# Obsidian: The Note App That Keeps Your Notes as Plain Files You Own

Obsidian stores notes as plain Markdown files on your own device, went free for commercial use in Feb 2025, and only charges for Sync ($4/mo) and Publish ($8/mo).

Author: J.A. Watte
Published: June 25, 2026
Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/blog-obsidian-local-first-notes/

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If you've ever exported your notes out of a tool and gotten a wall of broken formatting, weird HTML, or a `.json` blob nobody can read, you already understand the problem Obsidian is trying to solve. Most note apps store your writing in their database, on their servers, in their format. The app is the only thing that can open it. The day the company changes its pricing, gets acquired, or shuts down, your second brain is hostage.

I run a pile of small projects and client sites, and I've watched too many "indispensable" SaaS tools quietly turn into rent. So when a note app stores every note as a plain `.md` text file in a normal folder on my own disk, I pay attention. That's the whole pitch for Obsidian, and it's why I keep coming back to it instead of the prettier subscription apps.

Here's the part that surprised me most: the app itself is free, there's no account to create, and as of February 2025 it's free for commercial work too. No asterisk. Let me walk through what it actually is, who builds it, and where the money comes from, because "free and local" usually has a catch and this one mostly doesn't.

## What Obsidian actually is

Obsidian is a personal knowledge base and note-taking application that operates on Markdown files. That's the official description, and it's accurate. You write in plain text with light formatting, and every note is a `.md` file you could open in Notepad, TextEdit, or `cat` from a terminal.

The folder those files live in is called a "vault." Point Obsidian at a folder, and it treats everything inside as your knowledge base. There's no import step and no proprietary container. A vault is just a directory:

```
my-vault/
  daily/2026-06-22.md
  projects/client-site.md
  reference/dns-notes.md
  .obsidian/   # app settings, themes, plugins
```

The feature people show off first is the graph view, an interactive map of how your notes link to each other. You connect notes with double-bracket wikilinks like `[[dns-notes]]`, and those links go both directions. Open a note and you can see everything that points back to it. Over a few hundred notes, the graph stops being a gimmick and starts surfacing connections you forgot you made.

There are two newer pieces worth knowing. Canvas, introduced in December 2022, is an infinite visual board where you arrange notes, cards, and images spatially. Your Canvas files are stored locally in the open JSON Canvas file format, which Obsidian designed to work with other tools, so it's not a dead end either. And Bases, a core plugin, lets you build database-like views over your notes, where all the data still lives in your local Markdown files and their properties. Think of it as a spreadsheet view that reads from your actual notes instead of a separate database.

## Who builds it, and why that matters

Obsidian comes from Dynalist Inc., the company behind the Dynalist outliner. The co-founders are Shida Li, the CTO, and Erica Xu, the COO. Erica started Obsidian in 2020 to build her ideal note-taking app, and the first beta shipped on March 30, 2020.

The CEO is Steph Ango, who goes by kepano online. He joined Obsidian as CEO on February 6, 2023. I want to flag that date because it gets misremembered as 2024 a lot, including in my own notes before I checked. It's 2023.

Ango's background is the part I find telling. Before Obsidian he co-founded Lumi with Jesse Genet in 2015, a software platform that connected brands with factories for custom packaging, and earlier he worked on Inkodye. Lumi ran from 2015 to 2022 and was acquired by Narvar in 2021. So the person running Obsidian has already taken a company through the full acquisition cycle. That's relevant context for a tool whose entire selling point is "your data outlives the app."

The company line is that Obsidian is 100% supported by its users, not investors. For a note app, that structural detail matters more than it sounds. No venture board means no pressure to lock you in, hike prices, or harvest your notes for ad targeting. Whether that holds forever is anyone's guess, but the file format choice means you're not betting your archive on it.

## Where the money comes from

The core app is free without limits, no sign-up required. The revenue comes from a few optional paid services, and they're genuinely optional because none of them are required to use the app or open your notes.

| Product | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Obsidian app | Free | No sign-up, no ads, no tracking. Free for personal and commercial use since Feb 20, 2025 |
| Sync | $4/user/mo annual ($5/mo monthly) | Cross-device sync, AES-256 encryption, version history |
| Publish | $8/site/mo annual ($10/mo monthly) | Turn connected notes into a website with a graph view |
| Catalyst | $25 one-time | Support tier with early-access builds (does not include Sync or Publish) |
| Commercial license | $50/user/yr | Optional since Feb 20, 2025 |

The big shift happened on February 20, 2025, when Obsidian made commercial use free by making the Commercial license optional. Before that, organizations of a certain size technically needed the $50/user/year license. Now anyone can use Obsidian for work, for free, and the Commercial license stays around only as an optional way for businesses to support the project. At the time of that change, Obsidian said people in over 10,000 organizations use it, including high-security environments like government, cybersecurity, healthcare, and finance.

Sync is the service I'd actually consider paying for. At $4 per user per month billed annually, it keeps your vault in step across devices and secures your data with AES-256, the strongest standard in common use. The thing to understand is that Sync is a convenience, not a dependency. Because your notes are plain files in a folder, you can sync them yourself with Dropbox, iCloud, Git, or a Syncthing setup and never pay Obsidian a cent. I've run a vault through Git for version history and it works fine. The paid Sync just removes the fiddly parts and handles conflict resolution for you.

Publish, at $8 per site per month billed annually, turns your connected notes into a public website with an online graph view. It's the digital-garden option. If you'd rather not pay, the plain Markdown files export cleanly into static site generators, which is the route I take for client sites.

## How people actually use it

The flagship workflow is Zettelkasten, or "second brain" note-taking, where you write small atomic notes and connect them with `[[wikilinks]]` until the graph view shows a web of linked ideas instead of a pile of orphan documents. That's the use case the graph view was built for.

But most people start simpler. Obsidian ships a Daily Notes core plugin, so journaling and daily logs are a one-click habit. Researchers and academics use it for linked reference notes. Developers use it for internal wikis and technical docs, then optionally push them live through Publish. And project trackers use note properties surfaced through Bases or the popular Dataview community plugin to build task lists and tables on top of ordinary notes.

That community-plugin ecosystem is a real part of the appeal. Dataview (by blacksmithgu) and Templater (by SilentVoid13) are two of the most-installed third-party plugins, and they extend Obsidian into querying and automation territory the core app doesn't cover. The trade-off, and it's a real one, is that plugins run code in your vault, you maintain them yourself, and a plugin can break when the app updates. It's powerful and a little DIY. If you want something that just works out of the box with zero tinkering, the plugin culture can feel like homework.

## The honest trade-offs

Obsidian isn't the right pick for everyone. There's no native real-time collaboration the way Google Docs or Notion do it, since the model is files on your disk, not a shared cloud document. Mobile sync without paying for Sync means wiring up your own file-syncing, which is more steps than tapping "install." And the blank-canvas freedom that power users love can be paralyzing if you just want a clean inbox for quick thoughts.

What you get in exchange is durability. Your notes are plain text in a folder you control, readable by any text editor on the planet, with no account and no subscription required to open them. For anyone who's been burned by a note app that locked the door on the way out, that's the whole point.

There is a bigger idea under all of this, and it is the same one behind my book *The $20 Dollar Agency*: own your tools instead of renting them. A note app you control, built on plain files, is the personal version of running a business on a small stack of cheap, replaceable tools instead of a pile of subscriptions that quietly turn into rent.

## Fact-check notes and sources

- Obsidian is a personal knowledge base and note-taking app that operates on Markdown files, storing notes locally in a folder called a "vault" with an interactive graph view. Source: [Wikipedia: Obsidian (software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(software)).
- Obsidian is 100% supported by its users, not investors. Source: [Obsidian: About](https://obsidian.md/about).
- Co-founders are Shida Li (CTO) and Erica Xu (COO); Erica started Obsidian in 2020. The developer is Dynalist Inc. Sources: [Obsidian: About](https://obsidian.md/about), [Wikipedia: Obsidian (software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(software)).
- First beta released March 30, 2020. Source: [Wikipedia: Obsidian (software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(software)).
- Steph Ango (kepano) joined as CEO on February 6, 2023, not 2024. Source: [Wikipedia: Obsidian (software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(software)).
- Steph Ango co-founded Lumi with Jesse Genet in 2015; the packaging platform ran 2015 to 2022 and was acquired by Narvar in 2021. He previously worked on Inkodye. Sources: [Steph Ango: Lumi](https://stephango.com/lumi), [Wikipedia: Lumi (company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumi_(company)). Note: the founding duo worked together as far back as 2009 (Inkodye era), so some sources date the company's origin to 2009; the 2015 date refers specifically to the packaging platform.
- Canvas, for spatial note-taking, was introduced in December 2022; Canvas files are stored locally in the open JSON Canvas file format. Sources: [Wikipedia: Obsidian (software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(software)), [Obsidian: Canvas](https://obsidian.md/canvas).
- Bases is a core plugin that creates database-like views, with all data stored in local Markdown files and their properties. Source: [Obsidian Help: Bases](https://obsidian.md/help/bases).
- On February 20, 2025, Obsidian made commercial use free by making the Commercial license optional; the company stated people in over 10,000 organizations use it, including government, cybersecurity, healthcare, and finance. Source: [Obsidian Blog: Obsidian is now free for work](https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/).
- Core app is free with no sign-up. Sync is $4/user/mo annual ($5/mo monthly); Publish is $8/site/mo annual ($10/mo monthly); Catalyst is a $25 one-time tier; the optional Commercial license is $50/user/yr. Source: [Obsidian: Pricing](https://obsidian.md/pricing).
- Obsidian Sync encrypts data with AES-256. Source: [Obsidian: Sync](https://obsidian.md/sync).
- Obsidian Publish brings connected notes online as a website with a graph view. Source: [Obsidian: Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish).
- Dataview (blacksmithgu) and Templater (SilentVoid13) are widely-used community plugins referenced across the Obsidian community; I did not capture a verbatim official description and recommend each plugin's own repository for exact wording.

*This post is informational, not product-purchasing advice. Obsidian, Lumi, Narvar, and other names are referenced as nominative fair use. Pricing and features were accurate as of June 2026; check the vendor for current terms. No affiliation is implied.*

## Related reading

- [Turn your notes into a memory palace](/blog/blog-tool-mem-palace-gen/)
- [Using Claude as a research co-worker](/blog/blog-claude-cowork-research/)
- [Static site generators compared for 2026](/blog/blog-ssg-comparison-2026/)
- [Map your web stack before you build](/blog/blog-build-your-web-stack-visualizer/)


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