Their tech stack also sounds dumb. I stopped using their tool on principle on top of the insane pricing.
It wasn't "the guys". It was the CEO. He believes the best use of his time is monitoring Reddit threads and banning people. He posted an official policy that any negative comment or any mention of a competing app is a permanent ban - even if you're a paying customer.
I gave Roam a comprehensive evaluation last year before deciding to go with Obsidian, and paying for Obsidian Sync. I posted a short comment in one of the threads listing the reasons I didn't go with Roam. He could have learned from my comment. He could have ignored it. He banned me. A few days later, he banned Ramses Oudt, the leading community advocate for Roam, for making a negative comment.
That's a little more drama than I'd like for a notetaking app I'm paying to use.
The pricing truly is nutty. $165 a year for foldable bullet points??!! Gtfo. I wouldn't pay that much to own the app outright.
I sincerely hope they lose their lunch, and I feel bad for having recommended them to people.
I got lucky and snagged the sync product before they doubled the price, so I'm grandfathered into that. But even $50/yr is a fair bit given it's really just a storage mechanism. $50 isn't that bad, but I would give a hard no at the full price of $100/yr.
Worse, the publish feature... holy insanity this thing is. $192/yr to publish a single repository.
I just don't understand at all how they came up with the pricing. If they need to make money, make the app a paid product for like $10 or $15.
Everything they put a price tag on is astronomical.
* Catalyst (for early access) $25+
* Commercial $50 per year
* Sync $8/mo ($96/yr)
* Publish $16/mo ($192/yr)
The app remains free, so it's clear they're trying to subsidize the cost of the app by cranking up the dial on the extra services, but I'd rather they just charge a reasonable price for the app and make the addon services reasonably priced. I'd be happy to pay like $10/yr for the app, and if, presumably, enough others were it would probably make them MORE money than the add-on services because a larger portion of their user base would have to pay for the app, and probably wouldn't shit a brick at $10/yr or something reasonable.
I believe the tech stack is clojure, which makes a ton of sense given that the data store is basically a graph database.
The other points were though.
It's perhaps ironic that this reverses "you get what you pay for," but experience should teach all of us that these subscription type deals are strongly likely to screw you, usually through some change in the business model.
(Personally, tried org-mode in the past, have also played with Obsidian, but for me http://zim-wiki.org is the perfect combo of easy and extensible)
Athens is getting there as an alternative, but I wish they were markdown-based for portability.