The Real Cost of Obsidian: Sync, Publish and the Licence Nobody Mentions

Obsidian's headline is "free without limits", and that is true of the app. The costs are all around it, and they are easy to miss because nothing in the app ever asks.

Every figure below is from Obsidian's own pricing page, checked August 2026.

The price list

Education and non-profit users get 40% off Sync and Publish.

The three-year view

One person, app only: $0. This is most people, and Obsidian deserves credit for it.

One person with Sync: $48/year, so $144 over three years.

One person with Sync and Publish: $144/year, so $432.

A team of ten, commercial licence only: $500/year, so $1,500.

A team of ten with Sync: $980/year, so $2,940.

The licence nobody mentions

The commercial licence is the interesting one, because it is easy to be unaware of it entirely.

If you use Obsidian for work in a company of two or more people, Obsidian's terms ask for $50 per user per year. The app never mentions this. There is no prompt, no activation and no enforcement. Plenty of teams standardised on Obsidian without ever seeing the requirement.

This is not a criticism. Charging companies while individuals pay nothing is a reasonable way to fund a free app, and it is part of why Obsidian exists. But it is a real line item for a team, and it recurs.

What you are actually buying with Sync

Genuine things, worth being clear about:

• End-to-end encrypted sync on Obsidian's infrastructure
• iOS and Android, not just desktop
• Version history
• Selective sync
• Shared vaults for collaboration

The free workarounds (iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Git) cost nothing and produce merge conflicts, because nothing coordinates simultaneous writes.

The comparison worth making

The question is not whether Obsidian is expensive. It is whether you are paying monthly for something a one-time purchase covers.

If you need mobile sync, Obsidian Sync is the answer and there is no cheaper equivalent. Pay it.

If you sync between Macs only, a one-time licence does the same job. TypeFire Pro is $18 once for three Macs, includes notes sync and version history, and has no commercial licence requirement. A single year of Obsidian Sync costs more. See the comparison.

The honest summary

Obsidian is one of the best-value pieces of software available if you use it alone and never turn on Sync. The moment you add sync, or a second colleague, the arithmetic changes and it is worth doing deliberately rather than by default.