feature request: subscriber/payer access to notebooks

[triptych]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Right now you have public access, private access, group access. I as a creator want to find ways to make money for my work. One way is to get subscribers or folks to pay a one time $$ to access a document. So what I am asking for is similar to "teams" but I'm not collaborating with these folks. They are just a list of Observable members who have access to this notebook. This is something of course that can be done now with unlisted notebooks - and managed outside of Observable. The ask is at least allow us as a notebook owner to limit the ability to view a notebook to a list of folks.

Visibility :

• public
• unlisted
• limited -- list

Describe the solution you'd like The dream would be to allow someone to "subscribe" to a user. But the reality is just give observable notebook creators a way to limit the visibility of a notebook to a limited set of users. This is NOT a team. I don't want to collaborate with these people, I just want to allow them to see my otherwise hidden notebooks. I manage the list of users either on a per notebook or per collection basis.

Describe alternatives you've considered This can all be done and managed outside of observable manually now and just use unlisted notebook urls. However this is not secure as one of the folks might accidentally share an unlisted url. And this is not Teams - I don't want a collective collaborative workplace with these folks.

Additional context It would allow us as creators to do things like have Beta releases of content / notebooks. It would allow us as creators to sell access to these notebooks.

[CobusT]

Do you envision listing a large number of 'limited' users? And would you think of them as only viewers of the notebooks?

If you think about the personal sharing option that already exists for up to 4 additional people on a notebook, how similar would this be?

[triptych]

A typical use case is that people manage mailing lists. There are subscriptions via Patreon, Gumroad, Flurly, etc. The idea is that it's not scalable to try to manage links via "unlisted" links, as they are also leaky if one of the members accidentally shares a link. So, say I have a subscriber list of maybe 100 people - and I want to give them access to this certain notebook.

Either that limitation could be enforced via a whitelist of users, or another method like some special passcode? The ask is "I want to limit viewing a notebook to a white list of users" either this list is ON Observable, or off Observable but those users have a special key to access the content.

Another scenario might be that someone is a freelancer and did some work for a client, and want to present their findings via Observable. The freelancer would want to give a key or get a list of allowed users to see the results of the research.

[CobusT]

I suspect that the freelances could potentially get away with personal sharing (I am not talking about link sharing, or unlisted publishing as it is now called... but actually sharing via the 'Share' option, where you invite up to 4 additional users to a private notebook.

But your '100 people' scenario would obviously not be served through the limited personal sharing feature. That requires some thinking.

[triptych]

Thanks for considering this. Things like this would pave the way for freelancers to use Observable as a means to publish and sell their work. Imagine instead of a static PDF sold via gumroad, someone sells a dynamic document with live updates for say stock recommendations, or how to's that update based on new library changes.

[huangkuan]

I would like that feature as well. Why don't you allow 3rd party developers to contribute to these features?

[CobusT]

Why don't you allow 3rd party developers to contribute to these features?

Because our platform is not open source... :-)

Thanks for adding your vote to the feature request, though!

[pglezen]

I'm not sure if I'm asking for the same thing, but this sounds similar. As a pro user, I'd like to allow a non-pro user to view and comment on two of my private notebooks. It's a hard sell to get them to sign up for the Pro edition just to see one of my private notebooks.

Am I upvoting this feature? Should I open a new one? Or has this already been discussed and closed?

[CobusT]

I'm not sure if I'm asking for the same thing, but this sounds similar. As a pro user, I'd like to allow a non-pro user to view and comment on two of my private notebooks. It's a hard sell to get them to sign up for the Pro edition just to see one of my private notebooks.

Am I upvoting this feature? Should I open a new one? Or has this already been discussed and closed?

At the moment, the way to do this would be make the notebook public, but unlisted, and share the URL with the users. There are some limitations to this which you are probably aware of:

• The URL is public, so it could be leaked to others
• Private notebook features won't work in public unlisted notebooks (e.g. database connectors, secrets)

The way I see this feature request heading is to add the ability to add a password to a public unlisted notebook to add a layer of access control to the URL.