Questions

General AI chat services run your documents through the provider's own models and systems. Obsidian runs open-source models on a GPU dedicated to your vault. No third-party AI service sees your documents, and they are never used for model training. When you destroy the vault, its GPU instance and disk are deleted.

Your documents are uploaded over TLS 1.3 to Obsidian, and our servers relay them to your vault's GPU instance without storing them. That last hop is not encrypted. The GPU is rented from independent hosts on a third-party GPU marketplace; it is dedicated to your vault, though the host machine (CPU, disk, network) may be shared with other renters. Documents are indexed and processed there by open-source models. We never use your content for training.

Destroying a vault deletes its GPU instance and disk at the GPU provider, including the uploaded documents on it. This can't be undone. If chat saving was on (the default), the vault's saved questions and replies are deleted from our database at the same time.

We run a curated lineup of open-source models — Qwen 3 (4B) on the FLASH tier, Qwen 3.5 (35B MoE) on TURBO, and GLM-5 (744B MoE) on ULTRA — served via vLLM, an open-source inference engine. The model weights are public and run on your dedicated GPU instance, so no document is sent to a third-party AI API. You choose the model tier that fits your workload, from fast extraction to deep reasoning.

No. Obsidian is built for confidential work, but we don't offer a Business Associate Agreement and we haven't been certified against HIPAA. Each vault runs on a GPU dedicated to it, and you can destroy the vault when you're done.

Obsidian uses simple pay-as-you-go pricing with no subscriptions or commitments. GPU time starts at $4.95/hr for the FLASH tier (4B model) and goes up to $99.99/hr for the ULTRA tier (744B MoE frontier model). You only pay for the minutes you use. Add credit to your balance and start analyzing — no commitments.

Nothing goes to a specialist unless you request one. You write a brief, flag the files it's about, optionally auto-redact emails, US-format phone numbers, SSNs and card numbers in the brief, and confirm with a typed phrase. The specialist receives the brief and the names of the flagged files, not their contents. The request is recorded in your audit log.