What happened
Notion has the steepest climb on this site: $4 to $12 per seat per month, a 200% increase in four years.
It started in May 2020 with Personal Pro at $4. In 2021 that plan was folded into Plus at $10 — a restructure rather than a straightforward increase, but the bill for an individual user went up by six dollars all the same.
Then July 2024, and this one is worth dwelling on. Plus went from $10 to $12 monthly, $96 to $120 a year. There was no announcement email. The pricing page changed, and subscribers found out at renewal.
We can date it precisely because Notion’s own pricing page carries its price identifiers in the page source. The archived copy from December 2024 contains plus_monthly_usd_202407 — the change is stamped July 2024 by Notion itself. Most published price histories put this increase in early 2024 or in 2026; both are wrong, and both appear to come from reading the annualised figure as though it were the monthly one.
Why
Notion grew through a free tier generous enough to make people build their working lives inside it. Once your notes, your wiki and your project tracking live in one workspace, moving out is not a subscription decision, it is a migration project. That is when the price can rise.
The 2024 increase also arrived alongside Notion AI, sold separately on top.
What you can do instead
Notes and documents are worth owning. Tools you buy once — or that store plain files on your own disk — remove the renewal from the equation entirely.