Obsidian users are a particular breed of knowledge worker — they care deeply about their tools, their data stays local, and they are willing to tinker. Adding AI to Obsidian via community plugins is popular, but the default setup has problems. You are paying per-token for every single "summarize this" and "expand these bullet points" command, even though these are the simplest possible LLM tasks. Most people either accept the cost or avoid using AI features because they feel wasteful.
Antbase makes Obsidian AI features effectively free for daily use. The vast majority of note-taking AI tasks — summarization, expansion, brainstorming, quick questions about your notes — are simple enough that free models handle them perfectly. Antbase routes these to fast free models automatically. The only time you hit a premium model is when you ask something genuinely complex, like synthesizing insights across multiple long documents. For typical usage, your monthly AI cost for Obsidian rounds to zero.
For Obsidian users who care about privacy, Antbase also provides a single trust boundary. Instead of sending your notes to multiple different providers depending on which plugin you use, everything goes through one endpoint with one privacy policy. Your vault contents are not stored by Antbase — they pass through for processing and that is it.
Obsidian has several community plugins that support OpenAI-compatible APIs. By pointing them at Antbase, you get AI features in your notes — summarize long documents, expand bullet points into prose, brainstorm ideas, and query your vault — all with intelligent model routing.
Setup with Text Generator Plugin
Install the Text Generator plugin from Obsidian Community Plugins. Then configure it:
- •Open Settings > Text Generator
- •Provider: OpenAI Compatible
- •API Key: ant_your-api-key
- •Base URL: https://antbase.ai/v1
- •Model: auto
Usage
Select text in a note and use the command palette (Cmd+P) to run Text Generator commands:
- •Generate Text — continue writing from the selected text or cursor position.
- •Summarize — condense the selected text into key points.
- •Expand — turn bullet points into full paragraphs.
- •Custom Templates — create reusable prompts for specific tasks (e.g., "Write a meeting summary from these notes").
Tips
- •Most Obsidian AI tasks are simple generation — Antbase routes them to fast free models, so the cost is minimal.
- •Create templates for your common workflows: meeting notes, research summaries, brainstorming sessions.
- •The Smart Connections plugin also supports custom endpoints — configure it the same way for semantic search across your vault.
- •Your notes never leave the API call path. Antbase does not store request content.
