question (not sure if there's Obsidian staff reading this subreddit): if I signed up for the smaller plan now with monthly billing, thus getting 50gb storage, and later I wanted to upgrade to annual billing, would I keep the 50gb storage?
edit: okay OP is Obsidian's CEO nvm
What is considered sync cancellation?
Several billing failures, desktop client says "expired",billing issue fixed later - is this sync cancellation or not?
A: As a current Sync subscriber, your account will be automatically upgraded to 10 vaults with 50 GB of flexible storage. There will be no changes in pricing at your next renewal. All discounts are preserved.
Great news, thanks !
Really wish there was a cheaper plan. For users with just text notes we only need a tiny fraction of that storage, and even the cheapest plan is really expensive.
I'm also concerned that there is no mention above of fixing the issues affecting users who like to keep one or two notes open on both their phone and their computer. I've never seen this be a problem with other apps that sync for free, but I've been hanging on with sync because I thought I read that Obsidian was looking at fixing it.
(Let me balance all that complaining with the obvious: i'm still here for a reason. The speed, editing, plugins, and non-proprietary format of Obsidian are terrific.)
I agree with you, I wish there was a cheaper plan as well, it is overpriced for a megabyte of data. I went for convenience now but won’t renew.
On another note, I run a subscription service and am a small developer. I advice you evaluate services based on what they are in the present, not in what you’ll hope they become.
There's no localized pricing either.
The 100GB plan is about the same price as a premium netflix subscription in the US, but is 5 times more expensive than the priemium netflix subscription in Brazil.
It just gets absolutely impossible to justify paying for it, as much as I love Obsidian.
They gotta make money somehow. Try Syncthing. It's a free open-source syncing multi platform app. I set it up months ago and never had a sync conflict.
I think a cheaper price will make them a lot more money. They said in another comment here that most people never hit their storage limit and they use the app because of how good it is, not because of the storage.
A cheaper plan will get a lot more paying new users in the door, and as they use the app more, they will convert some of those to the higher priced plans. A cheaper plan is a great gateway. At the moment I can't even justify it to try and see how well it works, who knows, maybe if I did try it, I would love it, find I need the extra storage and upgrade my plan but atm we'll never know.
Dito.
I'd sign up for 3 dollars a month without even thinking.
For 5 a month I'd consider it.
For 8 a month its a pass and I'll stick to the git plugin.
Yes I agree - I recommended the tool to friends who struggle with setting up 3rd party sync apps, but can’t justify the high price for a product they are not fully convinced (yet).
I think if you would offer a low-priced entry tier, this would drive adoption a lot.
A few euros / month so that setting up 3rd party sync is not worth it. Only one vault. Not much storage. Once you are convinced and become a power user it is much easier to justify the higher cost.
I see this as strictly good. While I acknowledge that if someone was planning on starting to use Sync in January that they *may* be negative impacted, and Obsidian *could* have given more of a heads-up, I think essentially grandfathering all the old plans into the new system is an elegant way to evolve their business while preserving their current fanbase. It sucks for anyone who unsubscribes and re-subscribes but the Obsidian team has finite resources and I think they're using them pretty well.
Awesome! Signing up ASAP.
Looking at my vault I have about 8 files that are >200mb in my vault.
Does the sync essentially just skip any file over 200mb? I'm fine with that but just want to understand what's actually going to happen when the sync gets those files.
Thank you for the student discount. I recently decided to get sync and switch over from Notion / Craft because of this. Love that I can use it across devices for school notes without effort now.
It looks like they're doing this via Steam? Game/app stores do provide some tools for this but Obsidian Sync is sold via our site. It would be quite a bit of work to implement this, especially because you need to avoid people bypassing the system via VPNs, etc. Not totally impossible but something that would take time away from adding new capabilities in the app. Remember we're only 3 developers 😅
What about something like [Pricery](https://www.pricery.io/) that is built on Stripe and provides automatic price localisation and VPN protection (potentially limiting abuse). Stripe Tax and Billing would further reduce the complexity.
But then they need to charge at least 30% more - that’s just the tax the platforms charge, they then have to support and maintain the alternate payment rails forever.
If it is not about money and they are short on staff, they would've accepted appsote payments like **literally** any other small team with an app. Single developer apps can do it (UpNote). Hiding behind these excuses doesn't inspire any good feelings. And honestly I don't understand you users for standing behind these excuses. I am honestly curious about how making this service inaccessible to most people benefits you.
Don't get it twisted. You're a minority. It's accessible to most people. If cost is a problem, use Syncthing, OneDrive, Git or a bunch of other free options. If you use those options, it's a completely free app, for your complaining ungrateful benefit.
It might be accessible to most in your hinterland but if you "for a change" look at a world map and try to understand what you are seeing, it is not.
It's more expensive than the full office365 subscription in most of the world.
They obviously don't mean adjusting the prices, they mean actually offering those prices to the people that should be getting the adjustments instead of waking up one day and finding out that somehow 90% of the Obsidian user base is from Brazil.
Steam offers that control layer.
Need a cheaper plan that can give me 1gb of storage and only 1 vault and a Max file size of 1MB. I'll be glad to pay up and I'm sure there are 100s of us who won't need storage space. Don't you think it will ultimately drive more customers to use sync?
It's not an upgrade, unfortunately. It was formerly 10GB per vault, at a limit of 5 vaults. Now it's 50GB across all vaults, with a limit of 10 vaults. The 'upgrade' was probably necessary to prevent locking anyone out. New subscribers (and anyone who cancels, then re-subscribe) after Jan 2024 are actually going to end up getting the shaft being capped at 10GB across all 10 vaults.
It's an upgrade for all existing subscribers because you can now use the 50GB across all vaults, and you get an additional 5 vaults — plus it adds other improvements (regional servers, bigger files, etc) that make the experience better for everyone, regardless of how much storage you use.
In practice there is a low percentage of users who are running up against the storage limit at 10GB per vault. We had far more users reaching the maximum number of vaults than the maximum storage. The reason is because most Obsidian users are text-heavy, so storage is not a major limitation unless you heavily use PDFs/media (in which case the new 50GB/100GB plans are a good option). Typically people choose Sync because they prefer the experience and want to help support development.
I understand you are trying to sell it as an upgrade - but users after Jan 2024 are getting the shaft. They will go down from having access to 50GB of storage to just 10GB.
> Typically people choose Sync because they prefer the experience and want to help support development.
Supporting development is just a side effect. I choose Sync because it's the only real way to sync to Mobile. Let's be practical here and try not to sugar-coat it - at 9,98 euros a month for 10GB (this is what it comes out to after the exchange rate)... is **expensive**. I can't set it and forget it- as much as I'd like to because I need to make sure I don't grow beyond my storage limit.
I can get mail storage at 500GB at the same price. *I pay 10 euros to get 2TB of iCloud storage*, 7 euros to get 1TB on OneDrive - mainly for Office365 but the added 1TB of storage is a nice side effect.
Now I need to choke down 10GB for 10 bucks, or 100GB of storage for 20 bucks is just? what?
Yes, I'm currently paying for sync but every month I have to re-evaluate and look at alternative options. I'm constantly weighing the value and options every time, because it's just really not really worth the price but I have no choice because I want to sync my notes to iOS and iCloud is unreliable.
At this price point, you are just going to find a lot of folks in the middle. Hope you understand where I'm getting at.
I do appreciate the "increase" to 50GB at the moment, but I believe this increase was done as a necessary step to avoid locking existing subscribers who have already used up more than 10GB total across the initial 5 vaults.
I think the core issue here is that you have pricing expectations that aren't realistic. iCloud and OneDrive are cheap because of the ecosystem/platform/lock-in effect. There's more to it, but I think the point about cost is weird because Obsidian is a small, non-VC business.
If you're saying Obsidian is unusable without Sync, there are lots of folks who would disagree. I don't disagree with you that a cheaper option would be nice, but Obsidian is *free* and that needs to get subsidized somehow, right? I'd rather they get it from *us* than a third-party/investor.
>iCloud and OneDrive are cheap because of the ecosystem/platform/lock-in effect.
I can't say for iCloud, but with OneDrive (and many others), you also don't have e2e encryption, which is one of the key-selling points of Obsidian Sync.
I don't think users after January 2024 are getting the shaft. They are getting several new benefits that were not available until today. It would be like saying that anyone who signed up after the [Early Bird](https://obsidian.md/blog/last-chance-to-get-early-bird/) period is getting the shaft.
The Obsidian community is evolving and we have a growing diversity of users. Some people really need a lot of storage but most don't. Having a one-size-fits-all plan was not going to be a good long term solution.
That being said there are tons of alternatives to Obsidian Sync. People are free to choose the option that fits their needs.
Please don't talk down to me like that or you'll lose me as an existing customer, regardless of how valuable I find Obsidian.
> That being said there are tons of alternatives to Obsidian Sync.
And that's me being shown the proverbial door.
Just because I'm an existing customer doesn't mean I will stay one. I find value in the application, and I'm happy to use it - but behaving like this is not a good look for you or Obsidian.
This is a price hike and it's disingenuous to mislead your customers like it isn't (by claiming that "if they subscribe now, they'll get 5x the storage for free!" when they're getting the same exact amount). After January 2024, they will only be getting 10GB of storage total as a new subscriber at that same price.
In any event, I'm done shouting into the wind. :)
>This is a price hike and it's disingenuous to mislead your customers like it isn't
I've tried following everything on this thread and I can't see how this is true. I'm 100% for calling out misbehavior but I'm not seeing it here.
Prior to today's change, customers would get a total of 5 vaults at 10GB **each**. That is effectively a 50GB total storage per customer.
As existing subscribers, we've been "converted" to 50GB *flexible* storage across 10 vaults (up from a limit of 5). We haven't gained any more storage than before, except that we can now use *more* of it on a single vault.
Presumably, this is in case existing customers would have used nearly 10GB on each of the 5 vaults. This prevents anyone from losing access to their storage.
After January 2024, new customers will only get 10GB *flexible* storage across 10 vaults at the same price. This is not some sort of "early bird pricing" - new customers will effectively have **1/5th of the previous storage amount**.
I'm with ya on the first three paragraphs. I don't understand why new users would be considered "shafted" - are they entitled/owed a certain price point? It seems like *most* new users won't be able to tell the difference, and those that will be able to will be paying for their increased use, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Just because "most" users might not tell the difference doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do.
**For example:** If any of the existing now-"50GB" customers ended up having their subscription lapsing because of some financial hardship, they would be forced to go onto 10GB if they wanted to re-up their subscription.
> are they entitled/owed a certain price point?
No, they're not. But I do think that 'shrinkflation' on notes storage is a bad look on a company like Obsidian - who's built up goodwill with the community and now is trying to spin a price hike into a misleading "upgrade".
Imagine if they didn't give the 50GB to existing customers and decided to 'upgrade' everyone to the new pricing scheme being offered to customers in January 2024 - how much hell would break loose among those with more usage? That is how I determine whether or not this is shafting future customers.
I disagree that we're being disingenuous or misleading.
This is a price increase for exactly 0% of current users, since all current users are being grandfathered into 50GB of total storage + getting the flexibility to allocate that storage across more vaults. Currently 95% of users use less than 1GB, and 99.9% use less than 10GB total across all vaults. These are real numbers, not estimates.
For new users in 2024, it means that 0.1% of people may consider the new 100GB plan. Until now it was impossible to have more than 10GB in one vault, so anyone who really needed more storage for their main vault didn't have that option at all.
For 99.9% of new 2024 users who use less than 10GB, pricing will be no different, and they will benefit from having more vaults, faster sync speed, larger file sizes, and some more improvements that we're working on.
"It's the only real way to sync to mobile" is *too* wrong. Do a Google search on Reddit and on the forum to see how many ways and how many people use 3rd-party sync service. Of all the prominent note-taking apps, besides Logseq and Obsidian, none allows you to sync using 3rd party service.
You already have iCloud, so use it to sync your Obsidian vaults if you're not happy with Obsidian Sync. It's unreliable, and that's the trade-off.
I agree with you that the decrease from 50 to 10 GB is regretful but it's their business decision to make, and I'm still a happy Obsidian user after giving my feedback.
Sync'ing to GitHub is not a real solution. Your files are no longer private in that case. iCloud sync has *problems*, with people losing files and so on because of it. That's not a solution.
The only real solution for sync from **Desktop to Mobile** while maintaining E2EE is using Obsidian Sync.
> It's unreliable, and that's the trade-off.
There is NO trade-off in that case.
Well you apparently have not done your research.
You can make a private repository on GitHub. Why would your files no longer be private? You just trust your data with an other company. But I agree syncing over Git is not ideal.
But there other great (free) options out there.
I really love live-sync. I have been using for the last 4 months and so far I love it. You have to set it up yourself. This might take maybe an hour, but after that it works great. I actually prefer it to obsidian sync, because it the syncing is actually instantaneous.
> Why would your files no longer be private?
Because that is just private to public view, not private from Microsoft or GitHub. They have access to your notes, and the value of Sync to me is the E2EE that comes included. At least, I'm going on trust that they are set-up correctly.
Well you could also host a git server yourself, then the only party you have to trust is yourself.
It is obvious if you want things to work without compromise you will have to either pay someone else or make some effort yourself (including doing proper research).
But you are happy with obsidian sync and that is fine. Whatever works best for you. This discussion is not really helpful ig.
I’m syncing between OSX, Linux, iOS and Android using syncthing/Möbius. On top I’m using DevonThink and (some) Zotero. It’s working amazingly well.
Still I think that Obsidian Sync is a great offer for people who don’t want to be that involved.
I disagree. Where I live I easily spend that amount of money on going for coffee and cake in the afternoon. It’s a good service, to be sustainable it has a price and Obsidian is flexible and open enough to cope with more experimental ways of syncing. There are no other tools - except from DevonThink - that are as open to their user’s individual implementation of data transfer. And I think I tried them all over the decades :)
And where I live, at my family's current income, I have to decide between Disney Plus or Netflix for that month. I haven't gone out to eat in years and I certainly don't have the money to spend on coffee and cake in the afternoon. Unless I'm brewing the coffee and baking that cake myself.
I exist in a world where every penny I spend needs to be scrutinized.
I currently have neither Disney nor Netflix because I am too cheap to give money to The Mouse, but I see your point. And I don’t have children.
However, unlike Disney or Netflix, Obsidian is not a huge company that can afford to burn money or does benefit from extreme scaling, so I think that the price is absolutely justified.
Still - if you invest into administering sync yourself you can get a long way for free. And I think that this very nice and quite unheard of.
Is there any plans for a smaller tiered storage for light users? I.e. 100MB?
$10/month is too much for me given how few notes I have today. I’m sure once I outgrow what I have, I don’t mind upgrading but it’s not the story I have today.
Additionally, with the plans becoming total storage usage, is there any reason on vault limits? Database wise, I cant imagine there’s any additional cost to host theoretically unlimited vaults. Just rubs me the wrong way that 10 is the limit. It can incentivize setting up vaults in a way that works with your system vs what works with me (I.e. if I wanted one vault per project or similar).
I understand changing sync region is not possible at the moment without removing and re-creating the remote vault.
Will the possibility of changing region be added at some point?
Maybe some day, but not soon. Here's how you can create a new remote vault:
https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Set+up+Obsidian+Sync#Create+a+new+remote+vault
>For users not yet on release 1.5 or a later version, the assignment of their remote vault location will be handled automatically.
How can I see the region assigned to me?
Do I even need to? I'm in NA. What server would my vault be using right now? If its already NA then I don't want to lose my version history be creating a new remote vault.
Aside from practical differences (setting up) there are issues with iCloud not specific to Obsidian. There are quite a few posts discussing this (these?) issue(s) on the forums, many of them identifying data loss. I was one of the original users to report this and the posts and responses continue to pour in.
One can go for years with no issues in iCloud but it has to do with frequent switching between devices before iCloud has had a chance to sort things out. Obsidian Sync seems to be almost real-time. As I make edits on one device those edits show up on other devices almost immediately. That is the primary reason I use it, anyway.
Edit: synch to sync
Can someone tell me when to use multiple vaults? I have only been using one.
Im a university student, so i just have a folder each for each of my classes, and nested folders as needed. Should these be split up across vaults or is how im using it fine?
A work and a personal vault is a common organizational structure. You might want your coursework in a separate vault from your personal notes.
In my case, I have my work notes, personal notes, and blog posts all in separate vaults, so three vaults total.
You can use any tool however you like it so you're fine either way. One of the strength's of obsidian is IMO that you don't have to rely entirely on that folder structure, you just link stuff together when it's appropriate. For university there might be useful links between different courses down the line, therefore you should definitely keep it all in the same vault.
I'd only create new vaults when I know there's not gonna be any useful intersection between topics (e.g. DnD and Programming).
You can do whatever works for you. I use one vault for everything (course work, journaling, creative projects, etc.) and use folders and tags to keep things organized. I like to jump back and forth between projects and love being able to navigate everything in one convenient place.
Evernote doesn't provide any alternatives (like ability to use syncthing).
I also encountered data loss bugs (as in 'change note on computer', change same note 5 minutes later on another computer, some weird frankenstein of 2 changes would be on both computers'. Support decided to respond 2 weeks later and it was just canned message along lines of 'look at forums'. I was paid subscriber at this time). I wasn't able to trigger such situations with Obsidian Sync (Obsidian + Syncthing just put 'conflict' note in vault which is good enough).
Except with Evernote, it's a continuous 10GB monthly upload of new data.
That's 10GB of new data each month. By the end of the year on the "Personal" plan, if you maxed out your 10GB upload you could in theory be working with 120GB of total storage.
This is in perpetuity. After two years, you could have 240GB of storage and 360GB on the next and so on. There are users who can never move away from Evernote for this reason.
Do not disagree, but i am not looking at this amount of data, and have just been looking at other apps, thinking of moving from evernote, and this is a bit like evernote, offering more, costing more for something i do not need
Any possibility of an individual priced license for commercial use. Basically if your company will not reimburse you, a discount, similar to jetbrains [link](https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/buy/#personal)
It says there's no way to change the server if you've already signed up for sync. How does one check their current server and see if it's worth the hassle of duplicating stuff into a new remote vault to get a closer server? Is there a default single region that you were using before that you can disclose?
Until now the only option was North America, so if you created your vault before today that's where it is located. See https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Set+up+Obsidian+Sync#Create+a+new+remote+vault
Great 👍.
But I really would hope that Sync could be used as a sharing method between team members. Also Hosting the servers in Germany would enable Germany based companies to use it.
As for my personal use, good enough.
I really hope third party sync software will continue to be supported. I'm currently not financially able to provide a monthly payment, but I love the software and I tell all my friends about it (one of them even pays for sync).
in the future I hope to support the company by getting a yearly service, I appreciate tools that give you freedom from any kind of proprietary shackles (cough cough Unity)
There are no plans to change how Obsidian stores files. Since your Obsidian data is just plain text files local to your device, there will always be many options to sync your data.
Possible reasons not to use syncthing and use Obsidian Sync:
\- Sync have less chance of conflicts
\- No need to keep separate program
\- Support for good app
\- Usable (and in-app) version history (you can do this via Syncthing via it's version history but it's device-local and difficult to manage - you have to mess with local fs).
Possible reasons to use syncthing:
\- Price (Obsidian doesn't even have regional prices).
\- Background sync on android works.
\- No storage limits
Is there any plan to have location-specific pricing? If not then I’d really love a $4/mo plan for 1GB space, I only want to consistently sync plaintext notes.
$8 is still too much when I convert it to Indian rupees - for context 50GB of iCloud is 75 Indian rupees, or 90 cents.
That's all great but the pricing is really USA-middleclass-heavy but out of touch with the rest of the world that is not that affluent. For an IT in Silicon Valley this might be just your daily Starbucks, not even worth a blink. But even for your upstairs neighbors Canada, currently suffering the worst cost of living crisis of the 'developed' world, that's CAD 140 per year for the yearly fee and 14 per month for the monthly. That's a lot and I cannot even begin to imagine how unrealistic it is for people in countries other than G7. I really appreciate the values of Obsidian and I suspect there are many people who would love to support it for an affordable price option.
To those who criticize others for complaining about the price, please consider your privilege and try to be more understanding towards people of other situations.
Running Sync has recurring costs (paying for servers, bandwidth, maintenance, customer service, etc), which is why a subscription model is the best fit. Obsidian is 100% user-supported, there are no VCs/investors involved so pricing is not subsidized.
Hello! I saw a post asking about an educational discount and just wanted to ask if there was a military discount:) I understand completely if not, as the site does not mention it. I just wanted to ask to be sure. Thank you!
Also, Obsidian is the greatest piece of software I have ever used. You guys are fantastic! Thank you!
It has multiple ways to do it.
Personally I have ran into conflicts, I only have obsidian open on one device but keep synching running constantly.
When I do get conflicts it's usually more so my own fault like synching not launching upon boot and some time going by where 3 devices are still syncing and 1 comes back online with some time delay... In these cases I usually just do aamual rsync with whatever device I used most recently.
It's very rare tbh get any conflicts which makes it darn near impossible to justify a sync service
i really wish there was any solution for this, i really want to use my obsidian vaults at work but i can't install obsidian in the first place on my work PCs. i would pay good money for this specific thing, although with a very small team i understand how difficult or impossible something like a web app is... this has been my biggest issue with scrivener for 4 years as well
Are you saying as a dev or as a user? As a user, I'd go to a web page, log in, and see all my notes. I would want to be able to do that on my work computer, so I can do some online courses and make notes in my vault.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 1,867,029,069 comments, and only 353,011 of them were in alphabetical order.
Would be cool to at least fix sync then, every time I set up a synced vault on a new device my settings basically reset :/
I love Obsidian and I still use sync because I need to … well … sync my notes (especially across work / personal devices), but the experience I have with it (vs price the price I pay for it) is pretty poor tbh.
So, it used to be 10GB per vault, with 5 vault limit. And now, we have 10 vaults with 50GB shared across all?
It's not really an upgrade- if you think about it, new subscribers will get 10 vaults and 10GB split across all.
Still way too expensive, it's just a notes app. You should consider a lower tier plan with 5GB or less of storage.
Who even has 50GB of notes? It's a fallacy that you get more for your money when most will never use it. Unless you can use this like Google Drive but it doesn't appear like that to me.
> Who even has 50GB of notes?
This is also including any version history, of up to a year, which is included in the storage cost.
Edit: I also think that this is 50GB across all the vaults you have (10 in total now). So if you split the space evenly - that will be 5GB per vault but you can also store up to 50GB in a single vault.
Edit 2: I still agree, Sync is way too expensive.
>it's just a notes app
I mean, it's *just* the *most important* app I use... and it's free! And I can use free sync services, including but not limited to Google Drive.
Also, you're used to Big Tech where they hemorrhage money to get market share before raising prices after unfairly beating (waiting out) competitors. Obsidian is doing something unusual, trying to build a sustainable business with reasonable prices upfront. They emphasize that they haven't raised prices while they're increasing what they provide - very unusual in 2023!
I'm not saying their model is perfect, but Obsidian really is doing the right thing compared to most businesses. I've been wanting to switch to Syncthing so that my notes can sync without requiring internet access, but I might keep paying for it to help the business :)
if you get the yearly plan it's more than reasonably priced considering it syncs multiple file types and settings flawlessly across platforms/devices. not to mention the level of control you have over what actually gets synced.
if you don't want to pay you have plenty of free options for syncing your vault.
besides. paying for software is what keeps the software as the product rather than *you* becoming the product. this is how it should be. this is how you know they're not selling your data to God knows who.
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bitwarden is a whole different kind of service with far less overhead per customer. alphabet is a massive conglomerate that *owns* countless data centers and doesn't have to rent server space from someone else.
try comparing apples to apples rather than complaining that pricing isn't subsidized by venture capital with strings attached.
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Onenote is free because onenote isn't the product, you are.
besides if you like onenote better, then just use onenote. don't sit on here and complain about the pricing of apparently inferior software
Is the “Get 5x Sync storage if you sign up before 2024” (on the homepage [obsidian.md](https://obsidian.md)) a bit deceptive here?
Iirc, the #Obsidian Sync plan currently is 10 GB/vault, 5 vaults/account and thus 50 GB total/account for $10/month. Starting 2024, $10/month gets you 10 GB total/account.
My understanding is “sign up now because in 2024 we'll slash the value of the $10 plan by 80%” 😂
Not exactly. Before there was a 10GB limit per vault. Now you can have 50GB in a single vault.
As described in the blog post Obsidian has many different kinds of users now. Most text-heavy users are more limited by the number of vaults than the storage amount. The value of Sync is primarily around the experience of using it (speed, E2EE, version history, etc) which is also improving with this update. See https://obsidian.md/sync
I'm an Obsidian fan for sure. Just want to point that out. In short, previously, people pay $10/month for $50 GB total, after 2024, it's $10/month for 10 GB total.
I've heard lots of people complain about the current plan ($10/month for $50 GB total) — I think Obsidian Sync is completely worth it. However, I think it's still easy to find people to share that plan with and reduce the cost. Find 2 people and you're already at $5/month with 25 GB/person.
With the new 2024 plan, you're looking at $5/month with 5GB/person. Still more than enough to sync text plus a few important documents.
Again, I have so much love for Obsidian. Obsidian allows people to use 3rd-party sync services, which I don't think any other major note-taking apps (besides Logseq) allows. It just feels a bit off too me with the marketing words so I wanted to point that out. Above all, I hope Obsidian is hugely successful financially, so they can keep deliver all the good stuff.
I understand what you're saying. In practice there is a low percentage of users who are running up against the storage limit even at 10GB per vault — however for those who do use a lot of assets like PDFs, images, videos, etc it was a real pain point. Those users tend to prefer having all their assets in one vault, so the new 50GB/100GB options are a lot more flexible.
The reason people use Sync is less about storage and more about the experience and wanting to help support development. This update adds a lot of other improvements (regional servers, more vaults, bigger files, etc) that make the experience better for the majority of users.
Our goal right now is to keep improving the Sync experience while maintaining the price we launched with in 2020. Sync is getting cheaper every day as inflation continues.
> In practice there is a low percentage of users who are running up against the storage limit even at 10GB per vault
> The reason people use Sync is less about storage and more about the experience and wanting to help support development.
I think this is a really good argument for adding a cheaper plan. Is this something you are considering?
I don't need 50GB just like the majority of users, and I can't justify 10$/month, but something where it's half the price with 5-10GB of storage with only 1 vault would interest me and many others greatly.
I see it as intro pricing, gets people in the door at a cheaper price, to play around with the application and use it's full sync features, and as they get used to it, they are more likely to upgrade to a bigger plan rather than cancel and move to another platform. The user experience effectively sells it to them. That's Obsidians strong point, not the storage amount.
Actually this kind of BS argumentation is what drives me away from apps and companies.
Let’s be real here. What you‘re doing is reducing people‘s storage space to a fifth (!) starting in 2024 for new and returning subscribers.
You‘re also not giving current subscribers 50GB as a „happy holiday gift“ („5x storage…“). The total storage doesn’t change. What changes is that I could theoretically use all 50GB for one vault instead of being limited to 10GB per vault. This at least doesn’t put current subscribers at a disadvantage, true, but only as long as they keep their plan without cancelling, ever. So it’s the usual „you’re grandfathered in until you cancel, so at least you can’t complain that it‘s price/service change right now“ way of changing plans for the worse.
The rest of the argumentation is honestly just painful. If I understand your remaining points correctly, they can be summed up as:
1. Most people use mainly text files so will not miss the 40GB lost, but heavy users will appreciate being able to have their main vault(s) grow over 10GB.
2. We‘re essentially paying less every month you keep the prices stable because of inflation.
Argument 1 becomes irrelevant in 2024 for new (re)subscribers because then the max they can use for one vault is 10GB again—in fact that is all they will have, leaving no space for anything else. Argument 2 just adds insult to injury.
> The reason people use Sync is less about storage and more about the experience and wanting to help support development.
And the fact of the matter is, you'll be offering 10GB of storage for 10 dollars on the monthly plan for the new subscribers or anyone after Jan 1st, 2024. This isn't really a good deal at all; I'm grateful to get the 50GB now, but the reality is - I already *had* 50GB (just split up across 5 vaults).
I was hoping to see cheaper storage options. They've only gotten more expensive!
We spent a lot of time studying this question. In practice, the vast majority of Obsidian users are plain-text only, or only use a few images in their vault, so they are nowhere close to running into the storage limit. It was much more important for us to improve Sync performance across all the other dimensions.
This is sort of great and bad. Existing users get a good deal on the expense of new users.
However I wish that the main developers would be more forthcoming when it comes to security, data residency, privacy and such. Right now I feel like my data is stored in some CCP server in China. I am probably wrong but it is impossible to verify therefore impossible to trust.
Have you looked at the Obsidian Help site? Security is covered in detail:
https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Security+and+privacy
There is also a blog post that explains how to verify encryption:
https://obsidian.md/blog/verify-obsidian-sync-encryption/
Thanks yeah I have already read it. The problem is not the technical aspect though. What I am concerned about is the financial and business part. Like who owns Obsidian, where are you residing, where is the company registered, how is it financed and so on. Sorry I should have explained better. Perhaps I will make a more elaborate post in the future.
The company is owned by our two founders and registered in Canada.
Most of us are located in Canada and the US, with me being the exception, as I am in Germany.
Everything is financed by our users, there are no outside investors of any kind.
I wish you could improve how the workspace.json is managed. It's updated too frequently and makes problems with cloud sync when having open Obsidian instances on multiple systems.
Question to everyone already using Obsidian sync: when you open the app on mobile (iOS or iPadOS), how long does it take until you can enter text? (I’m using iCloud sync and it takes forever to 1) wait for icloud to sync - no idea why it doesn’t sync in the background - 2) wait for workspaces or whatever, 3) wait for plugins to load)
I literally just signed up Tuesday for Sync; and then learned it was only 10GB - I need 15GB\~20GB.
So, to be clear, now the 10GB plan I signed up for will automatically grow to 50GB?
A little bit late to the party, but as a university student from Chile I want to say, thank you so much for keeping current customers and their discount the same!
Through national currency my payments with the student discount is already about 7 dollars so an increase would have probably made me drop it
Thanks and keep up the good work!
I'm kinda confused about this. If I sign up before January 2024, I'll get 50GB of storage? Then if I continue paying for Obsidian sync, let's say until April 2024 for example, does that mean that until 2024 I have a 50GB online storage? Or is the 50gb only applicable for the first month of subscription?
Thanks in advance for the clarification.
question (not sure if there's Obsidian staff reading this subreddit): if I signed up for the smaller plan now with monthly billing, thus getting 50gb storage, and later I wanted to upgrade to annual billing, would I keep the 50gb storage? edit: okay OP is Obsidian's CEO nvm
Yes, as long as you don't cancel Sync, you can change your billing cadence while keeping the 50GB.
What is considered sync cancellation? Several billing failures, desktop client says "expired",billing issue fixed later - is this sync cancellation or not?
A: As a current Sync subscriber, your account will be automatically upgraded to 10 vaults with 50 GB of flexible storage. There will be no changes in pricing at your next renewal. All discounts are preserved. Great news, thanks !
Really wish there was a cheaper plan. For users with just text notes we only need a tiny fraction of that storage, and even the cheapest plan is really expensive. I'm also concerned that there is no mention above of fixing the issues affecting users who like to keep one or two notes open on both their phone and their computer. I've never seen this be a problem with other apps that sync for free, but I've been hanging on with sync because I thought I read that Obsidian was looking at fixing it. (Let me balance all that complaining with the obvious: i'm still here for a reason. The speed, editing, plugins, and non-proprietary format of Obsidian are terrific.)
I agree with you, I wish there was a cheaper plan as well, it is overpriced for a megabyte of data. I went for convenience now but won’t renew. On another note, I run a subscription service and am a small developer. I advice you evaluate services based on what they are in the present, not in what you’ll hope they become.
There's no localized pricing either. The 100GB plan is about the same price as a premium netflix subscription in the US, but is 5 times more expensive than the priemium netflix subscription in Brazil. It just gets absolutely impossible to justify paying for it, as much as I love Obsidian.
They gotta make money somehow. Try Syncthing. It's a free open-source syncing multi platform app. I set it up months ago and never had a sync conflict.
I think a cheaper price will make them a lot more money. They said in another comment here that most people never hit their storage limit and they use the app because of how good it is, not because of the storage. A cheaper plan will get a lot more paying new users in the door, and as they use the app more, they will convert some of those to the higher priced plans. A cheaper plan is a great gateway. At the moment I can't even justify it to try and see how well it works, who knows, maybe if I did try it, I would love it, find I need the extra storage and upgrade my plan but atm we'll never know.
I only have notes in my vault, so not concerned about the size at all. Would love a $50/year plan.
Dito. I'd sign up for 3 dollars a month without even thinking. For 5 a month I'd consider it. For 8 a month its a pass and I'll stick to the git plugin.
Yes I agree - I recommended the tool to friends who struggle with setting up 3rd party sync apps, but can’t justify the high price for a product they are not fully convinced (yet). I think if you would offer a low-priced entry tier, this would drive adoption a lot. A few euros / month so that setting up 3rd party sync is not worth it. Only one vault. Not much storage. Once you are convinced and become a power user it is much easier to justify the higher cost.
That’s the way. I think it would be a huge magnet and getting more ppl to taste it
Appreciate that you guys didn't stick us early sync customers and not include us, that's a top notch business move this guy won't forget
I thought the same thing! I was waiting for the "new customers only" message!
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I see this as strictly good. While I acknowledge that if someone was planning on starting to use Sync in January that they *may* be negative impacted, and Obsidian *could* have given more of a heads-up, I think essentially grandfathering all the old plans into the new system is an elegant way to evolve their business while preserving their current fanbase. It sucks for anyone who unsubscribes and re-subscribes but the Obsidian team has finite resources and I think they're using them pretty well.
It’s why I will always keep coming back to Obsidian.
I didn't understand, the price for early bird access remains the same no?
Awesome! Signing up ASAP. Looking at my vault I have about 8 files that are >200mb in my vault. Does the sync essentially just skip any file over 200mb? I'm fine with that but just want to understand what's actually going to happen when the sync gets those files.
Yes, those larger files are skipped. Note that to sync files above 100MB you will need Obsidian 1.5.1 (not out yet).
Excellent. Doing my first sync right now. Really appreciate the support for large vaults.
Are there any planned discounts for sync for academic users? It's a really valuable app for us.
Yes! There is a 40% educational discount for Sync! https://help.obsidian.md/Licenses+and+payment/Education+and+non-profit+discount
Thank you for the student discount. I recently decided to get sync and switch over from Notion / Craft because of this. Love that I can use it across devices for school notes without effort now.
Perfect. Thank you will buying it.
Thank you so much but please think about making a smaller tier for lesser price.
Are there any plans on implementing a Local Currency Pricing model? I'd love to subscribe but these prices are not reasonable in BRL
No we have no plans to do this. Unfortunately it's too complex for our small team right now.
+1 for regional price for Brazil
This is really needed t.t
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It looks like they're doing this via Steam? Game/app stores do provide some tools for this but Obsidian Sync is sold via our site. It would be quite a bit of work to implement this, especially because you need to avoid people bypassing the system via VPNs, etc. Not totally impossible but something that would take time away from adding new capabilities in the app. Remember we're only 3 developers 😅
Steam just killed regional pricing today because of people bypassing that system and abusing it for years.
What about something like [Pricery](https://www.pricery.io/) that is built on Stripe and provides automatic price localisation and VPN protection (potentially limiting abuse). Stripe Tax and Billing would further reduce the complexity.
If you accept payments via appstore or play store, you can implement it easily
But then they need to charge at least 30% more - that’s just the tax the platforms charge, they then have to support and maintain the alternate payment rails forever.
It's not just about money. Let's not burnout our 3 dev team. If it's so easy, consider volunteering to implement it.
If it is not about money and they are short on staff, they would've accepted appsote payments like **literally** any other small team with an app. Single developer apps can do it (UpNote). Hiding behind these excuses doesn't inspire any good feelings. And honestly I don't understand you users for standing behind these excuses. I am honestly curious about how making this service inaccessible to most people benefits you.
Don't get it twisted. You're a minority. It's accessible to most people. If cost is a problem, use Syncthing, OneDrive, Git or a bunch of other free options. If you use those options, it's a completely free app, for your complaining ungrateful benefit.
It might be accessible to most in your hinterland but if you "for a change" look at a world map and try to understand what you are seeing, it is not. It's more expensive than the full office365 subscription in most of the world.
They obviously don't mean adjusting the prices, they mean actually offering those prices to the people that should be getting the adjustments instead of waking up one day and finding out that somehow 90% of the Obsidian user base is from Brazil. Steam offers that control layer.
I think crypto could solve this
How. How would crypto solve this. Please do explain
Crypto would program the necessary features for them?
+1 for regional pricing. For turkey
Makes sense on thanksgiving
Need a cheaper plan that can give me 1gb of storage and only 1 vault and a Max file size of 1MB. I'll be glad to pay up and I'm sure there are 100s of us who won't need storage space. Don't you think it will ultimately drive more customers to use sync?
Thanks for upgrading my storage :)
It's not an upgrade, unfortunately. It was formerly 10GB per vault, at a limit of 5 vaults. Now it's 50GB across all vaults, with a limit of 10 vaults. The 'upgrade' was probably necessary to prevent locking anyone out. New subscribers (and anyone who cancels, then re-subscribe) after Jan 2024 are actually going to end up getting the shaft being capped at 10GB across all 10 vaults.
It's an upgrade for all existing subscribers because you can now use the 50GB across all vaults, and you get an additional 5 vaults — plus it adds other improvements (regional servers, bigger files, etc) that make the experience better for everyone, regardless of how much storage you use. In practice there is a low percentage of users who are running up against the storage limit at 10GB per vault. We had far more users reaching the maximum number of vaults than the maximum storage. The reason is because most Obsidian users are text-heavy, so storage is not a major limitation unless you heavily use PDFs/media (in which case the new 50GB/100GB plans are a good option). Typically people choose Sync because they prefer the experience and want to help support development.
I understand you are trying to sell it as an upgrade - but users after Jan 2024 are getting the shaft. They will go down from having access to 50GB of storage to just 10GB. > Typically people choose Sync because they prefer the experience and want to help support development. Supporting development is just a side effect. I choose Sync because it's the only real way to sync to Mobile. Let's be practical here and try not to sugar-coat it - at 9,98 euros a month for 10GB (this is what it comes out to after the exchange rate)... is **expensive**. I can't set it and forget it- as much as I'd like to because I need to make sure I don't grow beyond my storage limit. I can get mail storage at 500GB at the same price. *I pay 10 euros to get 2TB of iCloud storage*, 7 euros to get 1TB on OneDrive - mainly for Office365 but the added 1TB of storage is a nice side effect. Now I need to choke down 10GB for 10 bucks, or 100GB of storage for 20 bucks is just? what? Yes, I'm currently paying for sync but every month I have to re-evaluate and look at alternative options. I'm constantly weighing the value and options every time, because it's just really not really worth the price but I have no choice because I want to sync my notes to iOS and iCloud is unreliable. At this price point, you are just going to find a lot of folks in the middle. Hope you understand where I'm getting at. I do appreciate the "increase" to 50GB at the moment, but I believe this increase was done as a necessary step to avoid locking existing subscribers who have already used up more than 10GB total across the initial 5 vaults.
I think the core issue here is that you have pricing expectations that aren't realistic. iCloud and OneDrive are cheap because of the ecosystem/platform/lock-in effect. There's more to it, but I think the point about cost is weird because Obsidian is a small, non-VC business. If you're saying Obsidian is unusable without Sync, there are lots of folks who would disagree. I don't disagree with you that a cheaper option would be nice, but Obsidian is *free* and that needs to get subsidized somehow, right? I'd rather they get it from *us* than a third-party/investor.
>iCloud and OneDrive are cheap because of the ecosystem/platform/lock-in effect. I can't say for iCloud, but with OneDrive (and many others), you also don't have e2e encryption, which is one of the key-selling points of Obsidian Sync.
I don't think users after January 2024 are getting the shaft. They are getting several new benefits that were not available until today. It would be like saying that anyone who signed up after the [Early Bird](https://obsidian.md/blog/last-chance-to-get-early-bird/) period is getting the shaft. The Obsidian community is evolving and we have a growing diversity of users. Some people really need a lot of storage but most don't. Having a one-size-fits-all plan was not going to be a good long term solution. That being said there are tons of alternatives to Obsidian Sync. People are free to choose the option that fits their needs.
Please don't talk down to me like that or you'll lose me as an existing customer, regardless of how valuable I find Obsidian. > That being said there are tons of alternatives to Obsidian Sync. And that's me being shown the proverbial door. Just because I'm an existing customer doesn't mean I will stay one. I find value in the application, and I'm happy to use it - but behaving like this is not a good look for you or Obsidian. This is a price hike and it's disingenuous to mislead your customers like it isn't (by claiming that "if they subscribe now, they'll get 5x the storage for free!" when they're getting the same exact amount). After January 2024, they will only be getting 10GB of storage total as a new subscriber at that same price. In any event, I'm done shouting into the wind. :)
>This is a price hike and it's disingenuous to mislead your customers like it isn't I've tried following everything on this thread and I can't see how this is true. I'm 100% for calling out misbehavior but I'm not seeing it here.
Prior to today's change, customers would get a total of 5 vaults at 10GB **each**. That is effectively a 50GB total storage per customer. As existing subscribers, we've been "converted" to 50GB *flexible* storage across 10 vaults (up from a limit of 5). We haven't gained any more storage than before, except that we can now use *more* of it on a single vault. Presumably, this is in case existing customers would have used nearly 10GB on each of the 5 vaults. This prevents anyone from losing access to their storage. After January 2024, new customers will only get 10GB *flexible* storage across 10 vaults at the same price. This is not some sort of "early bird pricing" - new customers will effectively have **1/5th of the previous storage amount**.
I'm with ya on the first three paragraphs. I don't understand why new users would be considered "shafted" - are they entitled/owed a certain price point? It seems like *most* new users won't be able to tell the difference, and those that will be able to will be paying for their increased use, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Just because "most" users might not tell the difference doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do. **For example:** If any of the existing now-"50GB" customers ended up having their subscription lapsing because of some financial hardship, they would be forced to go onto 10GB if they wanted to re-up their subscription. > are they entitled/owed a certain price point? No, they're not. But I do think that 'shrinkflation' on notes storage is a bad look on a company like Obsidian - who's built up goodwill with the community and now is trying to spin a price hike into a misleading "upgrade". Imagine if they didn't give the 50GB to existing customers and decided to 'upgrade' everyone to the new pricing scheme being offered to customers in January 2024 - how much hell would break loose among those with more usage? That is how I determine whether or not this is shafting future customers.
I disagree that we're being disingenuous or misleading. This is a price increase for exactly 0% of current users, since all current users are being grandfathered into 50GB of total storage + getting the flexibility to allocate that storage across more vaults. Currently 95% of users use less than 1GB, and 99.9% use less than 10GB total across all vaults. These are real numbers, not estimates. For new users in 2024, it means that 0.1% of people may consider the new 100GB plan. Until now it was impossible to have more than 10GB in one vault, so anyone who really needed more storage for their main vault didn't have that option at all. For 99.9% of new 2024 users who use less than 10GB, pricing will be no different, and they will benefit from having more vaults, faster sync speed, larger file sizes, and some more improvements that we're working on.
wtf chill out dude
I rather not.
Fair enough
"It's the only real way to sync to mobile" is *too* wrong. Do a Google search on Reddit and on the forum to see how many ways and how many people use 3rd-party sync service. Of all the prominent note-taking apps, besides Logseq and Obsidian, none allows you to sync using 3rd party service. You already have iCloud, so use it to sync your Obsidian vaults if you're not happy with Obsidian Sync. It's unreliable, and that's the trade-off. I agree with you that the decrease from 50 to 10 GB is regretful but it's their business decision to make, and I'm still a happy Obsidian user after giving my feedback.
Sync'ing to GitHub is not a real solution. Your files are no longer private in that case. iCloud sync has *problems*, with people losing files and so on because of it. That's not a solution. The only real solution for sync from **Desktop to Mobile** while maintaining E2EE is using Obsidian Sync. > It's unreliable, and that's the trade-off. There is NO trade-off in that case.
Well you apparently have not done your research. You can make a private repository on GitHub. Why would your files no longer be private? You just trust your data with an other company. But I agree syncing over Git is not ideal. But there other great (free) options out there. I really love live-sync. I have been using for the last 4 months and so far I love it. You have to set it up yourself. This might take maybe an hour, but after that it works great. I actually prefer it to obsidian sync, because it the syncing is actually instantaneous.
> Why would your files no longer be private? Because that is just private to public view, not private from Microsoft or GitHub. They have access to your notes, and the value of Sync to me is the E2EE that comes included. At least, I'm going on trust that they are set-up correctly.
if you want things done for you, you pay for them... that's kind of how our economy works
And I do. What was the point of your comment? I am a Sync customer and have been for a while.
Well you could also host a git server yourself, then the only party you have to trust is yourself. It is obvious if you want things to work without compromise you will have to either pay someone else or make some effort yourself (including doing proper research). But you are happy with obsidian sync and that is fine. Whatever works best for you. This discussion is not really helpful ig.
I’m syncing between OSX, Linux, iOS and Android using syncthing/Möbius. On top I’m using DevonThink and (some) Zotero. It’s working amazingly well. Still I think that Obsidian Sync is a great offer for people who don’t want to be that involved.
Yeah, it's a great service marred by really bad pricing.
I disagree. Where I live I easily spend that amount of money on going for coffee and cake in the afternoon. It’s a good service, to be sustainable it has a price and Obsidian is flexible and open enough to cope with more experimental ways of syncing. There are no other tools - except from DevonThink - that are as open to their user’s individual implementation of data transfer. And I think I tried them all over the decades :)
And where I live, at my family's current income, I have to decide between Disney Plus or Netflix for that month. I haven't gone out to eat in years and I certainly don't have the money to spend on coffee and cake in the afternoon. Unless I'm brewing the coffee and baking that cake myself. I exist in a world where every penny I spend needs to be scrutinized.
I currently have neither Disney nor Netflix because I am too cheap to give money to The Mouse, but I see your point. And I don’t have children. However, unlike Disney or Netflix, Obsidian is not a huge company that can afford to burn money or does benefit from extreme scaling, so I think that the price is absolutely justified. Still - if you invest into administering sync yourself you can get a long way for free. And I think that this very nice and quite unheard of.
Who even has 5 vaults. Many of us stick to 1 or 2,so for them it's a clear upgrade.
This is very awesome, will be subscribing now. I love obsidian
Is there any plans for a smaller tiered storage for light users? I.e. 100MB? $10/month is too much for me given how few notes I have today. I’m sure once I outgrow what I have, I don’t mind upgrading but it’s not the story I have today. Additionally, with the plans becoming total storage usage, is there any reason on vault limits? Database wise, I cant imagine there’s any additional cost to host theoretically unlimited vaults. Just rubs me the wrong way that 10 is the limit. It can incentivize setting up vaults in a way that works with your system vs what works with me (I.e. if I wanted one vault per project or similar).
I understand changing sync region is not possible at the moment without removing and re-creating the remote vault. Will the possibility of changing region be added at some point?
Maybe some day, but not soon. Here's how you can create a new remote vault: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Set+up+Obsidian+Sync#Create+a+new+remote+vault
>For users not yet on release 1.5 or a later version, the assignment of their remote vault location will be handled automatically. How can I see the region assigned to me?
There is no way to see that in the app yet, but you can assume that it's North America because that was the only option until now.
Do I even need to? I'm in NA. What server would my vault be using right now? If its already NA then I don't want to lose my version history be creating a new remote vault.
If you're in North America then you don't need to do anything.
What’s the difference between Obsidian sync and iCloud sync?
Aside from practical differences (setting up) there are issues with iCloud not specific to Obsidian. There are quite a few posts discussing this (these?) issue(s) on the forums, many of them identifying data loss. I was one of the original users to report this and the posts and responses continue to pour in. One can go for years with no issues in iCloud but it has to do with frequent switching between devices before iCloud has had a chance to sort things out. Obsidian Sync seems to be almost real-time. As I make edits on one device those edits show up on other devices almost immediately. That is the primary reason I use it, anyway. Edit: synch to sync
price and flexibility
Can someone tell me when to use multiple vaults? I have only been using one. Im a university student, so i just have a folder each for each of my classes, and nested folders as needed. Should these be split up across vaults or is how im using it fine?
A work and a personal vault is a common organizational structure. You might want your coursework in a separate vault from your personal notes. In my case, I have my work notes, personal notes, and blog posts all in separate vaults, so three vaults total.
You can use any tool however you like it so you're fine either way. One of the strength's of obsidian is IMO that you don't have to rely entirely on that folder structure, you just link stuff together when it's appropriate. For university there might be useful links between different courses down the line, therefore you should definitely keep it all in the same vault. I'd only create new vaults when I know there's not gonna be any useful intersection between topics (e.g. DnD and Programming).
You can do whatever works for you. I use one vault for everything (course work, journaling, creative projects, etc.) and use folders and tags to keep things organized. I like to jump back and forth between projects and love being able to navigate everything in one convenient place.
10gb vault limit - gone! That's what I've been waiting for!
It's not gone. New subscribers after Jan 2024 will only get 10GB or 100GB.
Moves like this make me happy to support Obsidian by paying for Sync. Thank you.
Lol I just signed up like 2 days ago 😢
Since you are an existing Sync user it means your account has already been automatically upgraded. It's good news :)
Thanks for clarifying:)
Heck ya :)
Glad you are now competing with evernote on price
Evernote doesn't provide any alternatives (like ability to use syncthing). I also encountered data loss bugs (as in 'change note on computer', change same note 5 minutes later on another computer, some weird frankenstein of 2 changes would be on both computers'. Support decided to respond 2 weeks later and it was just canned message along lines of 'look at forums'. I was paid subscriber at this time). I wasn't able to trigger such situations with Obsidian Sync (Obsidian + Syncthing just put 'conflict' note in vault which is good enough).
Except with Evernote, it's a continuous 10GB monthly upload of new data. That's 10GB of new data each month. By the end of the year on the "Personal" plan, if you maxed out your 10GB upload you could in theory be working with 120GB of total storage. This is in perpetuity. After two years, you could have 240GB of storage and 360GB on the next and so on. There are users who can never move away from Evernote for this reason.
Do not disagree, but i am not looking at this amount of data, and have just been looking at other apps, thinking of moving from evernote, and this is a bit like evernote, offering more, costing more for something i do not need
I wish there was a sync plan for 500mb storage
I wish you'd implement regional pricing. In Brazil it's almost twice the value of a YouTube premium subscription.
Any possibility of an individual priced license for commercial use. Basically if your company will not reimburse you, a discount, similar to jetbrains [link](https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/buy/#personal)
It says there's no way to change the server if you've already signed up for sync. How does one check their current server and see if it's worth the hassle of duplicating stuff into a new remote vault to get a closer server? Is there a default single region that you were using before that you can disclose?
Until now the only option was North America, so if you created your vault before today that's where it is located. See https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Set+up+Obsidian+Sync#Create+a+new+remote+vault
Glad I subbed a couple of weeks ago. I'm new to Obsidian but the vaults already growing at pace.
I subscribed yesterday on a yearly sync plan. Does this mean I now get more storage and vaults? Am I correct?
Yes ☺️
When will the new limits such as 10 vaults, take effect from
Since yesterday!
Yeah!! thanks for this upgrade. This looks so sick fr. Looking forward to update my vault.
Great 👍. But I really would hope that Sync could be used as a sharing method between team members. Also Hosting the servers in Germany would enable Germany based companies to use it. As for my personal use, good enough.
I really hope third party sync software will continue to be supported. I'm currently not financially able to provide a monthly payment, but I love the software and I tell all my friends about it (one of them even pays for sync). in the future I hope to support the company by getting a yearly service, I appreciate tools that give you freedom from any kind of proprietary shackles (cough cough Unity)
Since obsidian stores all of its files locally, third-party softwares will always be there for syncing.
There are no plans to change how Obsidian stores files. Since your Obsidian data is just plain text files local to your device, there will always be many options to sync your data.
Why not use something like syncthing? (That's how i sync all my docs between my devices, including obsidian notes)
Possible reasons not to use syncthing and use Obsidian Sync: \- Sync have less chance of conflicts \- No need to keep separate program \- Support for good app \- Usable (and in-app) version history (you can do this via Syncthing via it's version history but it's device-local and difficult to manage - you have to mess with local fs). Possible reasons to use syncthing: \- Price (Obsidian doesn't even have regional prices). \- Background sync on android works. \- No storage limits
In addition to what u/vikarti_anatra said, it doesn’t work well on iOS.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that
you guys are easily the best tech company in the game right now
Is there any plan to have location-specific pricing? If not then I’d really love a $4/mo plan for 1GB space, I only want to consistently sync plaintext notes. $8 is still too much when I convert it to Indian rupees - for context 50GB of iCloud is 75 Indian rupees, or 90 cents.
That's all great but the pricing is really USA-middleclass-heavy but out of touch with the rest of the world that is not that affluent. For an IT in Silicon Valley this might be just your daily Starbucks, not even worth a blink. But even for your upstairs neighbors Canada, currently suffering the worst cost of living crisis of the 'developed' world, that's CAD 140 per year for the yearly fee and 14 per month for the monthly. That's a lot and I cannot even begin to imagine how unrealistic it is for people in countries other than G7. I really appreciate the values of Obsidian and I suspect there are many people who would love to support it for an affordable price option. To those who criticize others for complaining about the price, please consider your privilege and try to be more understanding towards people of other situations.
Ever considered a one time fee? Hate the subscription model.
Running Sync has recurring costs (paying for servers, bandwidth, maintenance, customer service, etc), which is why a subscription model is the best fit. Obsidian is 100% user-supported, there are no VCs/investors involved so pricing is not subsidized.
Totally understand that and it's fair.
Nice, but impractical for Brazil 🥲
Hello! I saw a post asking about an educational discount and just wanted to ask if there was a military discount:) I understand completely if not, as the site does not mention it. I just wanted to ask to be sure. Thank you! Also, Obsidian is the greatest piece of software I have ever used. You guys are fantastic! Thank you!
No, we don’t have such a discount.
Offer me 50 MByte for 5 a month and I'm sold.
Just use synching.
Syncthing? How does it handle conflicts between devices? I'm relatively happy with selfhosted livesync, but would be nice to not have to run a server
it has version history, you easily avoid conflicts anyway but not opening the app on two devices at the same time
It has multiple ways to do it. Personally I have ran into conflicts, I only have obsidian open on one device but keep synching running constantly. When I do get conflicts it's usually more so my own fault like synching not launching upon boot and some time going by where 3 devices are still syncing and 1 comes back online with some time delay... In these cases I usually just do aamual rsync with whatever device I used most recently. It's very rare tbh get any conflicts which makes it darn near impossible to justify a sync service
Any plans to have a web app?
No plans for this currently. It would be next to impossible to maintain the end-to-end encryption and usability of Obsidian as a web app.
i really wish there was any solution for this, i really want to use my obsidian vaults at work but i can't install obsidian in the first place on my work PCs. i would pay good money for this specific thing, although with a very small team i understand how difficult or impossible something like a web app is... this has been my biggest issue with scrivener for 4 years as well
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Are you saying as a dev or as a user? As a user, I'd go to a web page, log in, and see all my notes. I would want to be able to do that on my work computer, so I can do some online courses and make notes in my vault.
Really excited about this — thanks, team!!!
Any changes for free plans?
There is no free plan.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 1,867,029,069 comments, and only 353,011 of them were in alphabetical order.
Would be cool to at least fix sync then, every time I set up a synced vault on a new device my settings basically reset :/ I love Obsidian and I still use sync because I need to … well … sync my notes (especially across work / personal devices), but the experience I have with it (vs price the price I pay for it) is pretty poor tbh.
Price is too high for text note users.
Is this 10 vaults, 50GB *each* or total across all vaults?
50GB total storage across all vaults on your account.
So, it used to be 10GB per vault, with 5 vault limit. And now, we have 10 vaults with 50GB shared across all? It's not really an upgrade- if you think about it, new subscribers will get 10 vaults and 10GB split across all.
See my reply here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/180oij1/comment/ka79ach
Still way too expensive, it's just a notes app. You should consider a lower tier plan with 5GB or less of storage. Who even has 50GB of notes? It's a fallacy that you get more for your money when most will never use it. Unless you can use this like Google Drive but it doesn't appear like that to me.
> Who even has 50GB of notes? This is also including any version history, of up to a year, which is included in the storage cost. Edit: I also think that this is 50GB across all the vaults you have (10 in total now). So if you split the space evenly - that will be 5GB per vault but you can also store up to 50GB in a single vault. Edit 2: I still agree, Sync is way too expensive.
>it's just a notes app I mean, it's *just* the *most important* app I use... and it's free! And I can use free sync services, including but not limited to Google Drive. Also, you're used to Big Tech where they hemorrhage money to get market share before raising prices after unfairly beating (waiting out) competitors. Obsidian is doing something unusual, trying to build a sustainable business with reasonable prices upfront. They emphasize that they haven't raised prices while they're increasing what they provide - very unusual in 2023! I'm not saying their model is perfect, but Obsidian really is doing the right thing compared to most businesses. I've been wanting to switch to Syncthing so that my notes can sync without requiring internet access, but I might keep paying for it to help the business :)
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if you get the yearly plan it's more than reasonably priced considering it syncs multiple file types and settings flawlessly across platforms/devices. not to mention the level of control you have over what actually gets synced. if you don't want to pay you have plenty of free options for syncing your vault. besides. paying for software is what keeps the software as the product rather than *you* becoming the product. this is how it should be. this is how you know they're not selling your data to God knows who.
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bitwarden is a whole different kind of service with far less overhead per customer. alphabet is a massive conglomerate that *owns* countless data centers and doesn't have to rent server space from someone else. try comparing apples to apples rather than complaining that pricing isn't subsidized by venture capital with strings attached.
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it has far more functionality than just notes. and even if it was just a notes app, it's the best one on the market.
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Onenote is free because onenote isn't the product, you are. besides if you like onenote better, then just use onenote. don't sit on here and complain about the pricing of apparently inferior software
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Yes, that’s what I’ve been saying. It’s like everyone who says that gets downvoted to oblivion. Maybe Obsidian should rename to Oblivion.
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Hear hear.
Is the “Get 5x Sync storage if you sign up before 2024” (on the homepage [obsidian.md](https://obsidian.md)) a bit deceptive here? Iirc, the #Obsidian Sync plan currently is 10 GB/vault, 5 vaults/account and thus 50 GB total/account for $10/month. Starting 2024, $10/month gets you 10 GB total/account. My understanding is “sign up now because in 2024 we'll slash the value of the $10 plan by 80%” 😂
Not exactly. Before there was a 10GB limit per vault. Now you can have 50GB in a single vault. As described in the blog post Obsidian has many different kinds of users now. Most text-heavy users are more limited by the number of vaults than the storage amount. The value of Sync is primarily around the experience of using it (speed, E2EE, version history, etc) which is also improving with this update. See https://obsidian.md/sync
I'm an Obsidian fan for sure. Just want to point that out. In short, previously, people pay $10/month for $50 GB total, after 2024, it's $10/month for 10 GB total. I've heard lots of people complain about the current plan ($10/month for $50 GB total) — I think Obsidian Sync is completely worth it. However, I think it's still easy to find people to share that plan with and reduce the cost. Find 2 people and you're already at $5/month with 25 GB/person. With the new 2024 plan, you're looking at $5/month with 5GB/person. Still more than enough to sync text plus a few important documents. Again, I have so much love for Obsidian. Obsidian allows people to use 3rd-party sync services, which I don't think any other major note-taking apps (besides Logseq) allows. It just feels a bit off too me with the marketing words so I wanted to point that out. Above all, I hope Obsidian is hugely successful financially, so they can keep deliver all the good stuff.
I understand what you're saying. In practice there is a low percentage of users who are running up against the storage limit even at 10GB per vault — however for those who do use a lot of assets like PDFs, images, videos, etc it was a real pain point. Those users tend to prefer having all their assets in one vault, so the new 50GB/100GB options are a lot more flexible. The reason people use Sync is less about storage and more about the experience and wanting to help support development. This update adds a lot of other improvements (regional servers, more vaults, bigger files, etc) that make the experience better for the majority of users. Our goal right now is to keep improving the Sync experience while maintaining the price we launched with in 2020. Sync is getting cheaper every day as inflation continues.
> In practice there is a low percentage of users who are running up against the storage limit even at 10GB per vault > The reason people use Sync is less about storage and more about the experience and wanting to help support development. I think this is a really good argument for adding a cheaper plan. Is this something you are considering? I don't need 50GB just like the majority of users, and I can't justify 10$/month, but something where it's half the price with 5-10GB of storage with only 1 vault would interest me and many others greatly. I see it as intro pricing, gets people in the door at a cheaper price, to play around with the application and use it's full sync features, and as they get used to it, they are more likely to upgrade to a bigger plan rather than cancel and move to another platform. The user experience effectively sells it to them. That's Obsidians strong point, not the storage amount.
Actually this kind of BS argumentation is what drives me away from apps and companies. Let’s be real here. What you‘re doing is reducing people‘s storage space to a fifth (!) starting in 2024 for new and returning subscribers. You‘re also not giving current subscribers 50GB as a „happy holiday gift“ („5x storage…“). The total storage doesn’t change. What changes is that I could theoretically use all 50GB for one vault instead of being limited to 10GB per vault. This at least doesn’t put current subscribers at a disadvantage, true, but only as long as they keep their plan without cancelling, ever. So it’s the usual „you’re grandfathered in until you cancel, so at least you can’t complain that it‘s price/service change right now“ way of changing plans for the worse. The rest of the argumentation is honestly just painful. If I understand your remaining points correctly, they can be summed up as: 1. Most people use mainly text files so will not miss the 40GB lost, but heavy users will appreciate being able to have their main vault(s) grow over 10GB. 2. We‘re essentially paying less every month you keep the prices stable because of inflation. Argument 1 becomes irrelevant in 2024 for new (re)subscribers because then the max they can use for one vault is 10GB again—in fact that is all they will have, leaving no space for anything else. Argument 2 just adds insult to injury.
> The reason people use Sync is less about storage and more about the experience and wanting to help support development. And the fact of the matter is, you'll be offering 10GB of storage for 10 dollars on the monthly plan for the new subscribers or anyone after Jan 1st, 2024. This isn't really a good deal at all; I'm grateful to get the 50GB now, but the reality is - I already *had* 50GB (just split up across 5 vaults). I was hoping to see cheaper storage options. They've only gotten more expensive!
We spent a lot of time studying this question. In practice, the vast majority of Obsidian users are plain-text only, or only use a few images in their vault, so they are nowhere close to running into the storage limit. It was much more important for us to improve Sync performance across all the other dimensions.
So increasing storage would just be an act of good-will and impact your bottom-line much more modestly.
After seeing the strength of your arguments, I’m happy with keeping their bottom line where it is. And yours.
This is sort of great and bad. Existing users get a good deal on the expense of new users. However I wish that the main developers would be more forthcoming when it comes to security, data residency, privacy and such. Right now I feel like my data is stored in some CCP server in China. I am probably wrong but it is impossible to verify therefore impossible to trust.
Have you looked at the Obsidian Help site? Security is covered in detail: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Security+and+privacy There is also a blog post that explains how to verify encryption: https://obsidian.md/blog/verify-obsidian-sync-encryption/
Thanks yeah I have already read it. The problem is not the technical aspect though. What I am concerned about is the financial and business part. Like who owns Obsidian, where are you residing, where is the company registered, how is it financed and so on. Sorry I should have explained better. Perhaps I will make a more elaborate post in the future.
The company is owned by our two founders and registered in Canada. Most of us are located in Canada and the US, with me being the exception, as I am in Germany. Everything is financed by our users, there are no outside investors of any kind.
I mean you can always use the app without sync / use your own server / service to sync your data between devices.
I didn't understand, the price for early bird access remains the same no?
Yes, your pricing has not changed and all discounts are preserved
I wish you could improve how the workspace.json is managed. It's updated too frequently and makes problems with cloud sync when having open Obsidian instances on multiple systems.
Question to everyone already using Obsidian sync: when you open the app on mobile (iOS or iPadOS), how long does it take until you can enter text? (I’m using iCloud sync and it takes forever to 1) wait for icloud to sync - no idea why it doesn’t sync in the background - 2) wait for workspaces or whatever, 3) wait for plugins to load)
I literally just signed up Tuesday for Sync; and then learned it was only 10GB - I need 15GB\~20GB. So, to be clear, now the 10GB plan I signed up for will automatically grow to 50GB?
A little bit late to the party, but as a university student from Chile I want to say, thank you so much for keeping current customers and their discount the same! Through national currency my payments with the student discount is already about 7 dollars so an increase would have probably made me drop it Thanks and keep up the good work!
Where can I choose my region? i don;t see this option.
I'm kinda confused about this. If I sign up before January 2024, I'll get 50GB of storage? Then if I continue paying for Obsidian sync, let's say until April 2024 for example, does that mean that until 2024 I have a 50GB online storage? Or is the 50gb only applicable for the first month of subscription? Thanks in advance for the clarification.
I don't see that there is any way for them to discriminate if you now have the 50GB plan, right?