Today, users have received an email which says that after mid October, there will be a new paid offering : “This means that our free offerings will be for working in public and sharing with the community, and our paid offerings will support working in private as well as in public”. I’m not sure to understand what it means. Will still be possible to have draft notebooks without choosing the paid offering? Is there any difference between a draft and a private notebook? I think it’s relevant to keep draft in the free offering. Users need to have a draft before releasing a notebook.

Precisely not. We no longer have MATLAB, SAS, Adobe Creative Cloud or Microsoft Office on our computers. Those days are over.

I think that nobody will start a notebook if it is public from the start. Especially beginners will not do it. Would it be possible in the free offering to have a “budget of draft notebooks”. Imagine you have 3 or 5 draft notebooks for free. You need to release a notebook to start a new notebook and you cannot use draft as private notebooks since you’re limited to 3 or 5 notebooks. What do you think?

This sounds reasonable: “Unlisted” is a feature for Pro users. Because if I share an unlisted notebook, I do it to collaborate with someone. But the inability to create a private notebook seems very limiting. There are tons of use cases when the notebook is useful for me only, or when it has sensitive data, API keys, etc. If I were a new user without private notebooks, I would not have a chance to discover the joy of frictionless rapid prototyping which Observable provides.

Thank you all for the feedback on this topic. We are not responding to each of the comments, but wanted to let you know that we are definitely listening to all your comments here.

Wait what?! I didn’t realize the implication that the fee tier was going to lose draft notebooks and unlisted notebooks. That is crazy. Are all my existing notebooks going to become public? Or just new ones I create? Existing notebooks better not just become public overnight. And what happens if I edit an existing notebook? Does it become public then? I really like the unlisted notebook feature. That’s a bummer it’s going to become a paid only feature. We won’t be able to curate our work on this platform anymore and decide what’s shown on our profile, etc. What about secrets for notebooks? Those aren’t allowed in public notebooks. So are secrets only going to be allowed for paid users? What happens to existing notebooks and secrets for free users? It’s very chaotic to change the fundamentals of how product works so late into its lifecycle, especially when the core DX is immature and never finished (like how you make a custom control).

I don’t work at Observable but I’ve spoken to several folks there about these issues. So, in the interest of answering your question quickly, here’s my understanding. [image] keystroke: Are all my existing notebooks going to become public? No, definitely not. Private notebooks will stay private. Free account holders will lose the ability to edit private notebooks or to create new ones, however. [image] keystroke: What about secrets for notebooks? Those aren’t allowed in public notebooks. So are secrets only going to be allowed for paid users? That’s correct, only paid users will be able to create private notebooks to use keys.

Observable’s raison d’être is to collaborate and share. That’s why I think this strategy is a really bad news for the community. There are several reasons for this. A creative process is always built in several phases. First, we think. Then we test things. And finally we produce. I’m not sure if these 3 phases should be done in a public way. In any case, forcing people to test things publicly under the eyes of the community is rather likely to prevent creation. Second, it will discourage beginners. Indeed, it is not easy to write your first lines of code knowing that what you do can be seen by everyone. I would never have started working on Observable if I had to do it publicly. Today, I spend my time convincing colleagues to come and work with me on Observable. But if I explain to them that what they are going to do will be public from the start, they won’t come. No doubt about it. Finally, the fact that everything is public will be very annoying to see the new interesting productions. Every day, I look at the recent notebooks. If most of these new notebooks are tests or work in progress, it won’t be interesting at all. The interesting stuff will be drowned out. Proposals: Restoring private (or unlisted) notebooks for free users If no: Restoring private (or unlisted) notebooks for free users in a limited number (5/user) Separate very clearly the drafts notebooks and the public notebooks. Adda a banner “work in progress” for draft notebooks. Exclude them from the list of “recent notebooks” and “trendings”. Have the possibility to change status. Why not add a button [I wish to collaborate / I work alone for the moment] to respect the different phases of the creation. If you check “I work alone for the moment”, the notebook should not be visible to others. If you check “I wish to collaborate”, the notebook could be visible on a new section on the website. Conclusion The choice that has just been made is very bad news. For the sake of the community, it can’t stay the way it is.

I feel the same way. I’m glad I’m not alone. If I discovered Observable now, I wouldn’t start using it as much, and I wouldn’t grow into a pro user. As a pro user and fan, I’m happy to start paying, but I feel forced to. And as “Republish” button is gone I’m also forced to relay on the fork feature (which seems undeveloped, unintuitive, awkward, and sometimes broken) in my own notebooks just to make some edits. [image] I expected the Pro plan would introduce larger limits and early access to new features to shape the future product, but instead my favorite tool in my hands began to morph into a social network. I’d rather pay to keep it the way it was.

Not getting into changes for free users, the removal of the “Publish” button on “public (unlisted)” notebooks seems to me like a really bad development for pro users too. We have a pro team with many “public (unlisted)” notebooks in production, and now it just got much harder to do edits on these notebooks without potentially breaking production. I agree with @oluckyman that the fork feature doesn’t work very well, and to me it generates much more friction when updating public notebooks.

[image] bernardol: the removal of the “Publish” button on “public (unlisted)” notebooks seems to me like a really bad development for pro users too I raised pretty much this exact issue in this forum post. I hope this issue improves.

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Cobus October 9, 2022, 9:03pm 12

Thank you @mcmcclur
We created an FAQ and pinned it to the ‘Latest’ and ‘Announcement’ categories in the forum.

Topic		Replies	Views
FAQ: October 2022 Platform Change Announcements	27	3179	December 15, 2022
Officially announcing the new Observable Announcements	46	861	September 24, 2026
Noob: Can you run your own Observable server Help	36	16260	October 26, 2021
Where is Observable going? Feedback	13	1066	June 12, 2026
How long will the old observable be maintained? Help	26	507	September 24, 2026

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