blog / Welcome to screen.garden Early Access

Our doors are open!

Three years ago we started tinkering in our free time on an idea: what if we could have Google Docs-style collaboration right inside Obsidian? Over time that idea accreted, as all good ideas do, into a series of interlocking features: realtime collaboration, web editing, opt-in publishing, teams, seeing where your teammates are in your notes…we started building and we just couldn’t stop.

In the middle of that three-year period we released a private beta that looked, at least on the web and in the backend, pretty different from what we’re releasing today. Mostly what we learned from our private beta was that we had to keep building! That this was the kind of thing you couldn’t do partway. We’re finally at a point with screen.garden where we can throw open the door.

So, without further ado: screen.garden is now open for registration in what we’re calling early access.

What is early access?

Early access is our way of signaling that while screen.garden is production-ready, it’s still early days and there are a few remaining things we need to figure out, mainly:

1. We don’t yet support syncing or collaborating on anything other than Markdown, and
2. Our teams support, while suitable for teams of all shapes and sizes, doesn’t support the fine-grained permissions that e.g. very large organizations might expect.

Again, screen.garden is ready for production use: we’ve been using it as our main collaboration tool for months. Still, we believe in building tools for everyone, and that includes people who want to sync images alongside people who want to set up complex topographies of private notes. Once we ship those features—features we are currently in the planning and execution stages of—we’ll consider our early access period over.

A note on pricing and free

Every team on screen.garden includes a one-week free trial, after which it is five dollars per team member per month. We really agonized over how to price what we’ve built, and I thought it might be interesting to explain why.

When launching software on the web pricing is very, very difficult; our priority with screen.garden is to pay our server costs without making things prohibitively expensive. As a result, we decided to set our price as low as we could without risking immediately running our budget into the ground.

More importantly, we are running a service that should be online at all times, handles your data, and needs to respect those facts. The past two decades of internet history have shown that if someone gives you software that runs on the internet for free then they are profiting from you in other ways. We love Obsidian, for example, because at baseline it’s a free app that runs on our laptops and phones. You can connect it to the internet, via screen.garden or Obsidian Sync or both—this is perhaps a good place to note that Obsidian Sync and screen.garden work well together—but you don’t have to. We (Sloane and I, who made screen.garden) chose to pay for Obsidian because we love it, and we hope you choose to pay for screen.garden for the same reason.

In the end, we don’t offer a fully free tier because we don’t want to be in the business of profiting off your data. screen.garden is not code that runs only on your laptop or phone; it also runs in the cloud, where it does the work of keeping you in sync with your team (plus lots of other neat features!). It’s important to us that we never tempt ourselves with trying to stay afloat by doing anything other than offer you a great service. A subscription is what lets us do that.

Come on in

We hope you enjoy using screen.garden as much as we do. I use it every day, and every day I say something to Sloane like “this honestly feels like magic,” or “I can’t believe our sync is this fast!” You can read more, check out our new demo video, and sign up at screen.garden.