Cobus I really hope so. Because the community enjoys open source and produces every day code for free on the platform. To be popular, Observable must not restrict too much the features offered to free users. If people have to pay for private notebooks or other useful things, they will leave. I ask myself the question. And honestly, it’s a shame because your product is really great.
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I think the company is taking reasonable steps to become profitable.
@mcmcclur this makes sense to me, but I think removing the “Publish” button is making workflows worse for the paying customers, which in my mind goes against becoming profitable as a company. It’s like we’re paying for the same thing, but one day we wake up and we simply lost a very important feature.
Maybe this was a necessary byproduct of limiting private notebooks for free users (different discussion), but if yes it is very unfortunate.
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Very unfortunate for free users also.
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We are actively working on how to improve the workflow for editing public notebooks without breaking production. Although the fork and merge should work (bugs aside) as a workaround, we are confident that we will have a better solution soon.
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In any case, the best solution would be obliviously to allow free users to make changes privately.
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Although I am sure the Observable gatekeepers are aware, I want to remind the team how the proposed ‘Pro policy’ directly conflicts with the ‘privacy by default’ mandate enshrined in the GDPR (e.g. customers should be able to “Curb or withdraw any permissions previously given by them”) as well as the data portability clause of the upcomming Digital Markets Act (seeing how previously created notebooks remain locked unless paid for by users who are on a free plan).
Not to mention the quite extortative vendor lock-in by greasing people up with ‘unlimited’ free space while a ‘limit’ should have been advertised from the start. People should be able to reasonably assess and compare platform offerings before comitting to one, e.g. Colab, Starboard, Deepnote, Wolfram Notebook and so on. Again, practices that the upcoming DMA aims to curb for platforms operating within the European Union.
Alternative
Rather than the all or nothing approach currently proposed, why not try a credit based approach:
- Users start with X credits to keep private notebooks
- Users can gain credits through providing support/forks/suggestions on other people’s notebooks or buying X amount of credits
- And if we are really devious, award users ‘notebook credits’ when featured on the homepage or when a user’s notebook functions are frequently imported by others (although we may want to introduce mechanisms to prevent a ‘rich get richer’ effect from occurring)
- Provide ‘Pro’ subscription plans that refill user credits on a regular basis
- For previously signed up users, keep all previously private notebooks editable; many users have been with you from the early days and should not be bereft of their loyalty to your product.
- Bring back the (re)publish button, being a staple of many existing workflows.
I am sure more business oriented folk would be able to come up with something more fleshed out, but the above would at least solve some of the ‘all or nothing’ policy change issues people are having by providing some (creative) leeway for new and existing users.
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I agree almost word-for-word with @neocarto . Throwing up barriers to entry for those of us new to the field (for example, that anything you make must be public for future employers to wade through) seems to run directly against the ethos of the collaboration that Observable is trying to emphasize.
There’s a reason GitHub has private repos; there’s a reason many of us abandoned LastPass when they eliminated free features; the list goes on…
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I want to add one more use case that’s being broken by the new policy. I use Observable for teaching data visualization and EDA. The students make forks of a template I provide for their assignments. Of course, I don’t want the assignments to be public as that will allow students to just look up the answers.
I know there are education teams available but that means I have to add all students to an org and I haven’t yet explored how well that workflow works. Maybe it works if there is integration with LMSs like Canvas. Either way, I need to change my workflow from how I’ve been doing assignments so far.
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@domoritz We would highly recommend you try using a Team for teaching with Observable (Pro Teams free for educational use like yours, as you mentioned). The sharing features in Teams, as well as easy access to your assignments etc. works really well and eliminates the need to make notebooks Public (unlisted) and managing all those URLs.
Mike Freeman (when he was teaching at UW) created this wonderful collection describing his teaching process using Observable Teams.
Please reach out to us at sales@observablehq.com to get set up with a team for your students if you want to explore this.
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As academic, I have created a Team for teaching with a single-use coupon sent by Courtney. Cartographie thématique pour les étudiants de master 1 GAED de l'université Paris Cité
I had to give my personal credit card for this. Normally it should be free. But in the billing section, it is written that I will have to pay next month. Please solve this…
The support team will fix this and respond from our support@observablehq.com email address. Great to see that you are going to use a Pro Team for this.
Well. No choice if I don’t want to force students, who are beginners, to write code publicly. This is actually the problem with your new policy 
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I have to open my public notebooks in Incognito mode so that my activity is not seen by the viewers. It’s distracting when cells open, exposing page of code, right into the face of non-technical viewers when they study reports or charts.
It feels unjust that incognito users can view without being spied on, while the owner of the notebook has to watch out for opening their public notebooks, so as not to distract viewers.
Missing my “Republish” button 
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Good feedback, thanks.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, we are actively working on something to give the author control over which public version they would like others to see by default. Others would still be able to see the live version (to follow what the author is doing), but based on the feedback, there are many times where that should not be the default for viewers of your public notebooks. We are evaluating a few options for making this intuitive as well as flexible.
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I´m an argentinean designer who early adopted Observable, coming from bl.ocks., and learnt a lot in here. I´m not a full stack dev, I´m not fluent in .git or versioning or forking-merging, but Observable let me collaborate and learn from the very best of D3.js community.
I see observable as a “entry gate” for “people who code” (not developers but designers, journalists, academics) to the world of collaborative coding. But this new abrupt paywall will push us out -again.
I wonder if @Cobus has stats on country-of-residence of users? I´m from Argentina, a country with a broken economy where 15 bucks a month is not cheap, nor accesible. I wonder how many people, mostly minorities, global south citizens, students and young people will be left out?
The most valuable thing on observable for me was to be able to easily adapt great code made by those who know A LOT, usually living and working in “central” countries, to our third world countries. So sad this steep paywall will probably left us out.
This is just a long write about the usual: Charging the same amount of money for different people will ALWAYS favor those who are already in a good position. In democratic and teaching tools like Observable (was), this is even sadder.
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One more observation @Cobus : It is impossible to find a user anywhere who is happy with this policy. There’s a problem, isn’t there? Personally, I’m very angry and disappointed. I love observable. But it will be impossible for me to build interactions around this tool in my community ( geographers, academics, geomatics specialists) if we are not able to work for free privately at first. If it stays like this, I’ll probably have to change to another tool. What a waste of time for me.
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A few comments in the thread mention concerns about the cost of a Pro account. Please contact us directly at sales@observablehq.com so we can talk through options customized to your specific needs.
I would like to agree here with Neocarto about the new policy of Observable…
I am not yet very familiar with Observable, but I can see the potential of this platform, particularly in the areas of geovisualisation for thematic cartography purposes, when I see what can be done for example on @neocarto notebooks.
If beginners, who are often hesitant and unsure of themselves by definition, are not able to train themselves privately, they will not all stay in this environment. Not all developments are intended to be public, some are simple tests, others are bits of code: showing all this draft material is not necessarily gratifying, especially when you are not an expert.
Moreover, limiting the potential of the freely available version is purely counterproductive for (existing and future) users who will not have the possibility of paying. Also those in the South, students …
If we understand well that business is business, think carefully about the consequences of applying such a policy… I think it is “très dommage” for the community.
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From my point of view offering 5 or 10 max private notebooks (with the previous public/unlisted publish) would solve the issue : encourage the beginner to try as well as force the convinced professional doing business with it to pay.
I hope a solution would be found.
It is too bad that observablehq leaves suddenly the good ethic values that we expect from it.
Alain
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Losing public (unlisted) is essentially a deal-breaker for me. I would just go back to codepen where I can prototype quick little things unlisted.
A large majority of what I do with observable (today) is discovery/prototyping, and I don’t want to share these WIPs with anyone, often because they are broken, or I never finished, or I’m waiting on some breakthrough. I’m fine rotating them out if there were a limit to “unlisted”s, but making every half-assed attempt to figure something out visible (and indexed/findable) to the world is only going to prevent me from using observable for anything other than “show pieces” (cultivated things I actively want people to see).
If I can’t “play” in a safe space, observable will not be a paradigm-shifting tool, it will simply be “Medium, with dataviz” except my draft posts will be publicly visible from the first word, which also would make me reluctant to take the time to develop something that requires time investment.
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