PM Tools Reviewed

Update

Notion 3.8 and AI Credits Update 2026: What Changed, What It Costs

Notion's AI is no longer one allowance. Business and Enterprise seats now carry 1,500 Standard and 500 Select credits a month, paid models draw from a workspace pool at $10 per 1,000, and AI Meeting Notes starts billing Standard credits on December 1, 2026. Here is the arithmetic, the gaps, and what to do before that date.

· By Ace · Updated

Notion

Notion spent 2026 converting AI from a bundled feature into a metered one. If you read only the headline — “AI included with Business” — you have the shape right and every number wrong.

The current model, as documented by Notion itself, is three balances that behave differently: Standard credits, Select credits, and Notion credits. Two are per-member allowances that reset monthly and never roll over. The third is a shared workspace pool you buy at $10 per 1,000 credits on monthly billing or $13 per 1,000 on annual billing, and it is the only one that can make an exhausted workflow keep running.

This update page covers what changed, what the tiers include, what the paid models cost per seat per year, and — the part that matters for a team that already has automations running — one dated billing change: AI Meeting Notes begins consuming Standard credits on December 1, 2026.

TL;DR

  • Three balances, not one. On Business and Enterprise, each member gets 1,500 Standard credits and 500 Select credits per month. Notion calls these “credits” but explicitly says they “aren’t cash or a cash balance,” cannot be combined, cannot be transferred between members, reset monthly and do not roll over.
  • The two allowances split by who picks the model. Standard covers work where Notion routes the model for you (Notion Agent on Auto, AI editing, translation, AI blocks, database formulas, AI Meeting Notes from December 1 2026). Select covers work where you pick the model, or where you run a Custom Agent that is not funded by the workspace.
  • Notion credits are an add-on for Business and Enterprise only. Priced at $10 per 1,000 credits on monthly billing and $13 per 1,000 on annual billing. Annual credits are prepaid, usable any time in the subscription year, and do not carry over at renewal; monthly credits reset every month and unused ones are lost.
  • The billing-mode trap. If your workspace is billed through the Apple App Store or Google Play, you cannot buy credits at all. Notion’s own help documentation tells owners to cancel the app-store subscription, wait for it to fully expire, then move billing to notion.com — which for most teams means losing the seat before you can buy the thing that keeps the agent running.
  • A deadline worth calendarising. AI Meeting Notes “will begin consuming monthly Standard credit allowance on December 1, 2026,” with Notion estimating ~10 Standard credits per one-hour meeting. If Standard credits are already tight before that date, meeting notes is the line item that will break them.
  • If you are under 10 people and use AI occasionally, do not buy credits. Your 2,000 combined monthly credits per member (1,500 Standard + 500 Select) reset every month. Buy only if you have a measured, recurring workload — and measure it before you buy, because Notion’s included allowance “may vary depending on your plan and purchase arrangement.”

The three balances, defined the way Notion defines them

Most confusion about Notion’s 2026 AI pricing comes from treating “credits” as one currency. It is three counters with different owners, different resets and different failure behaviour.

Standard credits — 1,500 per member, per month. These are spent when Notion chooses the model. That is Notion Agent left on Auto, which the help documentation describes as “Notion’s model router” that “sends each task to the model that best balances quality, speed, and cost, so you don’t have to choose a model yourself.” AI editing, page translation, AI blocks, AI database formulas and AI Meeting Notes all draw here.

Select credits — 500 per member, per month. These are spent when you choose the model inside Notion Agent instead of leaving it on Auto, or when you run a Custom Agent that isn’t funded by the workspace. By default, a shared Custom Agent bills the owner’s Select credits even when other people use it.

Notion credits — a workspace pool you purchase. These are shared across the whole workspace and they exist to cover three things the allowances cannot: usage past the per-member caps, “high credit consumption models,” and Custom Agents funded by the workspace. Notion is unambiguous that these are the paid tier: “Notion credits are an add-on for Business and Enterprise plans.”

Verified against Notion Help — Standard, Select & Notion credits: eligible features, Notion Help — Manage your AI credits, Notion Help — What are Notion credits? and the Notion pricing page on 2026-11-07.

Three behaviours inside that structure decide whether your team ever hits a wall:

Balance Who owns it Resets Rolls over What happens at zero
Standard credits Each member, 1,500/mo Monthly No Auto-model work pauses until reset, unless an owner releases Notion credits
Select credits Each member, 500/mo Monthly No Model-picker work pauses until reset, unless an owner releases Notion credits
Notion credits The workspace pool Never (purchased) Annual: not at renewal. Monthly: no Custom Agents on workspace credits pause; high-consumption models pause

The row that surprises teams is the last one. Notion credits do not “reset” in any meaningful sense — monthly credits are consumed and any remainder is gone; annual credits are a prepaid pool that expires when the subscription renews.

What it costs: seats, credits, and the per-seat-per-year number

Notion’s published seats, per member per month, billed yearly: Free $0, Plus $10, Business $20, Enterprise custom. Monthly billing is higher on Plus and Business, and the pricing page’s own toggle advertises “Save up to 20% with yearly.”

What the pricing page does not put in one number is the AI cost per seat per year, because credits are bought separately. Here it is assembled:

Line item Unit price (verified) Annual per seat
Business seat (yearly billing) $20 / member / month $240
Included Standard credits 1,500 / member / month included
Included Select credits 500 / member / month included
Notion credits, monthly billing $10 per 1,000 $120 per extra 1,000/mo
Notion credits, annual billing $13 per 1,000 $156 per extra 1,000/year pool

Verified against Notion Help — What are Notion credits? and the Notion pricing page on 2026-11-07.

Read the last two rows carefully, because they invert the usual SaaS logic. Annual credits cost 30% more per credit than monthly credits — $13 versus $10 per 1,000. Notion explains the reason openly: annual credits are “a good fit if you want flexibility throughout the year, like usage that ramps up, spikes, or varies between teams and quarters,” and “because you can use annual credits anytime during your subscription year, they cost more and work well as a flexible pool.” You are paying a premium for optionality, not getting a discount for commitment.

That has a direct consequence for procurement: a team on an annual Notion plan cannot buy the cheaper credit. Notion’s documentation ties the purchasable credit type to your subscription: “Users on monthly plans can buy monthly credits. Users on annual plans can buy annual credits.” If you are annual and expect steady, predictable agent usage, you are buying the $13 pool whether or not you want flexibility.

The three pricing models in the field, side by side

Because “credits” is now the default vocabulary, it is worth seeing how different the unit economics are when you normalise them. All figures are from each vendor’s own pricing page, verified on 2026-11-07. This is a price-per-unit comparison, not a quality ranking — the units are not equivalent.

Vendor Unit Included with seat Overage price Notes
Notion (Business) Standard + Select credits 1,500 Standard + 500 Select / member / mo $10 / 1,000 (monthly), $13 / 1,000 (annual) Two non-interchangeable allowances; annual plan can only buy annual credits
ClickUp (Business) AI credits, workspace-pooled 1,500 / user / mo, pooled $10 per 10,000 credits Pooled from Core (1,000/user) upward; Free gets 500 per workspace
Asana (Advanced) AI requests 5 requests / user / mo, capped at 250 per account; AI Studio 75,000 credits / billing account / mo $0.50 / request prepaid, $0.60 / request on-demand Deliverable-level billing; a “request” is a task, an image or an image edit
monday.com (Pro) AI credits 3,000 / mo (per account, shown against a 10-seat default) Credits sold as an add-on; monday’s pricing page lists the included value ($30) but not a public per-credit rate Credits are per account, not per seat
Wrike (Business) AI Elite actions Starter pack included Not published on the pricing page The pricing page lists an “AI Elite” starter pack with no published rate
Smartsheet (Pro / Business) Smart Assist / Smart Columns, “Generate formulas” Included in seat price Not metered publicly Conversational AI listed as included; no credit currency

Verified against Notion pricing, ClickUp pricing, Asana pricing, monday.com pricing, Wrike pricing and Smartsheet pricing on 2026-11-07.

Two gaps in that table are deliberate. monday.com does not publish a per-credit top-up rate on its pricing page; the page shows what your included credits are worth (“1,000 credits = $10” on Basic, “3,000 credits = $30” on Pro) and says “Add credits anytime,” but the purchase rate for more is not a published number, so we are not going to invent one. Wrike’s pricing page advertises an “AI Elite” starter pack on Business without a published price per action. For both, treat the cost as a quoting step, not a calculation.

What actually changed: the December 1 billing date and the app-store wall

Two operational facts in this release cycle are worth acting on rather than reading.

AI Meeting Notes starts consuming Standard credits on December 1, 2026

Notion’s eligible-features page states it in a footnote: AI Meeting Notes “uses Auto and will begin consuming monthly Standard credit allowance on December 1, 2026. A one hour meeting is estimated to use ~10 Standard credits.”

Do the arithmetic for a real team, because the number is smaller than it sounds and the failure mode is not cost — it is the pause. A 15-person Business workspace has 22,500 Standard credits a month (15 × 1,500). At ~10 credits per meeting-hour, that is 2,250 meeting-hours — so credits from meetings alone are not the problem.

The problem is what else draws on the same 1,500-per-member pool: every Agent-on-Auto conversation, every AI block, every translated page, every AI database formula. The meeting notes change does not create a new cost centre; it moves an existing, previously free consumption path into the pool that everyone else is already using. A team whose Standard credits are already running out in week three of the month will now run out in week two.

The practical move, and it costs nothing: export your current Standard credit consumption per member before December 1 (Settings → Notion AI → Me, per Notion’s documentation), and add 10 credits per meeting-hour per person recorded in that meeting. If the resulting headroom is under 20%, that is the point to decide whether to buy Notion credits or turn off meeting recording for recurring internal syncs.

The app-store billing wall

Notion’s credits help documentation contains a sentence that has caused more support tickets than any pricing change this year: “If your subscription is billed through the Apple App Store or Google Play, you can’t buy credits. To buy more credits, a workspace owner must first cancel the existing app-store subscription, wait for it to fully expire, then move billing to notion.com on a Business or Enterprise plan that includes AI.”

Read the sequence. Cancel, wait for full expiry, re-subscribe on the web. For a team of any size, that is a migration project disguised as a billing setting — and it is scheduled at the exact moment when credits are about to run out and a Custom Agent is about to pause. The lead time is not measured in clicks; it is measured in the remainder of a billing cycle.

If there is a single line in this update worth passing to whoever owns your SaaS billing, it is this one: make sure Notion is billed through notion.com, not an app store, before your team starts depending on Custom Agents. If you are choosing a plan today and can see AI agents in your next two quarters, this alone argues for buying on the web even when the app store is more convenient for the person paying.

Where the documentation stops, and 2026 pricing changes that never got a changelog

Notion’s help centre is unusually candid about one thing — that the size of your included allowance is not a contract term: “Your included amount may vary depending on your plan and purchase arrangement.” And that the boundaries themselves move: “As Notion AI evolves, we may update how your Standard and Select credits work, including the features and models impacted, the size of your included allotment, how consumption is calculated… Features that don’t currently consume credits may do so in the future.”

That second sentence is the honest version of the December 1 change: meeting notes was free, and now it is not. Expect the same class of change again, because Notion has reserved the right to make it.

What the documentation does not give you is the cost of a single action. There is no published credits-per-task table — no rate card for “summarise this page,” “translate this paragraph” or “run this Custom Agent.” Notion tells you how many credits you have and how many you used, after the fact, and gives you a one-hour-meeting estimate. Everything else is measured empirically, which is exactly what experienced users do:

“It is very easy to blow through a month’s worth of credits in hours if you don’t test and prepare accordingly… Test use cases and how many credits they consume. Create a private project and test common and known use cases. See how many credits they consume and establish some benchmarks when these vary between similar activities.” — Asana Forum — “Manage AI Use Credit Expectations”, October 2026. This is an Asana thread, not a Notion one, and we are citing it deliberately: the pattern is identical across all three vendors, and the user’s method — benchmark the credit cost of a representative action before you scale it — is the only credit-planning technique that has ever worked for anyone.

The same thread contains the warning that applies to Notion’s Custom Agents verbatim. Another participant describes users defaulting to the AI builder because the UI steered them there: “Our users have been defaulting to the easier method and we ran out of credits in 2 weeks. The two users that burned through all the AI Studio credits had no idea that the workflow would use AI, they just assumed AI was helping build it out.”

Translate that to Notion and it is a one-sentence risk: a Custom Agent built once keeps spending its owner’s Select credits every time anyone runs it, and the default funding path is the owner’s allowance, not the workspace pool. Notion’s own documentation confirms the ordering: an agent spends “the agent owner’s Select credits” first, then the owner’s additional allowance, then the workspace’s shared Notion credits if an owner allows it.

A third thread makes the visibility problem concrete — and this one is about Notion’s closest competitor but describes the exact gap Notion shares: users cannot tell, before or after, whether an action cost credits. “Nothing tells me which side (free or paying) before the result, or even after… The only workaround I’ve found is to ask Dash directly, but I got limited results, and not always accurate.” (Asana Forum — “Dash: clarifying if a message costs a Request”, September 2026.)

The transferable lesson: when the vendor will not tell you the price of an action, your own benchmark is the price list. Build a small table of your five most common AI actions with measured credit cost, and keep it next to the budget. It takes an afternoon and it is the only defence that survives a silent repricing.

How to budget Notion credits for a real team

Here is a working model with stated assumptions, not a vendor figure. The inputs are Notion’s published allowances and its one published consumption estimate (~10 Standard credits per meeting-hour).

The seat math first. For N members on Business, yearly billing:

  • seat cost = N × $20/month
  • Standard allowance = N × 1,500 credits/month
  • Select allowance = N × 500 credits/month

A 12-person team is $240/month in seats and 24,000 credits/month in allowances — 18,000 Standard, 6,000 Select. Those allowances are not additional revenue to Notion; they are included. The marginal cost of AI only appears when you exceed them.

Then the overage. Every 1,000 credits past the allowance is $10 on monthly billing or $13 on annual. In per-seat terms, a single extra 1,000 credits a month for a 12-person team is $120/year at the monthly rate; if it is needed evenly across the whole team, that is 12× the headroom and 12× the price.

The break-even question worth asking. At $13 per 1,000 annual credits, one credit costs $0.013. If a ~10-credit meeting summary costs about $0.13 in credits after you have exhausted the free allowance, the question is not “is that expensive” — it is “how many of these do we run, and who decided that.” A 12-person team recording 20 one-hour meetings a week accumulates about 260 meeting-hours a quarter against a monthly Standard allowance that resets, and the answer will differ depending on whether your Agent-on-Auto usage is light or heavy.

Team-perspective judgement

Under 10 people, AI used occasionally. Do not buy Notion credits. Your combined 2,000 credits per member per month reset on a schedule you can plan around, and at that scale a pause is an inconvenience on a Tuesday, not an outage. Put the effort into a 20-minute benchmark of your three most common AI actions instead. If you have not outgrown 1,500 Standard credits in a normal month, buying a pool is pre-paying for consumption you are not having.

Under 10 people, one person building Custom Agents for the team. This is the configuration that breaks. A shared agent bills its owner’s Select credits first, and 500 a month for one person does not survive a team of eight running a shared agent daily. Either fund the agent from the workspace pool from the start (Notion allows an admin to switch an agent to draw directly from workspace Notion credits), or accept that the builder’s allowance is the team’s AI budget and watch it.

10–40 people, AI in a handful of workflows. Business is the correct plan for the AI feature set, but the tier is not the question — billing is. Verify you are on web billing, not app-store billing, before you need credits. Then buy credits at the monthly rate unless you genuinely need the annual pool’s flexibility, because $10 versus $13 per 1,000 is a 30% difference and annual plan holders cannot buy the cheaper one.

Any size, meetings are your main AI surface. Model the December 1 change now. At ~10 credits per meeting-hour, a team that records everything and a team that records client calls only have very different exposure, and the change lands in the same month as year-end planning.

Any size, evaluating Notion primarily as a PM tool. Credits are a second cost centre on top of seats, and the credits you must buy are the ones your agents will consume. If your plan is boards and docs with light AI, read Notion as a project management tool and Notion vs ClickUp before you treat credits as a planning input — and if data portability matters to your renewal, who owns your PM data covers what leaves with you.

What to do this month

  1. Check your billing channel. Settings → Access & billing. If it says app store, start the migration now, not when credits run out.
  2. Record your current Standard and Select consumption per member (Settings → Notion AI → Me). This is your pre-December baseline.
  3. Add 10 credits per meeting-hour per person for the meetings you actually record, and see whether the baseline plus that number stays under the monthly allowance.
  4. Benchmark your top three AI actions — credits consumed per run, measured. Write the numbers down; they are your only price list.
  5. Audit shared Custom Agents. For each one, find out whose Select credits it spends, and whether it should be funded by the workspace instead.
  6. Decide the credit purchase type against your plan. Monthly billing → monthly credits at $10/1,000. Annual billing → annual credits at $13/1,000, prepaid and non-carrying.
  7. Put December 1 in the calendar with the meeting-notes estimate attached.

How this content was prepared

Transparency note: This update draws on three sources. (1) Vendor primary documentation, read on 2026-11-07 and linked at each claim: Notion’s pricing page and four Notion Help articles — “What are Notion credits?”, “Standard, Select & Notion credits: eligible features”, “Manage your AI credits” and “Purchase Notion credits” — plus the AI FAQ page. Every allowance figure (1,500 / 500 / $10 / $13 / December 1 2026 / ~10 credits per meeting-hour) comes from those pages. (2) Real-user evidence from vendor community forums, quoted inline with links and dates: three Asana Forum threads from 2026 on credit expectations, credit visibility and shared-agent consumption. We cite Asana threads on a Notion page on purpose — the vendor documentation says nothing about the behavioural failure modes, and the same failures recur across vendors. (3) Editorial judgement, expressed as the credit-planning model, the annual-vs-monthly credit argument and the team-size recommendations.

We have not independently tested Notion’s AI credits. We do not hold a paid Business workspace used as a benchmark for this page, and no figure here is a measurement of our own usage. The “~10 Standard credits per meeting-hour” number is Notion’s published estimate, not ours. Where a vendor does not publish a rate — monday.com’s per-credit top-up, Wrike’s AI Elite action price — this page says so instead of estimating. Credit allowances, prices and boundaries change without notice; the dated verification blocks and linked help documentation are authoritative, and Notion reserves the right to change consumption behaviour for features that currently cost nothing.

The one claim we will make without hedging: if you are on app-store billing and you plan to use Custom Agents, fix that before you need credits. Everything else on this page can wait a month. That cannot.

Verified against Notion pricing and Notion Help — What are Notion credits? on 2026-11-07.