To add to your last point - 10 years is a very long time frame. Any recurring cost grows to eye-watering levels if the time interval is huge enough. In 10 years, a lot can happen in the space and you are not locked in with obsidian - if the next better thing comes along in 3 years, you can easily migrate.

iCloud sync is too unreliable and opaque for me.

It has been reliable for me with Obsidian. I still prefer Obsidian Sync because it has good integrated version history and shared vaults.

Also agree with the sibling poster - I like subscribing to support them on a regular basis (and of course Catalyst).

Yes I found it wasn't reliable. Perhaps it has improved, but Obsidian Sync has been excellent. I'm happy to support the developer as I'd like Obsidian to stick around.

Obsidian Sync is great (it helps that I got in on early-bird pricing...but it really is reliable).

In addition, the Git plugin, coupled with Working Copy on my iPhone and iPad, also work extremely well, with a bit of added overhead. Though iCloud works reasonably well for just about everything else, I haven't used it for syncing Obsidian data.

Syncthing... It can do it too

handles syncing my pictures too

I can second Syncthing. I just use a simple markdown editor with Syncthing on Windows, Android, and a Linux.

Wasn't the syncthing android app deprecated relatively recently?

It was if you install it from google's app store, but it's still fully functional for now if you install it from F-droid.

I've been using Obtainium to install Android apps from Github releases and automatically update them. It's worked great.

Syncthing's .apk release files can be found here: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/releases

Syncthing-fork (of the android app, not syncthing itself) is a straight improvement.

Yes, I use this and it is pretty solid. I can recommend it

Even setting up your own couchdb + livesync should be a small task if one can consider to 'write a whole app' to replace obsidian

edit note, if you want to build something :) please expand livesync or a new plugin to allow easily sharing of self hosted obsidian notes :) All the ones I tried use some 3rd party hosting which I don't like even if its encrypted.

Yeah the article was painful to read. $1000 in a decade? Its a decade, who cares. If you make 100k a year its 0.01% of your salary towards something you found worthwhile enough to use for ten years straight

the cheap sync plan is a scam though, it doesn't do enough to be even worth bothering with iirc

To add to your point, the phrasing of "$1K in a decade" seems convoluted to intentionally try to over-emphasize the cost. A much more fair/normal way of phrasing that cost would be $100/year, or $9/month, which is very little for someone who has the time and energy to write their own and gets enough value out of it that they find that worthwhile.

The tradeoff doesn't make sense otherwise. If you're poor, then you wouldn't have the luxury of the available time to write your own PKM - the opportunity cost is huge, it's massively preferential to use an existing free solution that is "good enough" (Obsidian without sync or using your own sync solution, Dendron, Roam, Org). If you're not poor, then $9/month is a rounding error, especially compared to the value provided.