Using Obsidian at work? That is $50 a year, each.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from Obsidian
The specific reasons people give for switching.
The licence is real and easy to miss
Obsidian's pricing page lists a commercial licence at $50 per user per year for use in a company of two or more people. The app itself never asks for it, so plenty of teams have simply never seen the requirement.
It scales per person, every year
Ten people is $500 a year, and again the next year. TypeFire Pro is $18 once for up to three Macs, with no separate commercial licence.
Sync is on top of that
The commercial licence covers the app. Obsidian Sync is a further $4 to $8 per user per month if the team wants their vaults synced.
You do not have to leave Obsidian to fix it
TypeFire reads the same vault. A team can keep Obsidian where it earns its licence and use TypeFire for capture, search from other apps and sync, rather than migrating anything.
One payment, three Macs
A work laptop, a desktop and a personal machine on the same $18, with no renewal and no per-seat pricing.
TypeFire compared with Obsidian
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Obsidian | |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial licence | Not required | $50 per user per year |
| Sync for a team | $18 once, 3 Macs | $4 to $8 per user per month |
| Ten people, year one | $180 once | $500 plus sync |
| Ten people, year three | $180 total | $1,500 plus sync |
| Per-seat pricing | No | Yes |
| Reads the same vault | Yes | Yes |
Figures taken from Obsidian’s published pricing, checked August 2026, and multiplied out. Obsidian offers a 40% education and non-profit discount on Sync and Publish.
Where Obsidian is genuinely better
Three things Obsidian does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Obsidian.
The licence funds a genuinely free app
Obsidian's core app is free without limits and has stayed that way for years. Asking companies to pay while individuals do not is a reasonable model, and it is why the app exists at all.
It is still the more capable tool
Plugins, canvas, mobile apps and a very large community. Paying $50 a year for it at work is often simply worth it.
Shared vaults
Obsidian Sync supports collaborating on a shared vault. TypeFire syncs a person's own Macs and nothing more.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Obsidian at any price.
No commercial licence to track
One $18 purchase, used wherever you like.
Capture and search from any app
The features a working day actually leans on, behind one keystroke.
A clipboard manager and text expander
Both included, which is most of what a support or sales desk needs.
It reads the vault you already standardised on
Nothing to migrate, and Obsidian keeps working alongside it.
Turn anything you copy into something you type
Right-click a clip, choose Save as snippet, give it an abbreviation. The thing you copied once becomes something you type three characters to get, forever. The same conversions run across all three surfaces: a clip becomes a note, and a note you keep rewriting becomes a snippet. Clipboard managers have no snippet engine, text expanders do not watch your clipboard, and no note app has either, which is why the loop only closes here.
- 01
Copy something
It lands in Clips alongside everything else you copied today.
- 02
Save as snippet
It leaves your rolling history and enters your permanent library.
- 03
Give it a trigger
Type
invfrom then on and never look it up again.
A clipboard manager you can tell what to ignore
A clipboard manager sees everything you copy. Until 4.0 the only control over that was a password-manager exclusion you could not see. There are three now, none of them gated, and the limits of the strongest one are stated rather than buried.
Turn image capture off
One switch. Text keeps being captured and pictures stop. Images you have already saved are kept rather than deleted, which is not what most people expect a privacy toggle to do, so it is worth saying.
Name apps to skip
Add any application and TypeFire ignores what you copy in it. Choose from the apps it has already seen, with clip counts, or browse to any app on your Mac. Each app gets one of three settings: allow it, block images only, or block everything you copy there. The middle one is what most people want for a work tool, keeping the text and losing the screenshots.
The password managers, now visible
TypeFire has always ignored password managers. That list is in Settings now, twenty-three apps including 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, Dashlane and Apple Passwords, blocked by bundle ID in code rather than by a setting you have to find. It shows which of them you have installed, and any one can be overridden.
Encrypted database, owner-only files
Clips are stored in an encrypted SQLite database on your Mac. The key is generated on your machine and kept in the macOS Keychain. Image files sit alongside the database with owner-only permissions.
Secrets expire in minutes
Card numbers and high-entropy strings are detected and deleted after five minutes by default, adjustable in Settings. Everything else follows the retention you choose.
An on-device AI option
Apple Intelligence and local models through Ollama or LM Studio run entirely on your machine. If you pick Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini instead, text goes to that provider directly; TypeFire operates no server in that path.
Where blocking by app stops being a guarantee
macOS does not tell an application which other application wrote to the clipboard. TypeFire matches on the app that was in front at the time, plus any app that identifies itself using the standard convention. That covers the overwhelming majority of real cases and it is not absolute. The protection that does not depend on a guess is the concealed-content marker: password managers mark what they copy, and TypeFire never stores it whatever else is set.
The app list also covers what you copy, not screenshots you save as a file. A PNG on your desktop records nothing about what was on screen, so TypeFire matches those to an app where it can and skips them when it does. It is right in the ordinary case and it is not a promise: to keep saved screenshots out entirely, turn off Save screenshots to Clips.
Eighteen dollars. Once.
TypeFire Pro is a single payment that unlocks unlimited clips, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, notes sync and note version history. There is no subscription and no per-seat pricing.
Free tier, then one payment
No free tier at all
One time
No free tier
One time
Lifetime, or $3.99/mo
Subscription, forever
Two months of Paste, or all of TypeFire.
Moving from Obsidian
Still not answered?
Yes. Obsidian's published pricing lists a commercial licence at $50 per user per year for people using Obsidian for work in a company of two or more people.
The application does not prompt for it or enforce it technically, which is why many teams are unaware it exists. Personal use is free.
Based on Obsidian's published pricing as of August 2026, ten commercial users is $500 per year for the licences, recurring annually.
Obsidian Sync, if the team wants it, is a further $4 to $8 per user per month on top.
No. TypeFire Pro is a single $18 purchase covering up to three of your Macs, with no separate commercial licence, no per-seat pricing and no renewal.
Use it at work or at home.
Yes, and that is the usual arrangement. Both read and write the same plain markdown files, so a team can keep Obsidian for the work that justifies its licence and use TypeFire for quick capture, searching notes from inside other apps, and sync.
We are not in a position to say how Obsidian handles compliance, and this page is not legal advice.
Their terms are published on their own pricing page and that is the authority worth reading before deciding what your team needs.
One payment, no seats to count.
TypeFire Pro is $18 once for three Macs, with no commercial licence and no renewal, and it reads the vault your team already uses.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets