Everyone’s running out of Notion AI credits

Hey,

Everyone’s running out of Notion AI credits this month. Business quota gone, top-ups gone, and Auto doesn’t pick the cheap model you’d expect.

So this issue is about doing more in Notion with less AI: a brain dump that builds its own project, the linked database rule that saves your task list, and 6 small changes you missed.

It gets more urgent on Thursday, when Workers start billing credits too. That’s 2 days from today.

Let’s get into it.

Before we get into this week’s email, something I think you’ll find useful. Most people who want to use AI in their business get stuck on the same question: what should I actually build first?

That’s why we made a 2-minute scorecard. It asks five questions about your work, then ranks which AI task is worth building first, based on how often it repeats, whether you have a written source for it, and how easy it is to check. You finish with one clear first build and a list of what to park for later.

It’s built by me and the team at Nerd Out, the same group behind Harvest Profit, the farm software company we grew with a six-person team until John Deere acquired it in 2020. Our live workshops are all about turning one real workflow into a working system, and knowing what to bring makes them far more useful.

It’s free and takes about two minutes.

Start the 2-minute scorecard

In Today's Email 👀

• Turn a messy brain dump into a real project with one prompt

• Linked databases aren’t copies, and deleting from one deletes everywhere

• 6 small things you probably missed, from word counts to silent API writes

• From the community: everyone’s out of AI credits, and how they’re coping

3 Tips / Updates

1/ TURN A MESSY BRAIN DUMP INTO A REAL PROJECT

Most research pages end up the same way: long, chaotic, with to-do blocks scattered through them that never make it into an actual task list. Notion Agent can now sweep through a page like that and turn every to-do into a task, and group them into a project if you ask.

The details are what make it worth trusting. Each task gets a short summary title, but the original to-do text is pasted into the task’s page, so a vague summary never leaves you guessing what you meant. Everything it creates carries a “Created by AI” tag, so you can always tell its work from yours. And because the agent’s instructions page says which databases tasks and projects belong in, it doesn’t waste time hunting around your workspace.

A prompt along these lines does the job:

You get to brainstorm without worrying about structure, and the plan gets built afterward, with fallbacks in place if the AI gets something wrong.

2/ THE NOTION FEATURE THAT LOOKS LIKE A COPY BUT ISN’T

Almost every serious Notion setup runs on linked databases, and almost everyone gets one thing wrong about them at first. A linked database isn’t a copy. It’s the same data shown somewhere else, with its own rules.

That’s what makes it powerful. Keep one master task list, drop a linked view on your Work page filtered to work tasks, another on a project page filtered to that project, and you only ever maintain one list. Nothing gets duplicated and nothing falls out of sync.

It’s also where the mistakes happen. A filter only hides things, it doesn’t remove them, but delete a task from any linked view and it’s gone from every other place it appears. Most people learn that the hard way, usually by cleaning up one page and finding the original list shorter than expected.

Once it clicks, you stop building separate lists for work, personal and projects, and just build one and look at it differently.

3/ 6 SMALL THINGS YOU PROBABLY MISSED

No big launch doesn't mean nothing moved. Half of these live in the app. Half live in the API.

• Default sidebar tabs. Admins can now set sidebar tabs that load automatically for every new workspace member. Existing members can add them too.

• Word count on selection. Highlight any block and the word and character count shows up at the bottom. Finally.

• Searchable settings. Type what you want instead of clicking through 4 menus. Notion moves settings around constantly, so this one saves real time.

• iPad rebuild (preview). Notion is rebuilding the iPad app from the ground up, new editor included. Not live yet.

• Silent page writes (Oct 8). Create page, Update page and Append block children now accept notifications.mode: "silent". No update pings, no @mention pings, no Person-property pings. Automations and webhooks still fire. If you run a nightly import, flip this on today and your team stops muting the integration. Pair it with an old trick most people miss: click any Person property → Notifications → None. Agents can reassign all day and nobody gets pinged.

• Select options stop breaking (Oct 9). Recoloring an existing select, multi-select or status option through the API no longer throws an error. Option names now match regardless of case, so "high" keeps your "High" option and its ID. Omitting a description or option list keeps what's there.

From The Community

AI credits are the new thing people keep running out of. Business plan quota gone, a couple of 1,000 credit top ups gone too, and Auto, which most assumed would pick the cheapest option, burns through them fast. The tooltip that used to label the cheaper models is gone as well, so picking one is mostly guesswork now.

The catch is that the expensive way to use AI is also the best way to think. Long chats with plenty of context give better results, but Notion’s AI re-reads the whole conversation on every message. The usual advice is short tasks, batched pages, and fresh sessions with results saved to a project page. It works, it just adds admin of its own.

So people have settled into a few workarounds. Comparing models by task on Notion’s Knowledge Board, connecting a ChatGPT plan, or leaving the heavy lifting to Claude or Cursor and using Notion as the place everything gets stored.

Which says a lot about where this is heading: Notion as the home for your data, and the AI wherever it’s cheapest.

Quick Links & Tools

The best 70 minutes on Notion AI this month: Matthias Frank's The Complete Notion AI Masterclass (2026 Guide) makes one argument worth stealing: Notion is your context layer, and the AI on top is swappable. The part to watch is the memory setup 49 minutes in. Each project gets 4 docs: a brief, a "where am I", a decision log and a dictionary. Most sessions only need to read 2 of them.

Steal Baseten's self-healing wiki: In How to Build a Self-Improving Answer Bot with AI Agents, Baseten runs 3 Custom Agents that answer questions in Slack, draft missing wiki pages and flag stale ones. Only the Q&A agent fires on every message; the other 2 run daily and weekly, which matters a lot more after Thursday.

Notion's onboarding runs itself: In Designing Employee Onboarding in the AI Era, Notion's people team shows how one database drives every new hire's first 90 days. Change a start date and a skill moves every day-one invite across 6 countries, a job that used to eat 6 to 10 hours a week.