[lolinder]

The point is that because of the way they structured their blog it would be trivial to do exactly this if they ever needed to. There's no complicated export from a locked in application, you just move your blog files from one host to another (maybe to your own VPS).

The overhead of switching from Cloudflare to a VPS if they needed to is really not that much larger than switching from one VPS to another, so they likely figured it wasn't worth paying $30/yr to own the whole stack, as long as they architected it such that they could own the whole stack if they needed to.

[anon7000]

Similarly, Obsidian is just a markdown editor. So you're not even relying on their free tier; you could use any other markdown editor on the planet with the same results. Or any cloud file syncing tool.