Sync your vault for $18 once, not $4 a month.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from Obsidian Sync
The specific reasons people give for switching.
The arithmetic is the argument
Obsidian Sync is $4 a month billed annually, or $5 monthly, forever. TypeFire Pro is $18 once. A single year of Sync costs more than TypeFire Pro costs in total, and year two costs the same again.
It syncs through iCloud you already pay for
Notes sync runs over your own iCloud Drive between your own Macs. We store nothing on our servers, because there are no servers in the path.
Version history, without a subscription
Every save keeps a snapshot you can roll back to. It is stored in TypeFire's own space rather than inside your vault, so we never scatter a hidden folder through a library you have kept for years.
Selective sync by folder and file type
Exclude folders, and choose whether images, audio, video and PDFs travel with the text. Media can consume real iCloud storage, so it is a deliberate choice rather than a default.
Nothing was taken away to create this
Notes sync is Pro from its first release, so no free feature moved behind a paywall. Snippet sync stays free and unlimited, as it always has been.
Pro is not only sync
The same $18 carries unlimited clipboard history, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, screenshot OCR search and Quick Paste.
TypeFire compared with Obsidian Sync
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Obsidian Sync | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $18 once | $4 to $8 per month |
| Cost over three years | $18 | $144 to $288 |
| Covers | 3 Macs | Per user |
| Notes sync | Yes | Yes |
| Version history | Yes | Yes |
| Selective sync | By folder and file type | Yes |
| iOS and Android | No | Yes |
| End-to-end encrypted service | No service, your iCloud | Yes |
| Also included | Clipboard manager, snippets, AI | Sync only |
Obsidian prices from their own pricing page, checked August 2026. Three-year figures are the monthly price multiplied out, not a quoted plan.
Where Obsidian Sync is genuinely better
Three things Obsidian Sync does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Obsidian Sync.
It syncs to your phone
Obsidian Sync covers iOS and Android as well as desktop. TypeFire syncs Mac to Mac through your own iCloud and has no mobile app. If you write on a phone, this comparison ends here and Obsidian Sync is the answer.
It is a managed, encrypted service
Obsidian runs the infrastructure with end-to-end encryption and their own conflict handling. We store nothing, which is a privacy strength and also means there is no service to lean on.
Shared vaults and collaboration
Obsidian Sync supports collaborating on a shared vault. TypeFire syncs your own Macs to each other and nothing more.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Obsidian Sync at any price.
One payment
$18 once, three Macs, no renewal.
A clipboard manager
Unlimited history, searchable by the text inside screenshots.
Selection Prompts and Chains
Rewrite highlighted text in any app, or run several AI steps from one trigger.
No commercial licence
Obsidian charges $50 per user per year for business use. TypeFire does not.
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 Sync
Still not answered?
Obsidian Sync is $4 per user per month billed annually, or $5 billed monthly, according to Obsidian's own pricing page as of August 2026.
Obsidian Publish is separate at $8 to $10 per site per month, and commercial use of Obsidian requires a $50 per user per year licence.
Many people sync an Obsidian vault through iCloud Drive, Dropbox or Git for free, though those approaches are known for merge conflicts because nothing is coordinating the writes.
TypeFire Pro is a paid alternative at $18 once for three Macs, which handles notes sync and version history without a recurring fee.
Mac to Mac, through your own iCloud Drive. TypeFire has no servers in the path and stores nothing, so your notes never touch our infrastructure.
Sync covers up to three Macs on a Pro licence, matching the rest of Pro.
No. TypeFire is a Mac application and notes sync is Mac to Mac only.
There is no iOS or Android app. If mobile sync matters to you, Obsidian Sync covers it and TypeFire does not.
No. Version history keeps snapshots of a note so you can roll back an edit, which is undo rather than disaster recovery.
Keep a real backup of your vault, the same as you would with any folder of files.
Yes, and snippet sync is free and unlimited, as it has always been.
Clipboard sync covers your 10 most recent clips on the free tier, which is the whole free clipboard history, and Pro syncs all of them.
Pay once, sync your Macs.
Notes sync and version history in a single $18 purchase covering three Macs, alongside the clipboard manager and text expander.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets