Last quarter Notion reminded me again why renting your own brain is a bad deal: the team workspace hit the free block cap mid-project, and the "upgrade" dialog wanted $10/user/month. For a three-person side project, that's $360/year to keep reading notes I wrote myself.
I moved everything to Obsidian + a private GitHub repo three months ago. Total cost: $0. Here's what actually happened.
The setup (15 minutes)
# 1. Create the vault as a plain folder of Markdown
mkdir ~/notes && cd ~/notes && git init
# 2. Obsidian: "Open folder as vault" → point at ~/notes
# 3. Sync via a private repo
git remote add origin git@github.com:me/notes.git
For phone access I use Obsidian Git (community plugin) — commit/push on a schedule. No server, no account, no subscription.
The honest comparison after 90 days
| Notion Free | Notion Plus | Obsidian + Git | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price (3 users) | $0 (capped) | $360/yr | $0 |
| Offline access | broken without net | broken | native |
| Data format | proprietary JSON | proprietary | plain .md |
| Search | slow on big workspaces | same |
grep -r / ripgrep, instant |
| Databases/tables | excellent | excellent | weak (Dataview helps) |
| Collaboration | real-time | real-time | git-merge pain |
What surprised me
The killer feature isn't price — it's grep. Last week I needed "that Postgres connection string from March." In Notion that's 3 minutes of clicking through search results that rank by recency, not relevance. With plain files:
rg -i "postgres.*5432" ~/notes --context 2
# answer in 0.04 seconds
Migration was 80% automated. Notion exports Markdown natively (Settings → Export all workspace content). The dump is ugly — folders named with UUIDs — so I cleaned it with a 20-line Python script that MonkeyCode wrote for me in one shot: strip UUID prefixes, fix the internal link format, done. 340 pages migrated in an afternoon.
What I lost: real-time multiplayer editing and the nice databases. My team now coordinates edits through PRs, which sounds insane but works fine at 3 people. If we were 10, I'd pay for Notion again without shame.
The contrarian take: Notion's moat was never the editor — it's that migrating feels scary. It took one afternoon. The lock-in is psychological, not technical.
I use MonkeyCode (free, open-source, local models) for the migration scripts and daily note automation: https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF
Have you left a hosted notes tool for local files? What finally pushed you — price, privacy, or an outage?
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