We made our office suite free for everyone, including businesses. Here's why.

When we launched OBSCURA OS here on 5 Sep, it had a free tier and a one-time paid unlock for the extra privacy tools. It got one upvote and zero sales. Fair enough.

The lesson we took from it: people won't pay to try a privacy tool from someone they've never heard of. Trust has to come first, and the fastest way to earn it is to hand over the whole thing and let people check that it does what it says.

So now everything is free, at home and at work. What that covers:

• A full workspace in your browser tab: docs, sheets, slides, notes, calendar

• A few hundred file tools: redact a PDF, strip location and metadata from photos and videos, compress, convert, merge, split

• No account, nothing uploaded. Files are processed on your own device, so there is no server holding your documents

• Installs as an app and works offline

The plan to keep it alive is an optional paid add-on later (encrypted sync between devices), the same way Obsidian does it. The core tools stay free.

Two honest questions for other makers:

1. If you've gone free-first, how long before you added the paid layer?

2. For a privacy product, what would make you trust it enough to use it for real work?

obscuraos.com if you want to poke at it. Blunt feedback welcome.