Is Notion really a free tool? What are the hidden limitations? Let’s find out.
Notion comes with three plans:
- Personal
- Personal Pro
- Team
- Enterprise
As of writing this blog post, this is their pricing description.
Their Personal plan is completely free for the public. Even their API access!
Even their Personal Pro plan is free for students, teachers and other academic uses.
Let’s talk about their free plan - the Personal plan.
Here are the limitations of the free plan:
- You can only share with 5 guests
- No unlimited file uploads - A per file size limit may apply to any file that you upload to a Notion page or per database.
- No version history - Can be a life-saver at times. Really!
You can create unlimited content with unlimited blocks even with their free plan.
But why do they have their free plan? How do they sustain themselves?
- In the SaaS space, having a freemium pricing model is a proven mental model to leverage the economies of scale and cause disruption at scale. Notion has embraced the same.
- Their free plan means a lot of people create Notion related tutorials, there’ll be more template-creators, and the friction for getting started with it will be less.
- You can’t upload big files or manage versions in their free plan. Creating text-only content will not consume much bandwidth on their end and so it’s sustainable.
Their main cash flow is from big organizations and enterprises.
If you take Notion seriously, you will likely upgrade to a higher plan as you will need unlimited file storage and version history.