Notion’s new credit system starts Nov 2

Hey,

Notion rebuilt its AI and rewrote how you pay for it. The new credit system went live Oct 19 for new customers. Existing Business and Enterprise workspaces switch over on Nov 2. That’s 13 days from today.

Let’s get into it.

Before we get into this week’s email, something I think you’ll find useful. Custom Agent runs draw down your credits, so what you build first matters.

That’s why I made a free scorecard. Answer 5 questions about your work, and it ranks your AI ideas on factors like how often the task repeats, whether you have a written source for it, and how easy it is to check. You get 1 clear first build and a list of what to park. In the example, invoice follow-ups ranks first at 9/12.

I built it with the team at Nerd Out, the same group behind Harvest Profit, the farm software company we grew with a 6-person team until John Deere acquired it in 2020. It takes about 2 minutes, and you enter your email to see your results.

Start the 2-minute scorecard

In Today's Email 👀

• Notion’s new credit system, and what changes for you on Nov 2

• Notion 3.8 makes Notion the home for every agent you use

• Reschedule a late project in 1 prompt

• Auto picks the model for you, and it’s cheaper

3 Tips / Updates

1/ NOTION REBUILT ITS AI AND ITS PRICING

Notion announced a faster Notion AI and a new credit system on Oct 19.

Every Business and Enterprise seat now gets 1,500 Standard credits and 500 Select credits per month. Standard covers Auto, plus AI Meeting Notes from Nov 1 (about 10 credits for a 1 hour meeting). Select covers any time you pick the model yourself + Custom Agents.

Free and Plus plans don't change. Credits don't roll over.

The engine under it changed too. Auto, the model router, now splits bigger jobs by difficulty: a cheap model gathers info, a smart one synthesizes, a cheap one writes it back.

Across 20+ common tasks, Notion says Auto matched Opus 5.5 and Astra at about 90% lower average cost. Agents were rebuilt to run tasks for more than 24 hours (up from 5 minutes), and Custom Agent runs cost about 30% less in testing. They also get their own browser for filling in forms and crawling sites with no API.

You can also connect your ChatGPT Plus, Pro, or Go plan to your personal Notion Agent (not Custom Agents). Bring your own key is in private alpha on Enterprise. The AI Command Center is coming soon.

The real win: every seat can now build Custom Agents without an admin buying credits first which was the biggest blocker to adoption.

Two potential problems. Select credits are per person, not pooled. A Custom Agent you build burns your Select credits even when a teammate runs it, until an admin funds it from workspace credits. Run out of Select and your Custom Agents pause until next cycle, while Auto keeps working on Standard.

2/ NOTION 3.8 IS A CONTEXT PLAY

Notion shipped 3.8 on Oct 13. The theme is context. Connect any MCP agent to your workspace and keep your docs and task trackers as the shared memory. Notion says MCP is its fastest-growing product ever, and memory sync is live.

You also get Skills you write once and sync to other agents through a new Skills API. Admins can see who connected each AI tool, when it was last used, and revoke one person without nuking the rest. Notion's own agents can pull from 150+ tools over MCP.

This is the right bet. If you switch AI tools your context should not move with them. Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari already runs his agents this way. He built a vault of 5 pages in Notion, including a memory database, and every agent he uses writes back to it. Version history shows which agent changed what.

Open questions remain: one reply points to Notion's page size limits, and nobody knows how conflict resolution holds up after years of memories.

Copy this setup URL → send it to your main agent → let it build the vault in Notion. Then connect a second agent and ask what it knows about your preferences. If it answers right, you just stopped retraining every new tool. Label what you told it separately from what it guessed, or every agent will treat a guess as a fact. If an agent uses the API instead of MCP, it can't see the vault, so give it direct page access.

3/ RESCHEDULE A LATE PROJECT IN 1 PROMPT

You tell Notion Agent your project is late. It reads task status and dates in your workspace, flips the late tasks to urgent, and moves the dates. In the demo you watch the database update live: late tasks turn red, and tasks blocked by others stay behind their blockers. Then it writes the message for your team: what changed, why, and what you need from everyone.

The prompt is 4 short sentences: say the project is late, ask it to reschedule around what's in progress, mark the late tasks urgent, and write the update to your teammates with details.

It only works if your tasks have a status, a date, and a blocked-by link. An agent can't reschedule what you never dated.

Pick a project database with 3 or more overdue tasks, or copy one. Run the prompt on Auto → check the date changes → check your credit usage. Run it again on a model you pick. Compare the credits and the result. Check that no blocked task jumped ahead of its blocker, then read the message before you send it to anyone.

From The Community

Another round of talk about changes to Notion’s AI allowance is landing badly with people who run real work on it.

The frustration isn’t really about more or less, it’s about how often the rules shift. Teams can spend a month adjusting routines to the last revamp, just as things settle to then be asked to adjust once again.

A few themes keep coming up. People can’t estimate whether they’ll stay under their allowance, so planning around it feels like guessing. A runaway request can burn credits, and getting them back through support can take weeks. And a simple budget cap, a hard limit per agent or task, is the fix that would help the most.

For anyone building routines around it, predictability may matter more than the number.

Quick Links & Tools

Notion's "Data Scout" agent: Notion's most-used internal agent. It queries Snowflake in plain language and builds meeting prep pages. 1 in 2 employees used it last month, and requests to the data team's Slack channel dropped 80%. Here is Notion's guide to building a data agent.

Find answers from all your apps: It now says one prompt catches you up on a project, and suggests asking for the main goals, recent progress, and current challenges. It credits “Notion says” for the up to 10 minutes saved per search, since that’s their claim.

Identify your ICP from meeting notes: Matthew Silberman, a Notion ambassador who runs a Clay consultancy, keeps every client call in a meeting notes database. One prompt has Notion Agent read all the transcripts, work out who the client sells to, then fill two databases with the company and people data points to collect. He says it surfaced points he'd missed himself. Steal it for any client onboarding.