Obsidian Revenue: Why the Estimates Run From $2M to $25M (2026)

Quick answer (2026): Obsidian, the bootstrapped note-taking app, has never published its revenue, so public estimates run across an entire order of magnitude. The grounded end sits near $2M in annual recurring revenue (GetLatka and Fueler, 2025 estimates); a viral April 2026 post pushed a much larger "$25M ARR, $350M valuation" framing. None of it is official. Working from Obsidian's own prices (Sync at $4 per user per month, Publish at $8 per site per month) against the commonly cited 1M to 1.5M users, the low single-digit-millions figure is far more defensible than the $25M headline.

Obsidian is a local-first note-taking app that stores your notes as plain Markdown files on your own machine. It is free for personal use, takes no venture capital, runs no ads, and requires no account to open. It is also, by reputation, one of the most admired small software businesses of the decade. The one thing nobody outside the company can state with confidence is how much money it actually makes.

That gap is the whole story. Ask Google today and the AI Overview hedges with a range of "$5 million to $25 million." Ask three data aggregators and you get three different answers. Ask the company and you get silence, by design. So the honest version of "Obsidian revenue" is not a number. It is a spread, a set of sources, and a reason the spread is so wide.

What the public estimates actually say

Here is every credible public figure, typed by what it really is. Note that not one of them is a disclosed, audited number. Obsidian is private and shares nothing.

The two ends of that table are not describing the same reality. GetLatka and Fueler both land near $2M for 2025, built from user counts and subscription math. The $25M and $350M figures come from a single viral thread in April 2026 celebrating "a $350M company built by three engineers," where the revenue line was itself an estimate ("$5M to $10M" in the original LinkedIn post) and the $350M was a hypothetical valuation, not a transaction. Crunchbase lists the company with no financial data at all. That is the real primary source here: an absence.

What Obsidian actually sells

You cannot reason about the revenue without the price list, so start there. Every figure below is straight from Obsidian's own pricing page as of 2026, which describes the company as "100% user-supported" and "free from investor influence."

• The app: free. "Free without limits. No sign-up required." This is the top of the funnel and it never converts to money directly.
• Sync: $4 per user per month billed annually, $5 billed monthly. Encrypted multi-device sync. Independent writeups consistently call this Obsidian's single largest revenue line.
• Publish: $8 per site per month billed annually, $10 monthly. Turns a vault into a public website.
• Catalyst: a $25 one-time license for early access to betas, community badges, and private Discord channels.
• Commercial license: $50 per user per year, and, importantly, now optional.

Two things fall out of that list immediately. First, the recurring money is small-ticket: a $48-a-year sync subscription is the workhorse. Second, the funnel is deliberately leaky. A tool with more than a million users converts only a thin slice of them to a roughly four-dollar-a-month plan, because the free tier is genuinely complete.

A back-of-envelope reconstruction (and why $25M does not survive it)

Here is the arithmetic the ranking pages skip. Treat it as a rough sketch, not a claim of fact, but it is built entirely from Obsidian's published prices.

Take the widely cited estimate of 1M to 1.5M users. Freemium note apps of this kind typically convert somewhere in the low single digits of percent to a paid plan. Assume a generous 3% of 1.2M users pay for Sync at about $48 a year. That is roughly 36,000 subscriptions, or about $1.7M a year from Sync alone. Add Publish sites, Catalyst one-time licenses, and whatever fraction of businesses voluntarily buy the now-optional commercial license, and you arrive comfortably in the $2M to $4M band. That is exactly where GetLatka and Fueler land, which is reassuring.

Now try to reach $25M with the same inputs. You would need on the order of half a million paying Sync subscribers, a conversion rate near 40% of the entire user base. No freemium utility with a fully functional free tier converts at 40%. The $25M headline is not a revenue measurement; it is a valuation-flavored talking point that traveled well because "three engineers, $350M" is a great tweet. On the numbers, the single-digit-millions end is the one that holds.

The decision that makes the number even harder to read

In 2024, Obsidian did something that cuts against every growth-at-all-costs instinct: it dropped the requirement that companies buy a commercial license and made commercial use free. The $50-per-user-per-year license still exists, but only as a way to support the project, not as a gate.

A year later, members of the Obsidian community tried to measure the damage, estimating a net revenue loss in the range of six figures a year from lapsed and non-renewing commercial seats. Take those community numbers as directional, not audited. The point is the direction: the company knowingly walked away from a paid tier to remove friction and buy goodwill. That is a revenue line most founders would fight to keep, deleted on purpose.

The operator lesson, stated honestly

It is easy to read Obsidian as pure vindication of the small-and-independent dream, and there is a lot to admire. A team reported at fewer than 20 people, and framed by some as as few as three to seven engineers, serving well over a million users with no investors, no ads, and no telemetry is a genuinely rare outcome. Founders Shida Li and Erica Xu, who earlier built Dynalist, and CEO Steph Ango have optimized for longevity and trust over maximizing the take. Zoho built a $1.4 billion business without a dollar of VC at the industrial end of this philosophy; Obsidian is the artisanal end of the same idea.

But the honest founder takeaway is not "copy Obsidian." It is "know which game you are playing." The same discipline that makes Obsidian admirable is also a ceiling it chose. A leaky-by-design funnel and a deleted commercial tier are not accidents; they are a decision to stay a low-single-digit-millions business with a devoted audience rather than chase a $100M outcome. That decision carries real risk too: key-person concentration on a handful of people, no war chest if a venture-funded competitor like Notion decides to compete hard on local-first features, and revenue you have deliberately declined to defend.

The reason Obsidian's revenue is unknowable is the same reason the company is beloved: it refuses to perform for the market. It does not disclose, does not raise, does not advertise, and does not chase the numbers that would make the figure legible. For a founder, that is the actual lesson. The number is a downstream effect of the game you choose. Obsidian chose a game where the number stays small, private, and entirely its own. Like PostHog and the $57M figure it will not confirm, the silence is a strategy, not an oversight.

FAQ

How much revenue does Obsidian make? Obsidian has never disclosed revenue. Credible third-party estimates for 2025 to 2026 cluster near $2M in annual recurring revenue (GetLatka, Fueler), while a viral April 2026 post floated $25M ARR alongside a hypothetical $350M valuation. Reconstructed from Obsidian's own prices and user counts, the low-single-digit-millions figure is the defensible one.

Is Obsidian profitable? It is not officially confirmed, but Obsidian is widely reported to be profitable and sustainable, run by a very small team with low fixed costs and no investor pressure. The company describes itself as "100% user-supported."

Is Obsidian bootstrapped or venture-funded? Bootstrapped. Obsidian has taken no venture capital and has no external investors. Crunchbase lists no funding rounds, and the pricing page states the company is "free from investor influence."

How does Obsidian make money if the app is free? Through optional paid add-ons: Sync ($4 per user per month annual), Publish ($8 per site per month annual), a $25 one-time Catalyst license, and an optional $50-per-user-per-year commercial license. Sync is generally described as the largest line.

Why did Obsidian make commercial use free? In 2024 Obsidian removed the requirement that businesses buy a commercial license, making commercial use free to reduce friction and goodwill cost. The commercial license remains available as optional support. Community estimates put the revenue impact in the six-figures-per-year range.

How many users and employees does Obsidian have? Estimates put usage at roughly 1M to 1.5M-plus users (not officially confirmed) and the team at fewer than 20 core members, with some framings citing as few as three to seven engineers.