choice of all notes being Markdown.
Even if Obsidian vanished tomorrow and the application became unmaintainable, I'd still have all my notes in a text based format.
I wish all markdown editors just had their markdown files in a simple folder like Obsidian does.
I wanted to like Bear, which advertises that it uses markdown. But when I went looking for the files, they were locked away in a database. This was many years ago, so if this has changed, I’d be happy to hear it.
I’d love to be able to easily jump between apps, which markdown should allow in theory, but in practice view apps allow for. I don’t find using a text editor to be ideal here as a solution, as I want my notes to look like notes and hide away the syntax when the cursor isn’t on the syntax. Obsidian handles this well, most text editors do not.
One of Obsidian's creators is saying exactly the same actually.
https://stephango.com/file-over-app
Why not? It’s got a huge user base, a massive open source plug-in ecosystem and a sensible revenue model. It’s probably one of the note apps that has the largest community around it outside of Notion, which is heavily VC influenced and is more of a do everything app
But Op's program have even less probability to be here in 20 years
How?
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We'll see. I think there is a chance that it will.
Neither solution is guaranteed to stick around for 20 years.
As we’ve seen before, it takes one VC investment to change a source available license into something not so friendly and forks are never guaranteed.
Can I have those 1000$ if you think that is nothing?
Sure, but only in installments over the next 10 years and in exchange I need you to provide a sync service for my notes.
I'll install https://syncthing.net/ on your computer right now for 100 bucks!