This seems very exploitative of their user base. In a way that’s becoming more and more common.
Although Obsidian isn’t open source, the community has a very similar vibe. Very anti-big-corporate-overlord.
But maybe not, maybe the world of bounties is just one im not in the loop on and this is common.
Everyone is looking down on LLM-assisted dev here, but I think it's a great fit.
I also don't believe it can be one-shotted (there's too many deltas between Notion's API and Obsidian).
With that said, LLMs are great for enumerating edge-cases, and this feels like the perfect task for Codex/Claude Code.
I'd implore the obsidian team/maintainers to take a stab at building this with LLMs. Based on personal experience, the cost is likely within the same magnitude ($100-$1k in API cost + dev time), but the additional context (tests, docs, etc.) will be invaluable to future changes to either API surface.
In addition to what's already in the thread, I assume by now somebody has vibecoded an agent to scan GitHub for bounties and then automatically vibe up a corresponding solution. Will be a fun source of spam for anyone who wants to do the right thing and pay people for good work.
As someone who wrote a fair share of notion API code - the 5,000$ bounty is not enough and I'm only half-joking here.
That being said, yay open source bounties! People should do more of those.
Having once used the Notion API to build an OPEN API doc generator, I pity whoever takes this on. The API was painful to integrate with, full of limitations and nowhere near feature parity with the Notion UI itself
There are also open bounties by comma.ai, is it becoming more common? https://github.com/orgs/commaai/projects/26/views/1
What’s the easiest way to convert all dataviews in an existing Obsidian vault to Bases?
> Please only apply if you have taken time to explore the Importer codebase, as well as the Notion API.
Suddenly 5k$ does not sound as good
I've had a pretty good experience offering bounties on my own projects:
- https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6
If you look at that thread, you'll see I've paid out quite a lot in bounties, somewhere around 50-60kUSD (the amount is not quite precise, because some bounties I completed myself without paying, and others I paid extra when the work turned out to be more than expected). In exchange, I did manage to get quite a lot of work done for that cost
You do get some trash, it does take significant work to review, and not everything is amenable to bounties. But for projects that already have interested users and potential collaborators, sometimes 500-1000USD in cash is enough motivation for someone to go from curious to engaged. And if I can pay someone 500-1000USD to save me a week of work (and associated context switching) it can definitely be worth the cost.
The bounties are certainly not a living wage for people, especially compared to my peers making 1mUSD/yr at some big tech FAANG. It's just a token of appreciation that somehow feels qualitatively different from the money that comes in your twice-monthly paycheck