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But it's certainly not $5/mo. Something in the ballpark of $10/yr would be better.

I can buy a private VPS for $20/yr with 30gb of storage and slap sync thing on it, and find an existing markdown editor if I wanted.

That could easily pay for itself with 4 users. And that's just scraping the bottom of the barrel of low cost servers.

Yes not everyone can set up a server, and yes this takes the burden off spending time doing that. But your average software engineer with some server knowledge could set this up in a day.

The value proposition is just not there.

In a day? I'd think closer to an hour than a day to set up.

I would want to add time for a bit of stress testing, backups, etc.

If I'm building something that needs to "stand the test of time", I find a day lets me relax, meander, think it through, and not get stressed over not moving fast enough.

I've also learned from experience to always over estimate these things ;)

I like Obsidian+SyncThing

If you live in the Apple ecosystem you could use something like FSNotes and icloud for 7$ for FSNotes plus 1$/month for icloud.