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Comment by japanuspus | Hacker News Reader

To me, Obsidian is a perfect example of how to get SaaS-revenue without making the user captive: All data is stored in an accessible form on the user hardware, and what you pay for is sync.

X-user kepano (who is a/the creator of Obsidian) has some nice insights on this _file over app_ philosophy.

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> (who is a/the creator of Obsidian)

No. He is the current CEO, an excellent communicator and definitely the right person for the job, but he wasn't there in the beginning and nothing meaningfully changed about Obsidian's philosophy since for it to be attributed solely to him.

I don't disagree with him on anything in particular, it just feels bad to see the two equated. Original devs wanted to spend their time on actually making the thing, so they hired a CEO. They even picked from the community, kepano was the developer of the most popular Obsidian theme well before he got hired, but he is absolutely not the creator of Obsidian. When he joined, Obsidian already existed.

He's also not the only community hire either, there's at least one or two more people that started as plugin developers before they got hired.

Sounds utopian and inspiring. I hope it never gets enshitified.

This is an effective, simple solution if the application doesn't have transactional constraints and authorization. The user is in full control of the data - and that's a good thing.

It becomes a bit more complicated if the data has to be in a specified shape and can only partially be authored by any individual due to authorization requirements. Having a single source of truth on a server is quite a bit easier to reason about and design in this case.

I don't know where Obsidian stands on this, but I assume that if it has collaborative features or complex data constraints it has to do some quite sophisticated stuff to make it work reliably.

> if it has collaborative features or complex data constraints

It has neither of these things - it is aimed at individual (non-collaborative) use, and is intentionally very open and structureless. It is uniquely positioned to succeed with their chosen business model.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a large part of Obsidian’s use are free accounts illegally using it for professional purposes.

> what you pay for is sync.

You also have to pay for commercial usage. And may choose to pay for early access to updates.

And the sync is locked behind their offering, if you use other software to handle the sync, you're out of luck if you want the data to be available on mobile since you can't dynamically choose the location of the vault.

It's still miles ahead of other offerings when it comes to having the data be "open", but I found this limitation frustrating.

That’s genius. I’m glad their one primary paid feature can’t be trivially circumvented.

This is only partially true. Their business model is based on business use, not personal use. They do allow free community based solutions. Like Notion - use it for free for personal stuff. But better UX and you get to take your notes home.

Last time I checked 3rd party plugin 'Remotely Sync' worked fine on mobile. You just create a new vault with any name you want, install the plugin, fill-in the settings and the sync will copy content of your existing vault there. After that sync will work in both ways. Personally, I use S3 backend and didn't encounter any issues so far.

> you're out of luck if you want the data to be available on mobile since you can't dynamically choose the location of the vault

Is this possibly an iPhone-only limitation?

On Android, I can add as many vaults as I like, and choose any directory for that. I'm happily using it with a directory that is synced via Syncthing.

I've been using Obsidian for months now. I couldn't justify the high sync cost even though the offering is nice. So I hacked a solution with the community plugin "remotely save", syncing to WebDAV. I thought it would be shoddy and after 2 days I would just go with the official solution. But no. Obsidian is a "too good to be true" kind of thing.

Also, the fact that it's just files allows me to shamelessly use Restic to back it up. No "intergrations" or "export workflows" - my data is my own (although it might be snooped by the app), I get to decide what to do with it, how and where to put it.

For me, this is the future. Imagine your data is yours. You get to enjoy all the possible ways of making value out of it, not just in some crippled ways that make other rich people richer.

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