Obsidian is now free for work – Commercial license becomes optional
The News
Obsidian just announced that it's free for work, and the previously needed Commercial license that allowed two or more employees to use it for work now becomes optional.
Steph Ango, also known as kepano, the CEO of Obsidian, explains this change with striving for simplicity, as users were confused about the Commercial license terms because of unnecessary complexity. According to Obsidian, people in over 10,000 organizations currently rely on Obsidian for their work. Those organizations are partially featured on Obsidian's new Obsidian Enterprise page (you have to buy 25 licenses or more for your organization to be featured).
Thanks to the Commercial and Catalyst support, add-on services, Sync and Publish, Obsidian remains 100% user-supported.
My Thoughts
In a world, in which we get bombarded with news of big tech corporation making one unethical decision at the cost of their users after the other, I am thankful for companies like Obsidian, which are striving for simplicity, supporting their users, and building up on the mission of giving everyone access to tool that help them think clearly and organize ideas effectively. Obsidian always followed an open and transparent approach when it comes to the development of the app. Users were able to engage in product discussions in the Discord server, and the developers were always responsive, delivering constant updates and features based on users' needs.
I hope those news have a more broader impact. Personally, I think Obsidian is a great example of a company that made it. And by that I mean that they built a calm company, a tight-knit team, building a super solid product, which is highly loved, to the extent that users decide to support the development of it by buying licenses although they could use it for free, they have a strong community full of users who are helping out each other, while developing the app they never got distracted by software trends, but rather stayed focused on their mission, as the open plugin system allowed anyone with the needed skills to make experiments and explorations on their own. And the recent change of making the commercial license optional is another step towards making it easier for teams to adopt the tool without worrying about licensing complexities.
Obsidian has been at the forefront of fostering a community of supporters who value the tool and are willing to contribute to its development. The move of making the Commercial license optional not only feels like a move towards simplicity, to me it seems like a strategic move that balances growth with sustainability, closely aligning with their mission to provide effective thinking tools to everyone.
This is innovation.
Conclusion
While the change of the Commercial license becoming optional is exciting and makes the app even more accessible, the message here is still that if you get value out of an app, you should consider paying for it to make sure to support its development, so you can rely on it for many years ahead. While loads of big companies, especially the ones heavily funded with VC money, are constantly trying to sell everything to their users, loosing sight of the things that really matter to them, solving their problems, and actually building the tool for it, they just tell you about that shiny thing they shipped that doesn't do anything besides being expensive and invaluable.
Till next time! 👋
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