history
the company, sourced and dated — dynalist, the 2020 beta, and building in public without vc.
the dynalist years2015–2019
shida li and erica xu meet at waterloo, build the outliner dynalist as students, and learn exactly what a notes product costs — before obsidian exists.
- 2015-03omniflow beginsshida li and erica xu — waterloo students — start 'omniflow,' a web outliner, as a side project. it is the direct ancestor of both dynalist and obsidian.
- 2015-07omniflow becomes dynalistafter a hacker news front-page post and a product hunt top-ten, omniflow is renamed dynalist — partly over potential conflict with the omni group.
- 2015dynalist becomes the runwaydynalist grows into a freemium outlining saas run by two people — and its revenue later lets them build obsidian without outside money.
- 2019-05the local-first paperink & switch publishes 'local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud' — kleppmann, wiggins, van hardenberg, mcgranaghan — naming the architecture obsidian is about to ship as a product.
the betaearly–mid 2020
a quarantine project becomes a private discord alpha, then a public beta — local files, backlinks, a graph view, and the plugin registry repo created before launch.
- 2020-01conceived in quarantineobsidian is conceived during covid quarantine — erica had carried the idea for about two years; a fan wiki claims the first line of code was written january 31, 2020, which is plausible but single-source and weak.
- 2020-03-30v0.0.1desktop v0.0.1 — the earliest release in the official changelog, and the first distributable electron build. access stays limited to alpha testers.
- 2020-04-10rapid alpha iterationv0.1.0 ships inside two weeks of v0.0.1; the obsidian.md homepage is live and archived the same day.
- 2020-05-08plugin registry pre-stagedthe obsidian-releases github repo — later home of the community plugin and theme registries — is created three weeks before the public beta. the plugin economy was planned, not emergent.
- 2020-05-19the forum goes livethe obsidian forum's first topics are timestamped may 19–20 — licat is user #1, silver user #2, invited by him. the community infrastructure is populated in the final days of the private beta.
- 2020-05-24catalyst insider buildschangelog v0.6.4 notes catalyst license holders can enable insider builds — the early-access paid tier exists before the public launch.
- 2020-05-27the show hn launcherica posts 'show hn: obsidian — a knowledge base that works on local markdown files.' it reaches ~1,087 points. in the thread she names the three values: local-first, plain-text markdown, and 'linking like an ide.' publish is already planned but 'not yet available.'
- 2020-05-30dynalist hands its users overthe dynalist blog tells its users the public beta 'was launched two days ago' — 'obsidian values connections more, whereas dynalist values structures more… we will develop and maintain dynalist as usual.'
building in publiclate 2020–2021
publish before sync, catalyst before launch, mobile within fourteen months — the no-vc business model assembles itself in public while the plugin economy takes off.
- 2020-07-18the pricing menuthe wayback pricing snapshot already shows the whole business model: personal use free, catalyst from $25 one-time, commercial $50/user/year, sync early-bird $4/month, publish early-bird $8/month/site — services pre-sold before sync shipped.
- 2020-08-27the name explainedsilver answers 'why is obsidian named so?' — 'if your raw, unstable thoughts are lava, then obsidian is… well, obsidian. it is your crystallized (and beautiful) knowledge.' plus minecraft: the hardest block in the game.
- 2020-09-30obsidian publish shipsv0.9.2 ships the publish plugin — obsidian publish, the paid site-publishing service, is live. publish actually predates sync as the first add-on.
- 2020-10-29the plugin directoryv0.9.8 adds the in-app community plugin browser — the formal start of the plugin economy that becomes the moat.
- 2020-12-07obsidian syncobsidian sync becomes purchasable on insider builds — end-to-end encryption, selective sync, version history — and reaches the public channel about a week later.
- 2021-03-17mobile closed betamobile v0.0.12 — the first changelogged mobile build, in closed beta for catalyst vips.
- 2021-07-07mobile shipsmobile v1.0.0 goes public on ios and android; the public-facing launch lands july 12 — #1 product of the day on product hunt, 760 points on hn.
- 2021-07-01early-bird endgamesilver announces early-bird pricing ends september 30 — and in the same post tells users which free alternatives (icloud, git, hugo) work instead. buyers who paid once keep the discount for life.
- 2021-09-21first obsidian octoberthe first obsidian october — a community build event for plugins and themes. the judges include liam, mgmeyers, argentum, and kepano — community members who later joined or shaped the team.
- 2021-11-10live previewv0.13.0 introduces experimental live preview — wysiwyg-style editing, the most-requested feature since launch; it becomes the default editor a month later.
- 2021-12-08gems of the yearsilver opens the first named gems of the year awards — 'that time of the year again' implies a 2020 precursor that was never formally named.
the kepano era2022–2023
1.0, canvas, and the author of the most-installed theme becomes ceo — 'file over app' turns the architecture into a public philosophy.
- 2022-10-13obsidian 1.0obsidian 1.0.0 drops the beta label — a redesigned ui (contracted to kepano), tabs, tab stacks, theme versioning. hn: ~1,329 points, 565 comments. erica notes the first private beta users came 'from a comment under a hn thread about org-roam.'
- 2022-12-05canvascanvas enters early access — an infinite spatial canvas for notes, images, and embeds — and reaches everyone december 23. its show hn becomes the highest-scoring obsidian submission ever: 1,380 points.
- 2023-02-06kepano becomes ceosteph ango — kepano, the minimal theme author who pitched the founders rather than the reverse — joins full-time as ceo. 'there are no investors pushing us to compromise on these values.'
- 2023-04-18publish repriced downpublish is repriced down to $96/year or $10/month per site — the first of several kepano-era price cuts.
- 2023-05-09pdf supportv1.3 adds built-in pdf reading and annotation.
- 2023-06-01new icon, first statskepano's first company byline: the new gem-style icon, the knapping metaphor, and the first official stats — ~1,000 community plugins, 100,000 discord members, 1 million downloads on the latest release. the blog and changelog pages debut the same day.
- 2023-08-31propertiesproperties ships to all users — a structured yaml-frontmatter ui that makes obsidian viable as a lightweight database, and the ground bases later builds on.
- 2023-11-21beyond a million userskepano announces sync expansion — 10 vaults, 100 gb, regional servers — and says obsidian has 'grown beyond a million users.' self-reported; the company runs no analytics.
recent history2024–
web clipper, bases, audits, a cli for agents — the product keeps compounding while the industry around it pivots to ai.
- 2023-12-01first security auditcure53 completes the first third-party security audit of the apps; a second follows a year later. the audit cadence becomes annual.
- 2024-03-20sync standarda cheaper sync standard plan launches at $4/month billed yearly — answering the pricing critique with a lower rung.
- 2024-08-24the five-hour outagea ~5-hour outage takes down sync, publish, login, and signup — a forced reboot plus a misconfigured auto-restart. licat posts the postmortem on discord; it survives via a lemmy mirror.
- 2024-11-11web clipperobsidian web clipper launches — 'save the web': a free, mit-licensed browser extension that clips and highlights pages into durable markdown, led by kepano.
- 2025-02-20free for work'obsidian is now free for work' — the $50/user/year commercial license becomes optional. the post reveals over 10,000 organizations use obsidian, with thousands of daily employee-users at amazon and google each (self-reported).
- 2025-08-18basesbases reaches all users — database-style views over note properties, saved as plain .base files. the biggest core-feature addition since canvas, and the flashpoint of the 'scope creep' debate.
- 2025-12-01the sync auditsobsidian publishes the cure53 and trail of bits sync audits together — including a disclosed high-severity weak-randomness flaw that could have allowed recovery of encrypted files, remediated and validated.
- 2026-02-27the obsidian clithe obsidian cli debuts in v1.12 — 'read, search, and write to your vault programmatically. give agentic tools the ability to interact with your vault' — plus headless sync for servers.
- 2026-05-12the community directory relaunchcommunity.obsidian.md relaunches with a developer dashboard and automated per-version security review — because coding agents flooded the queue: 4,000+ plugins and themes, 120m+ downloads, a 2,300-submission backlog cleared.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.