Is Notion AI actually worth it?

Hey,

Notion shipped some updates this week that are easy to miss but hard to ignore once you know about them.

Mobile got a proper rework. Agents can now get into your private Slack channels. And if you're running Custom Agents, the free ride is over.

Nothing flashy. But the kind of stuff that changes how you use the product day to day.

Let's get into it.

- Nick

In Today's Email 👀

• Notion mobile finally becomes usable

• Agents can now work where real conversations happen

• Why custom agents might get expensive fast

• The Notion AI debate (and why both sides are right)

3 Tips / Updates

1/ NOTION MOBILE FINALLY HAS A HOME

Notion's mobile navigation just got a full rework.

The new home tab consolidates 4 things that were previously scattered: your home feed, chats, meetings, and inbox. One swipe to get from your daily brief to a meeting note to a teammate message. No more hunting through the bottom nav to find where your Meeting Notes landed.

Mobile Notion has been an afterthought for power users who live in the desktop app. But a lot of people use Notion specifically on their phones for general notes and quick captures during calls. That use case has been frustrating for years. This update directly fixes it. It's not too crazy, but it's the kind of thing you notice immediately.

The five-minute test for this week: Open Notion on your phone. Pin the 3 pages you actually open on mobile most. Most people's mobile sidebar is a graveyard of stuff they only ever touch on desktop. Clean it up while you're in there.

2/ AGENTS IN PRIVATE SLACK CHANNELS

Custom Agents can now read and reply in private Slack channels. Sounds like a small update. It isn't.

The conversations worth automating almost never happen in #general. They happen in your internal team chats. An agent locked to public channels is half an agent.

This is also what makes Notion's own demo use cases actually work. Their examples, like Clay's IT Buddy and Braintrust's competitive intelligence agent, only function if the agent can see where real work happens.

→ Public-only access was the gap. This closes it.

One catch: you have to invite the agent to each private channel manually. No blanket access. That's the right call for security, but it means setup work per channel. Start with one low-stakes channel before you go wide.

Settings → Notion AI → AI connectors → Enable access to private content. Then invite your most useful agent to one private channel and watch what it does for a few days. Expand from there.

3/ CUSTOM AGENTS ARE NO LONGER FREE

As of yesterday, Custom Agents cost Notion Credits to run. $10 per 1,000 credits, billed on top of your Business or Enterprise plan. When credits run out, agents stop. No warning, no fallback. They just pause.

What does real usage look like? One power user burned 33,700 credits last month. That's $337. For a team running a handful of agents, that's not an edge case, that's Tuesday.

The biggest lever is model selection.

→ Haiku 4.5 is 80% cheaper per run than Opus 4.7 and handles simple tasks just as well: routing, summarizing, formatting.

If you built agents during the free trial and left the model on auto, you're paying Opus prices for Haiku work. Fix that today.

Poll / From The Community

A 7-year Notion veteran gave Notion AI another shot and walked away unimpressed. Asked it to set a reminder, got a page with no reminder. Their verdict: joke, always has been.

The thread split cleanly in two. If you want to check it out for yourself → here

On one side: total agreement. One commenter had AI removed from their workspace entirely and hasn't looked back. Others pointed to the "New Chat" default as a design choice that feels more like a shove than an invite. A few noted that even if you're not anti-AI, the product should handle basic tasks without 30 seconds of thinking.

On the other side: equally passionate defenders. Several power users said Notion AI clicked for them once they set up an instructions page, switched models to Opus, and gave it real workspace context to work with. One commenter built out a full modal architecture, prompt libraries, and calls it their complete sidekick.

Both camps are right, just using different products.

→ Out of the box, Notion AI underdelivers.
→ With setup, some users swear by it.

Whether that gap is acceptable is the real question.

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Quick Links & Tools

Notion Credits FAQ: The official breakdown of how credits work, per-agent cost ranges, and how to set budget caps before you get a surprise bill.

OIsNotion Q1 2026 Breakdown: OIsNotion's 6-minute video covering 25 Q1 2026 features. Good catch-up if you don’t know what’s going on.

Claude Managed Agents for Notion: Private alpha, interest signups open. Assign tasks to a Claude agent directly from your existing Notion task database. It picks up full context from linked docs, meeting notes, and connected data, then reports back as it works. Not an MCP workaround. Native. Worth getting on the list now.