New policy

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43

I just came to share my two cents on the new policy. At first, I was upset, but after thinking it over, I’ve concluded that what Observable’s doing is completely reasonable.

I was upset because a thing that I like that was free is not going to be free anymore. Paying $0 for something is better than paying more than $0. Also, I and others I’ve talked to shared the feeling that Observable had used drug dealer tactics on us: they gave us the great free thing, waited until we were hooked, and then made us pay for it. The old bait and switch. So I get why people are upset. Perhaps Observable should have communicated earlier on that this was coming so people weren’t surprised by it.

Still, after some reflection, it’s hard for me to see how Observable did anything wrong here. They made a great product. It’s completely reasonable to ask customers to pay for a great product. That’s how businesses work. They have to pay their employees and pay for office space and servers and so on. And it’s not like Observable is alone in adopting this model. GitHub does the same thing — you can make as many free repos as you like, but they’re public. If you want private repos, you pay for them. Likewise, you can still use Observable as much as you want. Public notebooks are fine. I might just keep using the free version, or I might pay for it. I haven’t decided yet. But in any case, it seems like a reasonable way to run a business. I hope Observable makes enough money to keep running the business and to grow.

Last thing. I think many early adopters felt as though we were part of Observable. We weren’t on the payroll, but we were using Observable all the time, building cool things on top of it, and offering suggestions about how to improve it. The new policy shifts that relationship a bit. We are customers now. That’s fine! But great companies have great customer service. I have no reason to doubt that Observable will have great customer service. But sometimes, as companies grow larger and acquire more customers, each individual customer becomes less important. I hope Observable takes the opposite path — that its customer service continues to improve as it grows.

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44

I don’t agree with you at all @HarryStevens. Personally, I work for the french public university and I try to create commons that are useful to humanity. So no, I don’t want to be a customer of a private company. Let’s charge private companies for doing business, no problem. For everyone else, it must be free. Otherwise, we will go elsewhere. Have you changed your mind @Cobus ?

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45

The lack of a distinctive published and draft versions is really limiting in a way:

Let’s consider a use case: the original collection of input widgets.

It is no longer possible to create and maintain a library like this for free account holders.

The reason is this: what happens if you want to, say, add an enhancement to the Slider? Nobody types code and have it work from the first try. So you would be working on it for a while. It will be work in progress, possibly some things don’t work at all.

During this time, all notebooks using the widgets will be broken.

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A solution would be to fork the notebook, make modifications and then merge with the original notebook. You can also use the Tinker mode in the View menu. But it is true, that it is less practical than the previous way.

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I could be wrong, but I assume the French public university is funded by French taxpayers. They are paying for you to do your work. Observable cannot rely on taxpayer money. How would you suggest it continue to fund its operations? Neither Observable nor the French public university nor anything else can expect to survive without some source of funding.

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49

Researchers, engineers and technicians in public research in the field of data sciences work a lot with R. It’s free. Everyone shares everything. Many collaborations. Many publications. Many innovations. Etc. We are also able to build pretty notebooks with Quarto (in which you can also run Observable cells). Same with Jupyter. If Observable is not free, academics will not use it and will not teach it. Bad news for the community. Bad news for Observable.

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50

Hi @roelandschoukens thanks for your thoughts.

Just to note… when others import cells from a notebook the default is to lock the import (and all indirect imports) to the version when they imported it. That means that you can continue editing your notebook without breaking other people’s notebooks. Of course, people may choose to unpin the import since that does make sense for some use cases, but most imports are version-locked.

See Version Locking for Notebook Imports / Observable / Observable

That being said, we are working on some designs to give authors options for whether they want others to see their live edits by default or not. The feedback and thoughts shared here and elsewhere have been very useful to shape our thinking about how to make this better.

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I also love open-source software. I use it every day and have developed and maintain open-source libraries, as do you, as do the people behind Observable. We are all in agreement there.

But surely researchers, engineers and technicians doing public research in the field of data science also use paid software. Some people have MATLAB or Adobe Creative Cloud or Microsoft Office on their computers, right? And certainly people pay for their hardware, like computers and servers and mouses and keyboards. They pay the electric company to keep the lights on. So it’s certainly not the case that public researchers never pay for the tools they need to do their work.

I agree with you that Observable should consider charging a lower price for academics and public researchers (which maybe the already do). If you still decide it’s not worth it, that’s okay. It’s possible that Observable’s decision to be a for-profit company rather than a non-profit foundation will prove wrong. But it could also be very successful. I hope it’s successful.

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52

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

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@neocarto, we have not changed our minds. Observable is free for public use and paid for private use. For others on the thread who may not have seen the announcement, please refer to our blog post here

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We offer significant discounts to academics and non-profit organizations (mentioned at the bottom of our pricing page ). Please reach out to sales@observablehq.com to learn more.

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I work for a for-profit company, so maybe this just comes down to differences in organizational culture. But we pay for lots of software: GitHub, Slack, Trello, and many more. We also pay for a Team account on Observable! So from my perspective, it is not reasonable for a craftsman to expect all of his tools to be free.

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That’s the point. This new policy is in line with the philosophy of private companies. But this will take Observable away from the research community. Bad news for everyone.

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I didn’t know that, however it still leaves the problem that if you make a new notebook while one of the widgets is work in progress you are stuck until the work in progress is finished.

It is also much more awkward for your own notebooks, if you have a dependency it is much easier to leave those at the “latest” version, defined as the last time it got “published”.

If the free version doesn’t allow private versions that is fair enough, but the lack of a defined published version is quite limiting in this way.

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58

GitHub used to do the same thing. They no longer do. See GitHub offers free private repositories for unlimited collaborators, cuts Team plan to $4 per month | VentureBeat

Up until last year, GitHub offered a number of paid plans to suit specific use-cases, and these plans offers unlimited public and private repositories. However, the free plan could only be used for public repositories and open source projects — until last January, when GitHub gave non-paying users access to unlimited private repositories, though with an upper limit of three collaborators. Now this restriction is being removed.

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59

I stand corrected. For what it’s worth, I would also prefer if Observable offered some number of free private notebooks before you hit the paywall. It might also be a good way to let new users try it out before deciding whether it’s worth it to pay.

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61

Hi everyone. I have written in a bit privately on this change. And yeah - I agree - this is sorta the opposite of GitHub, which first charged for private notebooks, then made private free. Few precedents out there…

I hope my two cents are welcome, and I’ll try to be novel in these statements, as everyone else had voiced exquisitely both sides…

There is (to me) something to be said about “forcing” public notebooks. It removes the pretence that the web can be private. I am slowly coming to believe it cannot be. Yes, there is the massive dark web, and there are protection layers to keep the lights off. But these are illusory, and if you flick a switch, everything changes.

We, as users, must now squarely confront that our work can be public. Want to avoid the consequences? Change habits: fork notebooks, edit somewhere people aren’t looking, merge changes, continue. Want to pretend our work is private? Pay smart people to add layers to separate us from the web, trust these layers work, and pay for it

I agree that I would have used Observable very differently in my learning journey if the current model reigned when I started. In fact, when I was learning in 2018, I had to publish listed to ask questions on the talk forum…and it was scary!! Then we got publish unlisted, and I asked more questions with less overhead, and it felt great! So I immediately reacted negatively to the new model. And I agree that it makes Observable scary again and I worry for the consequences for new users. Many different models have been suggested to diminish this and I hope some are taken onboard… But I digress…

Public unlisted is public. Private is private, but at the expense of Observable and thanks to a lot of hard work and intellectual contributions. I agree that it is acceptable to pay for this. I think it doesn’t help to bring in scared users like me for everything immediately to be public, and I agree that to continue to bring in new users options like e.g. 5 private notebooks would help… But… I also like that the current model tells us, clearly, private is private because someone covers the cost of this luxury and forces us to confront that maintaining this luxury will continue to cost…

So yeah, that’s about it. I do hope we find a ‘trial’ option through drafts or whatever that incentivizes new users to experiment and play without fear… But I also appreciate the reality check that anything on the Internet is dangerous and it’s our responsibility to understand and appreciate how to mitigate the risk of exposure (which is now a bit more transparent…)

Love to all. Love to this community. Love to the Observable team. You have all changed everything about how I do work and how I understand the Internet.

(And sorry… I meant to respond to the thread, not just Harry!)

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62

I totally understand the need to generate revenue and have no problem with paid Pro accounts along with educational and academic discounts. But, I am very concerned that the details of this policy are focusing on short-term revenue at the expense of the longer-term viability of Observable.

In the short-term, this will push some Free users to become Pro users, thus increasing revenue. But, I worry that this policy will greatly reduce the number of new Free users exploring the product from now on. As a result, in the long-run, the “pipeline” to Pro users will dry up, and the growth and viability of Observable will stall.

Please, please consider providing Free users with a limited number of Private or, at the least, Public (unlisted), notebooks so that potential new users feel that they can try out Observable without being forced to do it in full public view.

The new model is like having a clothing store without a changing room, and you tell new customers that if they want to try on the clothes they have to do it out in the open. Don’t you think the store would be more successful with a changing room where you are only allowed a limited number of items?

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63

Very relevant metaphor

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64

This is a great way to drive out all of the would-be mid-tier customers. No more free private/unlisted? Fine, I’d be willing to pay for private/unlisted as long as everything else remained the same, and because the platform is so powerful. But remove publishing at the same time? And replace it with this awkward, half-baked fork+merge workflow? Who among the userbase is asking for these changes? Upgrading to pro just feels dirty now, because it rewards the decision by observable to take three steps backward in functionality.

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