Is Notion free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —File uploads capped at 5 MB
• —10 external guests
• —7 days of page history
• —Block limit applies once a workspace has more than one member

Where the wall is

The second person, and then the 5 MB upload cap. Solo users can run on the free plan indefinitely and many do — this is one of the few genuinely honest free tiers in the catalog, and we say so plainly. The upload limit is the practical irritant even for individuals: a 5 MB ceiling rules out most PDFs and any video, which pushes attachments out to another service and quietly fragments the workspace.

After that: Plus is $10 per member per month, which removes the block limit for collaborative workspaces and lifts file uploads to unlimited.

Can you self-host Notion? No — cloud only

Notion is cloud-only with no self-hosted edition. AppFlowy is the closest open-source equivalent and can be run locally; Anytype is local-first and end-to-end encrypted; Outline is the better answer for teams who mainly want a wiki rather than databases. None of them match Notion feature for feature yet, and pretending otherwise would not help anyone choose.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

When paying is still the right call

Notion's all-in-one polish, real-time collaboration, and enormous template ecosystem are best-in-class, and there is nothing to host or maintain. If your team lives in shared databases and values a frictionless hosted experience over owning the raw files, staying is a reasonable choice.

What you are locked into

Proprietary block format and cloud hosting; leaving means an export that never round-trips perfectly.

If you would rather not pay: Logseq