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This is kinda weird, because I was happily giving them $4/month after running out of space in their trial plan, and now I absolutely have no reason to keep givi
by avolcano 6y ago
This is kinda weird, because I was happily giving them $4/month after running out of space in their trial plan, and now I absolutely have no reason to keep giving them money.
Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my usage of their app doesn't align with their business model, which makes it feel rather... tenuous? Like at any time they might say "actually we're going to only support paid enterprise usage now" or "oh we're shutting down because companies just used Confluence and Airtable instead" (I have yet to sell any employer on using Notion because it's too unstructured for them to grok the benefits of :\).
- clairity 6y agoit's product as marketing: make happy individual users, in the target market, and you're likely to tell others, hopefully workmates or others like you. if you can get a workgroup using the product and happy with it, it's worth quite a bit more with their per-user subscription model for groups. it can work well for productivity apps, slack, for example.
- omegadeep10 6y agoI too was happily paying for my personal plan. Recently they have been hiring aggressively and expanding their templates for specific use cases. Coming from a cynical HN perspective, this looks like another promising startup falling into the vicious cycle of using VC money to fund hyper growth. However their founder Ivan Zhao has been outspoken about not taking more VC money than necessary, and creating sustainable growth. So for now I'm approaching this news with cautious optimism.
- trynewideas 6y agoKnowing their aversion to VC in their history, I had the opposite reaction — this feels like a play to boost raw user count in order to attract an investor.
- keithwhor 6y agoNotion just raised $50M. I don't think they need to boost anything to attract anybody. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup-fund-raising.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup...
- Infinitesimus 6y agoI share your cynicism on this. Good chance this is a play to drastically boost numbers to court a big company for an exit. Not a bad idea if that keeps the product alive since it seems to be very loved in the world of productivity apps. Also, I find it interesting that they're working on an API. A lot of organizing products lack integrations and this might open to door to sync items between Office, GSuite, fitness applications and other services for life management.
- ponker 6y agoThe flip side is that Evernote had a human-aligned business model and as a result never made enough money to compete with Microsoft OneNote.
- gkoberger 6y agoGithub just did the same thing! It’s because the math works like this: They’d need 1,000 people to pay them $4 to match a single enterprise company paying them $4k/mo. So they just need one of those 1,000 people to bring Notion into their company, and they’re ahead. If they get 10, they’re way ahead. (This is slightly simplified, of course)
- jilles 6y agoI never thought about it in this way, very interesting and super logical actually.
- tnolet 6y agoThis is exactly how freemium in b2b SaaS works. The free plan is a marketing tool to drive awareness and adoption.
- bachmeier 6y agoDon't overlook the importance of the economy. It's tough to get individual customers to pay $4/month for a service like this in a good economy. (They were already giving it away to academics, which will never be a lucrative market.) I wouldn't want to be selling Notion to individuals in an economy like this.
- noam_compsci 6y agoThis is exactly what I did. Free student user. When I started working at a new company, and they wanted to modernise internal knowledge tools, I recommended Notion. Fingers crossed it gets traction.
- Lightbody 6y agoThe impressive thing here is that it's (sadly) pretty rare for a company to actively cease a revenue stream and think of the longer term benefits. GitHub and Notion are two recently examples, but for every one I see in the market, I can point to at least 10 that failed to take the obvious action.
- 6y ago
- iliaznk 6y agoGot about the same feeling, but then I noticed that this free personal plan allows only 5mb of file uploads as opposed to the unlimited uploads in the paid plan, which is one of my use cases – I store quite a lot of files there as a personal software archive, and then I felt relieved.
- hsrada 6y agoThe 5mb is a per file size. You can still upload unlimited files as long as they're less than 5mb.
- intopieces 6y agoAre there any open source Notion alternatives? This is the main benefit of open source software, in my mind: no one can "take" it from you because it doesn't belong to "them" in the same way that a product does.
- brnt 6y agoI'm a happy user of QOwnNotes and Markor with a shared dir with a sync tool of your choice. Indeed, committing my data to a closed (source) silo is what prevents me from using tools like this (Notion does look very neat).
- madballster 6y agoemacs + orgmode
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MikeKusold 6y agoJoplin or Bookstack are probably the closest. Joplin is closer to Evernote. https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/
- eugeniub 6y agoYeah I don't think Joplin has collaboration features. I also found the UI to be extremely bad on iOS. BookStack doesn't have any client apps — it's basically a PHP app like WordPress that you can self-host, but the collaboration feature set is pretty good. It's a wiki that feels a bit like Notion.
- tommoor 6y agoOutline could be an alternative if your main usecase was internal team documentation. I understand that Notion can be used for a lot of other things too… It is BSL licensed, the only restriction is that you cannot run a hosted version for other organizations to use (aka compete with the only way the project maintains itself). https://www.getoutline.com/ https://www.getoutline.com/
- the-dude 6y agoI assume this is on the frontpage because of the Microsoft announcements.
- machbio 6y agothey might have ruined it for people paying for Notion Personal >> What if I had multiple members in my free workspace? No worries, you don’t have to remove anyone! Nothing is different for you until you hit 1,000 blocks of content. At that point, if you want to add more, you can: Upgrade to our Team Plan. Start a new workspace for just yourself and use it for free, indefinitely. Remove members, and enjoy no content limits on your own. Note: Make sure members in your workspace have their private pages backed up before you remove them!
- madballster 6y agoDon't feel bad, they just got a major cash infusion from a VC firm. Looks like they figured those $4 a month individual users won't move their need much long term?
- pacomerh 6y agoYeah, you might still have a reason though, if you upgrade to Personal Pro which gives you 30 days of version history
- ec109685 6y agoBy keeping SSO out of personal use, they can be assured that most businesses will have to pay as thus they can more easily give this part of their service away. Another example of the SSO Tax: https://robchahin.github.io/sso-wall-of-shame/ https://robchahin.github.io/sso-wall-of-shame/