Yes. Observable is now free again for individuals, including private notebooks and databases connectors. And you can pay for larger (>5) teams and more hosted projects.
Our business focus is on productionizing (i.e., hosting and compute) data apps for teams. Observable Framework is open-source, so it’s free for you to do whatever you like with it. But if you’re building data apps professionally, our hope is that we offer a compelling complementary paid service for you to host and maintain your (often private) data apps on Observable. We make it easy for you to share data apps securely with your team or customers or clients or whoever, and we manage the complexities of keeping your app & data up-to-date with continuous deployment, scheduled builds, access control, collaboration, monitoring, analytics, etc. This starts with observable deploy today and will get better over time.
(And we think notebooks are a nice complement to Framework projects too, so you can quickly try out ideas.)