It’s 6:08 AM right now. Woke up at 3 and couldn’t go back to sleep. That’s really annoying because I am going to be going to school in 2 hours running off of 5 hours of sleep, hope, and a dream[^1]. Words cannot describe just how tired I am. Anyway, moving on. Hopefully the bright light will wake me up more.
Why I love Obsidian SO MUCH
Granted, I’ve only been using Obsidian for less than 24 hours now. It was during 4th period STEM Chemistry. Circa 18 hours ago, then. So take it with a grain of salt–I am definitely not a pro user yet.
One of the annoying things that so much software has been doing as of late is that they’ve been moving to this SaaS[^2] model where every piece of software you use isn’t an actual application on your computer–Which would give you the power over its data, instead choosing a SaaS model where the application you run on your own computer is completely reliant on a server hosted by the company who made the software–Such as Adobe[^3], meaning that if they go down, so do you.
In addition, the SaaS model effectively requires a subscription payment plan as well, because of the fact that servers (and maintaining them) cost money. You can’t just pay upfront for software anymore because your app relies on some company’s servers, to harvest host your data[^4]. It’s also kind of insulting to people like myself who have powerful computers to run software on to be using the cloud for everything!
I’m not against paid software–Developers need money to continue working on the app, and sometimes, it’s a good software that I am more than happy to pay for, to use forever. Take iStat Menus for my MacBook Air. It’s a great piece of software, and I find enough value in it to pay $12[^5] for the software, and keep it for life. That makes software operate like buying something at the store–You pay for it, and you can keep it, for as long as you want. That’s totally fine.
What’s NOT fine is turning LITERALLY EVERYTHING TO A FUCKING SUBSCRIPTION. You need a subscription for Adobe Photoshop–In the beginning it was sold on CDs and people were happy! Then after the whole CD thing went out of fashion, you had an option to pay monthly, or pay $500 upfront for a lifetime license to use the software.
It’s not even like the software is getting any better! Very often they REMOVE features, as Linus Tech Tips describes in his "I Have to Pirate COLORS Now??" video. With SaaS, you’re subject to the developer’s whims. Your application will just update whenever there’s a new version, for better or for worse.
Anyway, getting distracted–going back to talking about Obsidian.
Why I love Obsidian
Firstly, Obsidian isn’t a SaaS, which I like. A lot.
All your data is saved on your own computer, and the application is completely 100% free. No ads, nothing. This is because for normal users of the app who use it locally (or sync their notes via git), it doesn’t touch their servers so they don’t have to pay for you. They do offer a subscription service, if you want a seamless sync of your notes, which makes a whole lot of sense–It’s an ‘add-on’ for the application, and if you want the convenience, you can buy that from them to use their servers to sync your notes across devices. I especially like that because Sync is listed under the "Core Plugins" list in the settings menu, you can completely turn this off if you do not plan to buy it, and there’s a completely free Git sync plugin under "Community Plugins". This means that I can just have Obsidian maintain a Git repository on my GitHub, containing all my notes, and periodically[^6] check for changes on the upstream repo.
I also have it so that if I haven’t written anything in Obsidian for 10 minutes, it will commit and push all my changes to that repo, so I don’t even have to think about staging changes or anything. It just works.
In my opinion, this is the single best way they could have structured the application, and it’s the reason why I can easily see myself using this for the foreseeable future, and their business model (Providing a great base application free of charge, and selling optional conveniences on top of that) is such a great idea.
Obsidian also uses Markdown internally, which is great because
Why I love Obsidian, the company
What’s even better with local-first applications, is that if Obsidian goes out of business, the application should keep working, other than services that they provide such as Sync and maybe the plugin repo. I found this Reddit post and one user put it like this:
"I pay Sync, 10% because it’s worth it, 90% to support this company I absolutely love"
- u/Guilty_Advertising75
People don’t buy the subscriptions because they need it–The base app has everything they need and more. It’s that the users care about Obsidian continuing long-term.
Honestly, it’s very impressive that Obsidian has so much goodwill with their customers–And it makes a lot of sense, considering that Obsidian is free for the people who can’t (or don’t want to) pay for it, and the people who end up buying their subscriptions are trying to help support the ongoing development of the application.
While writing this, I was looking through r/ObsidianMD, trying to find negative comments about it[^7], and it’s mostly that it’s too flexible and prone to going down organization rabbit-holes, which makes sense.
[^1]: … And diet coke, of course
[^2]: Software as a Service
[^3]: At some point (I forgot when), the Adobe login servers went down, making noone able to use the Adobe software on their own damn computers!
[^4]: … Storage (Especially HDDs) is cheaper than ever now… Most people don’t want that other than syncing, and at that point make it an extra service for those who want it!
[^5]: At the time of writing this – $11.99
[^6]: I have mine set to pull every 5 minutes
[^7]: Sure, maybe a subreddit dedicated to the app or platform isn’t the best place to find unbiased information, but look at r/discordapp and they complain all the time