While the basic plan will become free, Notion will also introduce a paid personal plan with premium features. The company does not disclose user numbers, but says it is “seeing record signups every day” - sometimes double the pre-pandemic volume, Zhao said. But the company delayed it amid a surge in usage related to COVID-19 and global stay-at-home orders.

Notion has intended to make the personal plan free since last year, said Ivan Zhao, Notion’s CEO. “The biggest motivation is just capturing market share - getting more people to use Notion,” says Akshay Kothari, Notion’s chief operating officer. (The company introduced a free version for students and teachers last fall.) Making Notion’s free plan more generous represents an effort to lure in more people and broaden the top of the company’s sales funnel. And plenty of people get by with the basic notes app that comes preinstalled on their phone or laptop. Among private companies, Evernote, Bear, and the upstart Coda all have their partisans. Among tech giants, choices include Google’s G Suite and Microsoft Office. The market for note-taking and collaboration apps is crowded and growing. The company put up a page showcasing other uses here. A guest can edit or comment on pages, allowing for lightweight collaboration. You can also add up to five “guests” on a free account. Job seekers are using this feature to create dynamic resumes that point to their work, the company says. The app’s community has built a broad range of templates highlighting potential uses: creating to-dos, keeping a journal, storing recipes, making a list of books to read, or publishing simple websites through a tool that allows you to make Notion pages public.

Now, free users will be able to add as many blocks as they like to their personal Notion database. After that, you had to pay $5 per month to create new blocks. Previously, users of Notion’s free plan could create 1,000 of what the company calls “blocks”: individual elements you add to Notion documents, such as text, tasks, embedded maps, or calendars. The company said today that people on its free plan will now be able to create unlimited notes, making it a top contender for anyone in the market for a sophisticated note-taking app or collaboration software. Notion, the workspace and note-taking app, just became much more appealing to individual users.

Story planner app backup