BrainShare FAQ

Common questions about BrainShare, the free Obsidian publishing plugin.

What is BrainShare?

BrainShare is a free, open-source plugin for Obsidian that publishes a slice of your vault as a public or token-gated URL. It runs on Cloudflare's free tier and renders wikilinks, backlinks, callouts, tags, canvases, and a knowledge graph. The whole stack is one Obsidian plugin, one Cloudflare Worker (~3000 lines of TypeScript), and one Node CLI for bulk operations. Author is Maheen / MachoMaheen, license is MIT, source is at https://github.com/MachoMaheen/brainshare.

How is BrainShare different from Obsidian Publish?

Obsidian Publish costs $96/year, runs on Obsidian's servers, has no API, no per-recipient gating, and no way to extend the renderer. BrainShare costs $0, runs on your own Cloudflare account, exposes a public API for full-text search and feeds, supports per-recipient JWT-gated tokens with expiry and revocation, and is MIT-licensed so you can fork the renderer. Both are valid choices for different use cases. See BrainShare vs Obsidian Publish for the full breakdown.

Is BrainShare free?

Yes, $0. The plugin is MIT-licensed and the whole backend is designed for Cloudflare's free tier (100,000 KV reads/day, 1,000 writes/day, 1 GB storage). There is no paid tier, no signup wall, no email gate, no sales call. If you outgrow Cloudflare's free tier, you upgrade your Cloudflare plan to Workers Paid ($5/month). BrainShare itself stays free.

Can I self-host BrainShare?

Yes, that is the only way to host it. There is no central BrainShare server. You deploy the worker to your own Cloudflare account with wrangler deploy, the plugin in Obsidian points to that worker URL, and you own the entire stack. Full walkthrough is in Install BrainShare in 60 Seconds.

Do I need a Cloudflare account?

Yes. The worker and the KV namespace both live in your Cloudflare account. A free Cloudflare account is enough to run BrainShare for real launch traffic. The reasons we picked Cloudflare are written up in A Thank-You to Cloudflare.

What does each shared URL include?

A BrainShare slice renders every note in the slice as an HTML page, plus a sidebar tree of the folder structure, backlinks for each note, the properties panel from Obsidian frontmatter, callouts, mermaid blocks, full-text search, an Atom RSS feed, and a knowledge graph. Canvases (Obsidian's native JSON canvas format) render as interactive nodes and edges. Wikilinks resolve across the slice using stable ULIDs, so renames and reorganizations do not break links.

Can I share notes privately?

Yes. Each slice can be gated with JWT tokens, one URL per recipient. Tokens are expirable, revocable, and view-count-capped. You can also leave a slice fully public, or mix the two. Sharing decisions are per slice, not per account.

Is BrainShare a SaaS?

No. BrainShare is a plugin plus a worker that you deploy to your own Cloudflare account. There is no central BrainShare account, no shared backend, no telemetry pinging a vendor. The repo is MIT and forkable.

Can AI agents read BrainShare pages?

Yes. Every BrainShare URL is server-rendered into a single self-contained HTTP response with no client-side framework, so AI agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, agents using fetch) get the full content from a plain GET. The worker also exposes /api/search and /api/wraps/{id} as JSON endpoints, and serves /llms.txt and /pricing.md for machine-readable context. Every page a human reads is callable by an agent at the same URL.

How do I install BrainShare?

Three paths. Beta channel via BRAT (recommended while the community store PR is in review): use the BRAT plugin in Obsidian and point it at MachoMaheen/brainshare. Manual install: clone the repo into your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ folder and reload. Community store: pending review at PR https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/pull/12449. Full quickstart with the worker deploy step is in Install BrainShare in 60 Seconds.

Does BrainShare work with Obsidian Sync?

Yes. BrainShare writes a ULID into each note's frontmatter and otherwise leaves the file alone, so Obsidian Sync (or any other vault sync) handles the file like any other markdown file. The published URL stays stable across renames because the ULID, not the filename, is the canonical identity.

Who built BrainShare and why?

Maheen (https://github.com/MachoMaheen) built it in 16 days, between 29 April and 15 May 2026. The motivation is in A letter for my fellow viewers: sharing a curated slice of a second brain with a specific audience, on terms you control, was a missing middle between private notes and full public publishing. The bigger picture, where many brains lightly link to each other, is sketched in Many Brains, One Web. Why every render now takes 3 KV reads instead of 38 is in How I cut KV reads by 12x the day before launch.

Maheen 15 May 2026