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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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