"Included" is not always cheaper
When a paid add-on gets folded into a plan, it usually travels as good news. No extra charge — it is just part of what you already pay for.
Notion AI in 2025 was reported that way. Put the archived pricing pages side by side, though, and the order of events looks different.
The upper plan went up 33% first. The bundling came two months later.
Two separate changes
Snapshots from May, July and September 2025. Figures are per member per month, billed annually.
| 2025-05-04 | 2025-07-01 | 2025-09-01 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business | $15 | $20 | $20 |
| "Add Notion AI" purchase toggle | present | present | gone |
| AI as a plan feature | — | — | Notion AI included |
The price rise happened between May and July. AI was still separately purchasable at that point.
The switch to bundling happened between July and September, independently of the rise. Telling it as a single change gets it wrong.
What disappeared was the option, not the price
The September page carries both "Notion AI included" and "Trial of Notion AI" — included on the upper plans, trial on the lower ones.
The standalone purchase toggle is nowhere.
So Free and Plus users can no longer buy the full AI at any price. What used to be reachable by paying extra now sits behind a plan upgrade.
For an individual or a small team on Plus who wants AI, that is an increase in what they must pay. The word "increase" appears nowhere on the page.
Something similar happened the year before
In 2024, Plus went from $8 to $10 billed annually. 25%.
It was hard to see because it coincided with the move from notion.so to notion.com and a rebuild of the pricing page. The display changed from showing both prices side by side to a toggle defaulting to annual.
Put a screenshot from before the migration next to one from after and the layouts differ so much that the price difference does not register. A redesign is the most effective place to keep a price change.
One older note while we are here: the free plan's 1,000-block limit vanished from the page about a year before Notion said publicly that all plans were unlimited. That one moved in the customer's favour — and it still moved before the announcement, quietly.
What could not be established
The standalone price of the Notion AI add-on could not be recovered. It renders behind a toggle, so no figure survives in a static snapshot. There is no number here because there is no number to give.
Monthly prices cannot be reconstructed after September 2024 either: the pricing page began rendering annual by default on the server, so the monthly figures were never saved. Every price in this article is the annual display.
The disappearance of the free plan's block limit can only be placed within a six-month window, December 2019 to June 2020 — the snapshots covering that stretch could not be retrieved.
The real student-plan price was not found in any year's data.
One January 2025 snapshot rendered in euros. That looks like a crawler-location effect, so it is excluded from the price evidence.
Reading the next bundling announcement
The question to ask is who could buy the feature separately before it was bundled.
If those people sit below the plan it got bundled into, then for them the bundling is a price rise. The extra charge did not go away — it was absorbed into a plan fee, and then put out of reach from below.
"Included" sounds like the language of a price cut. It is also the language of choosing who is allowed to buy.
Sources
Every figure was read from Notion's own pricing page as saved by the Internet Archive — plan prices, the AI purchase toggle, and the AI-as-plan-feature wording, directly.
- Pricing page, 4 May 2025 (Business $15, AI separately purchasable)
- Pricing page, 1 July 2025 (Business $20, AI still separately purchasable)
- Pricing page, 1 September 2025 (toggle gone, "Notion AI included")
- Notion
The page lives at notion.so from 2017 to November 2024 and at notion.com after that. Both were followed to make the comparison.
Only the vendor's own published pricing and plan terms are used. No user reviews or forum posts.