Notion AI: Is It Free, What It Costs and How the New Credits Work

Notion AI is the assistant built into Notion, the docs-and-databases app: an agent that writes, edits, builds pages and databases, searches your connected apps and takes meeting notes, all inside your workspace. Is Notion AI free? Only as a short trial. The Free and Plus plans get "a limited number of complimentary AI responses," and on my free account that trial was used up and stayed used up. The full Notion AI comes with the Business plan, at $24 per seat a month, or $20 a month if you pay for the year.

What Notion AI is right now

Notion AI still edits text inline, but Notion now sells its AI as a team of agents. The main one is the Notion Agent: you chat with it, and Notion says it can do anything you'd do in Notion yourself, from drafting a report to building a whole task database. Earlier in October, on this same account, it turned a study plan into a database with real checkboxes, and the trial ran out halfway through tidying up.

Notion AI · Notion Labs

Free trial · from $12/mo

Notion AI review →

Notion's comparison table ticks the Notion Agent and meeting notes on Free and Plus too, but there they run on the limited trial. The full versions, and these extras, come with Business:

• Custom Agents: agents you set up once to handle a repetitive job for the team, like answering questions or triaging requests.
• AI Meeting Notes: transcripts and summaries of your meetings, no bot joining the call.
• Enterprise Search (in beta): answers drawn from your connected apps, such as Slack, Google Drive and GitHub, not just from Notion.

When you open Notion AI on the web, the home screen asks "How can I help you today?" and offers shortcuts for slides, spreadsheets, research and visuals, plus a row of app icons (Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, GitHub, Salesforce and more) under "Get better answers from your apps." Next to the send button there's a model picker set to Auto: Notion calls its AI "model agnostic," and Auto chooses the model for each task. That picker matters more than it looks, because it decides which credits you spend. More on that below.

On your data, Notion's pricing page says Notion AI "will not use your data to train our models" unless you opt in, and its product page says its AI providers are contractually barred from training on customer data. Notion says non-Enterprise plans have 30-day data retention with the AI providers; Enterprise gets zero data retention.

Is Notion AI free? What I found on my free account

My test account is on the Free plan and signs in with Google. The free AI trial on this account was already used up earlier in October: it covered three requests, and the third one stopped halfway. So the question for today was simple: does the trial come back after a few weeks?

It doesn't. When I opened the Notion AI chat, a light-blue banner sat above the prompt box: "You've run out of free AI responses. Upgrade Notion AI." I typed a real request anyway, "Make me a 2-week training plan to run my first 5K, as a table with day, workout and notes," and pressed Enter. Nothing happened. The send arrow stayed gray.

Then I clicked "Upgrade Notion AI" to see what Notion would offer me. The answer is telling: not Plus, but Business. The screen says "Upgrade to the Business plan to access the full suite of Notion AI features," with $24 per member a month or $20 a month billed yearly.

Notion AI pricing: Free, Plus, Business and Enterprise

These are the prices on Notion's pricing page as of October 27, 2026, the day I tested it, in US dollars per seat (member) and month. Notion adds tax at checkout. It advertises up to 20% off for paying yearly; on Plus and Business it works out to about 17%. Guests are free, but they only see the pages they're invited to.

Worth knowing: there's no separate AI add-on on the pricing page. Plus at $12 gives you more Notion (custom forms and sites, charts, bigger file uploads, longer page history), but its Notion AI line is the same trial as Free. If the AI is what you're paying for, Plus is the wrong plan.

If you're a student or a teacher, the Plus plan (limited to one member) is free with your school email address. Just know that it comes with the same AI trial, not the full Notion AI.

How Notion AI credits work, and what changes in November

Fair warning: this part gets a little technical, but it decides what Business actually gets you. Notion is moving to a new credit system: new Business and Enterprise workspaces got it from October 19, 2026, and existing workspaces switch on November 2, 2026. There are three kinds of credits:

Standard and Select credits are separate: you can't combine them, swap one for the other or pass them to a colleague. When one kind runs out, the features that use it pause until your next monthly reset, unless your admin lets you keep going on Notion credits. Some top models always use Notion credits; Notion's help gives Fable and Astra as examples.

Here's the useful part: Notion's own estimates show how much cheaper Auto is. A simple task, like polishing an email, costs about 5 credits on Auto and 50 if you pick Opus 5.5 (from Claude's maker, Anthropic) yourself. A medium one, like writing a work report, is about 10 versus 85, and a complex one, like setting up a database, about 25 versus 150. My advice: leave the picker on Auto unless a task really needs a specific model. AI Meeting Notes runs on Auto and starts using Standard credits on December 1, 2026, at roughly 10 credits for a one-hour meeting. Everyday reading and writing through the Notion API or Notion MCP doesn't use credits, though running an agent through them does.

Custom Agents: the part that can cost extra

Custom Agents are where Notion is clearly heading. The pricing page sums them up as agents that "handle repetitive tasks autonomously," free to try and then $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits. By default, a Custom Agent spends its owner's Select credits, even when the whole team uses it; an admin can instead give an agent its own monthly budget of Notion credits.

Notion's own 40-second demo shows the idea: an agent that answers your team's questions in Slack and fixes the source page in Notion when someone corrects it in the thread. If your team asks the same questions every week, that's the kind of job worth handing over.

Who should pay for Notion AI, and who shouldn't

Notion AI makes sense if your team already keeps its docs, projects and meeting notes in Notion. The agent's big advantage over a separate chatbot is that it works on your pages and databases, so it can build or update them instead of handing you text to paste. That's what Business pays for: $20 a seat a month, billed yearly.

It makes much less sense if you're one person on the free plan hoping for free AI. The trial gives you a taste, and then it's Business (or Enterprise) or nothing. Plus won't get you there.

Notion AI or something else?

If you just want a capable assistant and don't need it inside Notion, a free plan elsewhere goes a lot further.

ChatGPT · OpenAI

Free with limits · from $8/mo

ChatGPT review →

ChatGPT gives you unlimited text chats on GPT-6 Luna for free, and Plus is $20 a month. Claude has a generous free plan and is my pick for long documents; Pro is also $20. If what you want is to ask questions about your own notes and files, NotebookLM, now called Gemini Notebook, answers only from the sources you add and is free with a Google Account. And if your day runs on Gmail, Docs and Drive rather than Notion, Gemini is Google's assistant built around them, free with a Google Account too, with paid Google AI plans from $4.99 a month.

Written by Miguel Ángel, with help from an LLM to verify facts.