A couple of thoughts and comments on Obsidian pricing:

1. The reason for publishing the pricing model is precisely so that people don't waste time on something they won't use once it goes live. I personally wish many more apps were as open and transparent about their planned business model early on. They are not charging for what you see now, but telling you what they plan to charge for the final product.

2. For a large number of use cases this app will basically be free. One shouldn't be surprised at a business model like this from the developers of Dynalist which also has a very generous free tier, and then jumps quickly to a very expensive pro tier. I have debated this with them in the past, arguing for a middle tier, but I don't think anyone knows what the right answer is to make a living selling software these days and they seem to be doing better than most.

3. I personally also would like to use the publishing tool but can't afford it at the current rates. Am talking with them about ways to make this particular feature less expensive. There is already discussion of a branded version that would be cheaper if you don't mind it telling the world that the site was built using Obsidian in small type somewhere.

4. Because the app uses plain text Markdown files it is also possible that one could publish using other tools without relying on Obsidian's paid service. (The same way one will be able to sync with Dropbox without paying for Obsidian's sync service.) There is already discussion on the forums about possible ways to do this, and the developers are perfectly happy to make changes that will make such solutions easier.

5. As with Dynalist, there might be a lifetime discount for early adopters. And there is discussion about possible academic discounts as well.


Paul Korm wrote:

The pricing is insane. Simply arrogant. They have barely provided
much more than a toy model so far. "Publish" is essential for me for these
apps, but $240 annual is beyond realistic.

Jonas Hvid wrote:

I've actually been working on my own knowledge manager, directly
inspired by
Roam. It's called Thinktool, and there's a version publicly available at
https://thinktool.io if anyone's interested.

...

(By the way, I've been lurking this forum for a while, but this is my
first post
here. I hope it's not considered too rude that my first post is about my
own product!)

Jonas, I can only speak for me. I'd prefer you to open up a new topic in which you present Thinktool and answer questions regarding your tool.

I’d agree with Frank, Jonas - obviously your post is relevant to Obsidian and this thread, but do create a separate thread about Thinktool, too.

Cheers!
Bill

Thanks for the advice, Frnaz and Bill. Yeah, I agree, I should make a new topic
for it. Actually, I'm currently working on implementing a small interactive
guide, so I'll probably wait until that's done, since it'll be easier to give
useful feedback then :)

Paul Korm wrote:

(My post was about Obsidian, not Roam.)

$16/month x 12 months = $192/yr, not $240

and that is only for the most expensive tier. I doubt most people need/want them to host, plus have team collaboration, plus use them for publishing. Premium ($96/yr) would be what the vast majority of people would choose.

But if it's something you're interested in they've just cut prices by 50% for lifetime early bird pricing, same thing they did with Dynalist. So if you sign up now Premium is locked in at $48/yr, and Publish is $96/yr

https://obsidian.md/pricing.html

So an app I'd never heard of called amplenote has added bidirectional links and a Roam importer:

https://www.amplenote.com/blog/bidirectional_note_linking_and_an_offer_for_roam_exporters

Giving it a try...

OK. So amplenote does have backlinks, but they are hidden away in the "note details" window which is hard to get to. Maybe they will improve this later, but right now it really feels like a cheap hack to get new users, not something that a lot of thought went into.

On the other hand, amplenote does seem pretty nice otherwise. Unlike many of the other apps implementing Roam-like features (or Roam for that matter), the task management aspect does seem to be very well implemented. Amplenote looks like Rich Text, but it does export to Markdown (with front matter for metadata).