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Comment by avolcano | Hacker News Reader

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 :\).

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Github 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)

Don'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.

This 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.

I never thought about it in this way, very interesting and super logical actually.

This is exactly how freemium in b2b SaaS works. The free plan is a marketing tool to drive awareness and adoption.

More than that, because account management and dealing with billing problems is not free.

The 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.

In Github's case I feel like it helps that they have Microsoft backing them up. MS is much more used to this model, I imagine they make a ton more off enterprise licensing then they do off individually sold ones.

Exactly. After reading this Notion going free news.. My initial reaction is "the Github way". In any case, thank you for explaining math behind.

I 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.

I 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.

Knowing 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.

Notion 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...

Are 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.

Joplin or Bookstack are probably the closest. Joplin is closer to Evernote.

https://joplinapp.org/

https://www.bookstackapp.com/

Yeah 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.

Outline 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/

I cannot use outline unless I have Slack or a Google account?!

That's correct.

I'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).

I use Tiddlywiki. The good part is that, once you familiarize yourself with the internals, you can customize it any way you like.

https://tiddlywiki.com/

https://standardnotes.org/

No. There are tools doing similar stuff of some aspects of Notion. But the main benefit of Notion is the interface and collection of ability. And there is nothing like that at the moment. But the question is what you really want. Maybe you are just care for some specific aspect, not the whole tool?

emacs + orgmode

It's a wiki. MediaWiki has a lot of dynamic features now.

it'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.

By 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/

Got 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.

The 5mb is a per file size. You can still upload unlimited files as long as they're less than 5mb.

they 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!

Don'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?

The flip side is that Evernote had a human-aligned business model and as a result never made enough money to compete with Microsoft OneNote.

Yeah, you might still have a reason though, if you upgrade to Personal Pro which gives you 30 days of version history

I assume this is on the frontpage because of the Microsoft announcements.

no they just anounced this today

Timing of the announcement isn't a coincidence though I'd guess.

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