I work on one of the third party plugins enabling real-time collaboration in Obsidian called Relay [0].
We have a novel architecture where you can optionally register a self-hosted relay server with our control plane for complete privacy for all of your docs and attachments.
We know that people typically prefer to have a unified vault, so you can share individual folders with different groups of people within your vault.
Relay is free for markdown docs up to 3 users, and then we have a hobby plan which includes attachment storage (especially popular with D&D and TTRPG players), as well as per-seat plans for businesses and universities. There are a couple of cloud-only alternatives like peerdraft and screen garden as well.
I recently bought the toniebox to hack it for my son's 4th birthday. It has become his favorite object.
I considered building sometime custom, but the tonie hardware is cute, portable, and lovable in a way that would be hard to replicate.
It has been really fun for my wife and I to listen to our favorite music in the car, and then when my son says "I like this song" I "burn" him a little disk that evening.
He's turned into a little DJ, and has memorized a handful of his songs (and dances and sings along).
One caveat is that finding compatible NFC tags is a little bit complicated. if you buy from RFIDfriend [0] then they take a couple weeks to arrive from Germany.
Having just received a toniebox as a gift for my daughter's 1st birthday, this got me so excited. Had no idea this was possible. Gonna get some of the NFC tags next week.
I've been thinking a bit about the "protocol"/features behind "Obsidian Graph Markdown" like frontmatter and link-integrity-on-rename. Have you implemented anything like that? How about embeds?
For those who don't know, Leo Labs operates a commercial version of NORAD radar sites that track satellites and debris.
If you're a satellite operator looking to avoid conjunctions, then buying additional measurements helps reduce uncertainty (which is often needed in order to decide if you should conduct a maneuver).
I have been building a plugin for Obsidian commercially.
I messaged @kepano about being able to support paid plugins. Apparently they can't because of Apple App store rules that forbid third party "stores" (and/or require a cut of the payment). IIRC there was a ruling that walked this back a little bit, but only in the US?
One thing I've appreciated about Obsidian is that they have donated to the top plugins as voted on by users each year. It's a small amount (eg. $25), but it is a nice gesture.
Micropayments could also be a nice gesture, but I don't think they could add up to meaningful income for a developer. There are enough developers that are willing to build great open-source plugins for free. IMO the missing tier is having quality (and vetted) plugins that people can work on full-time.
Yeah, the idea of getting to a viable income source for plugin writers is what I'm hoping for. I didn't know about the issue with Apple App store, that complicates things quite a bit.
Congratulations on your success with relay.md! It looks like a great tool.
I'm building a file-over-app local-first app call Relay [0] (it makes Obsidian real-time collaborative) and I agree with you.
We have a business model that I think is kind of novel (I am biased) -- we split our service into a "global identity layer"/control plane and "Relay Servers" which are open source and self-hostable. Our Obsidian Plugin is also open source.
So while we have a SaaS, we encourage our users to self-host on private networks (eg. tailscale) so that we are totally unable to see their documents and attachments. We don't require any network connection between the Relay Server and our service.
Similar to tailscale, the global identity layer provides value because people want SSO and straightforward permissions management (which are a pain to self-host), but running the Relay Server is dead simple.
So far we are getting some traction with businesses who want a best-in-class writing experience (Obsidian), google-docs-like collaboration, but local-first. This is of particular interest to companies in AI or AI safety (let's not send our docs to our competitors...), or for compliance/security reasons.
In some ways this reminds me of what I'm trying to do with connet [0] - give users the choice to completely self-host (all is open source), identity host (e.g. control server as cloud solution, host relays themselves) or even full cloud [1].
I'm developing an Obsidian plugin commercially. I wish there was a higher tier of vetting available to a certain grade of plugin.
IMO they should do something like aur on Arch Linux and have a community managed plugin repo and then a smaller, more vetted one. That would help with the plugin review time too.
The plugin is called Relay [0] -- it makes Obsidian more useful in a work setting by adding real-time collaboration.
One thing that makes our offering unique is the ability to self-host your Relay Server so that your docs are completely private (we can't read them). At the same time you can use our global identity system / control plane to collaborate with anyone in the world.
We have pretty solid growth, a healthy paid consumer base (a lot of students and D&D/TTRPG), and starting to get more traction with businesses and enterprise.
In the age of Claude Code having real-time collaboration + local-first markdown + easy to write custom plugins is the future. It makes no sense to lock up your documents in a saas product that gatekeeps your access to using AI on your own documents.
That's why I've been working Relay [0] - a privacy-preserving local-first collaboration plugin for Obsidian.
Our customers really like being able to self-host Relay Servers for complete document privacy while using our global identity system to do cross-org collaboration with anyone in the world.
We offer Notion MCP since most users prefer the ease of GUI, but agree that Claude code CLI + markdown files is handy. If we had the Obsidian md style sync we could sync to an obsidian vault in a Git repo just as well. We have lots of docs in Notion as you might imagine and having them synced into the git repo could improve their hit rate w Claude and all the other menagerie of code agents without needing to hook them all up w MCP and waste time on remote tool calls.
I'm with you. I've been working on making Obsidian great for work with real-time collaboration, SSO, and the ability to have fully private document collaboration [0].
Performance aside, it's crazy that in the age of Claude Code people don't insist on having their docs local, private, and in markdown.
We have a novel architecture where you can optionally register a self-hosted relay server with our control plane for complete privacy for all of your docs and attachments.
We know that people typically prefer to have a unified vault, so you can share individual folders with different groups of people within your vault.
Relay is free for markdown docs up to 3 users, and then we have a hobby plan which includes attachment storage (especially popular with D&D and TTRPG players), as well as per-seat plans for businesses and universities. There are a couple of cloud-only alternatives like peerdraft and screen garden as well.
[0] https://relay.md