Guide

Notion Workers Start Using Credits October 15—Audit Agents and Seats First

By Istar editors
At a glance

Notion Workers start using credits October 15, 2026. Measure Workers and Custom Agents, then clear paid seats before renewal.

At a glance

Workers beta is free until 15 October 2026, then it draws Notion credits. Custom Agents are free to try, then $10 per 1,000 monthly credits. September is the month to keep, pause, or kill the beta — and to decide whether Agents deserve a credit line — before the meter starts. Removing people does not refund this cycle’s seats.

Checked 28 August 2026 against Notion’s pricing page with Price in USD. The yearly toggle showed Plus at $10 and Business at $20 per member/month ($120 and $240 per year); the monthly toggle showed $12 and $24. Credits, Workers, Agents, refunds, and seat rules below were verified on official help pages the same day.

If your workspace already turned on Workers beta, the free window is not open-ended. Notion’s pricing page still says Workers are “Free to try now. Starts using credits on October 15.” The Workers pricing help doc names the date: 15 October 2026. Custom Agents sit next to that line: “Free to try, then $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits.”

Those are two different clocks. The Workers clock is a hard date. The Agents clock is “try, then pay.” Both draw from the same Notion credits pool once credits apply. Neither is covered by the included Notion AI usage allowance on Business and Enterprise. That allowance is for personal Notion Agent, image generation, and page translation. Custom Agents and Workers require credits.

September, not October, is the decision month. You need a measured 30-day usage sample before 15 October, plus time to pause Workers, delete experiments, and set a credit amount — or to leave Auto Adjust off.

This is not a feature tour. It is three ledgers: Workers, credits, seats.

What you are actually being asked to buy

Custom Agents are Business and Enterprise only. They run in the background on schedules and events. They are not the same product as the personal Notion Agent in chat. On Free and Plus, Notion AI / Agent / Meeting notes / Research Mode are a Limited Trial. Upgrading Free → Plus does not refresh that trial; continued AI requires a plan above Plus.

Workers (beta) are also Business and Enterprise only, including Business trials. They run custom code on Notion’s servers: database syncs, tools that Custom Agents can call, and webhook-triggered jobs. You can turn them off for the workspace, restrict who can create them, pause all of them, or delete one Worker.

Notion credits are an add-on for Business and Enterprise. They are shared across the workspace. They pay for Custom Agents, Workers (from 15 October 2026), and extra Notion AI usage if an admin turns that on. They are not available on Free or Plus, and you cannot buy them in-product if the workspace is billed through the Apple App Store or Google Play.

Per-seat USD, checked with both billing toggles: Plus is $12 monthly or $10/month equivalent on a $120 annual bill; Business is $24 monthly or $20/month equivalent on a $240 annual bill. Notion labels yearly billing as save up to 20% and Enterprise as custom. Re-open notion.com/pricing in USD before committing, because the annual card’s lower monthly figure is not a month-to-month price.

If you are still on Free or Plus, the rest of this article is a reason not to “just turn on Agents.” Credits and Workers do not exist on those plans. If you are on a 30-day Business trial and already entered a card, the trial auto-renews onto Business unless you cancel first. Workers stay free through the beta date only if you are still on Business or Enterprise when 15 October arrives.

Decision 1 — Keep, pause, or kill Workers before 15 October

The beta is the measurement window. Notion says so: Workers are free during beta so you can run real workflows and estimate credits. During beta, Workers show a Free badge in the credits dashboard; hover it for the end date. Worker usage does not count against your credit balance until credits apply.

That is the trap. A sync that is “free” at every 15 minutes will not be free on 16 October.

Official cost math, from the Workers pricing doc:

  • Typical cost: $0.0023 per run
  • About 4,348 runs per 1,000 monthly credits ($10)
  • One credit is $0.01 in their own conversion

Their scheduled-sync examples (your actual usage will differ):

Cadence Runs / day Official monthly cost
Nightly (1×/day) 1 $0.07
Hourly 24 $1.66
Every 15 minutes 96 $6.62

A 15-minute Salesforce-style sync is cheap in isolation: 2,880 runs/month × $0.0023 = $6.62, or 662 credits. That is not the bill you should fear.

The bill you should fear is agent-triggered tool calls. Each time a Custom Agent calls a Worker, that call is its own Worker run. One agent run can generate several Worker runs. Notion’s own examples:

  • Low: 3 Worker runs per agent run × 30 agent runs/month → $0.21
  • Medium: 4 × 3,000 → $27.60
  • High: 5 × 9,000 → $103.50

Webhook volume scales the same way. A low Stripe-style feed at 20 events/day is $1.38/month. A high support feed at 5,000 events/day is $345/month on their table. Frequency is the lever: a job that runs every minute is 1,440 runs/day; a daily job is 1.

Keep the Worker only if all of these are true:

  1. You can name the job it replaces (a sync you would otherwise pay Zapier/Make for, or a tool a Custom Agent actually needs).
  2. You have a 30-day usage sample from the CLI or Settings → Access & billing → Notion credits → Workers tab.
  3. The projected monthly Worker cost is a number you would approve as a line item, not a leftover from “it was free.”
  4. Someone owns it: who pauses it if it retries, who lowers the schedule, who deletes it.

Pause or delete if any of these are true:

  • It was a demo, a trial sync, or “we’ll need it later.”
  • It runs every 15 minutes because that was the default curiosity, not a requirement. Notion’s own advice is to start hourly or daily.
  • Nobody on the team can find it in Settings → Workers.
  • You do not want Workers sharing a credit pool with Custom Agents after 15 October.

Admin path: Settings → Workers. You can switch Workers off for the workspace, limit who can create them, disable or delete one Worker, or pause all of them. Default: Workers are on for owners. Turning the workspace toggle off is the clean September move if the beta was tourism.

Do this in September, not on 14 October. You want one quiet week after the pause to confirm nothing client-facing depended on a sync you had forgotten.

Decision 2 — Do Custom Agents deserve a $10 / 1,000-credit line?

Custom Agents already sit on the paid side of the line. The pricing page copy is “Free to try, then $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits.” The credits FAQ is blunter: if the workspace does not have enough credits, Custom Agents pause until credits reset or an admin adds more. Admins get in-app and email notices at 80% and 100%.

Credits are a workspace pool. Every Custom Agent draws from it, no matter who created it. A “small” agent that runs all day will beat a “smart” agent that runs once a week.

Notion’s Custom Agent pricing table (benchmarks, not quotes):

Example Cost per run Runs per 1,000 credits ($10)
Q&A (Slack answers from internal docs) ~$0.03–$0.11 ~90–333
Task routing ~$0.05–$0.15 ~65–190
Status update ~$0.08–$0.18 ~57–133
Mail triage ~$0.04–$0.10 ~100–250
Daily brief ~$0.10–$0.30 ~33–100

Their worked example: a status-update agent at 60 runs/month is about $4.80–$10.80. That is one agent. Stack a daily brief, a Slack Q&A, and a routing agent, and one $10 pack is no longer a rounding error.

Cost drivers they name: how much the agent reads, how many steps it takes, how often it runs, and which model you pick. Auto is the default they recommend. Advanced models use more credits. After each run, exact usage is in the credits dashboard.

Buy a monthly $10 / 1,000-credit pack only if:

  • At least one Custom Agent replaces a recurring job you would otherwise do by hand or pay another tool for.
  • You have looked at 1–2 billing cycles of that agent’s actual usage, not the marketing table.
  • You accept that unused monthly credits do not carry over.
  • An owner will watch the 80% notice.

Do not buy yet if the agents are still in “free to try,” if nobody can explain what pauses when credits hit zero, or if the workspace is on Free/Plus (credits are not an add-on there). Downgrading to Free or Plus switches Custom Agents off (not deleted). You can view them; you cannot edit them. They resume if you come back to Business or Enterprise.

Basic Autofill on Business/Enterprise does not use credits. Custom Agent Autofill does.

Treat Agents the way the free-tier guide treats complimentary AI: a trial is not a contract. If a client report only exists because a Custom Agent is still in “free to try,” that report already has an unbudgeted meter.

The credit SKU most people will misread

Two products, two prices, neither rolls over. From What are Notion credits?:

Monthly credits Annual credits
Price $10 per 1,000 $13 per 1,000
Who can buy in-product Monthly Business/Enterprise Annual Business/Enterprise
Unused Reset each month; do not carry over Expire at subscription renewal; do not carry over
Mid-cycle Increase: full amount now, not prorated. Recurring bill steps up next monthly service date. Decrease: next period. Increase anytime, available immediately. Lower or cancel at renewal.

Annual credits are not a discount. Notion says so in the FAQ. You pay more for a pool you can spend any time during the subscription year. For a freelancer or a five-person studio with a weekly status agent, monthly at $10/1,000 is the cheaper SKU — if you can live with a hard monthly reset.

In-product billing follows the core plan: monthly plan → monthly credits; annual plan → annual credits. Account-team deals can mix monthly, annual, and on-demand; usage is drawn monthly → annual → on-demand. Credits have no cash value.

Mid-cycle top-ups are not prorated: you get the full extra amount immediately. That is useful if an agent is about to pause. It is also how a “just this month” panic becomes next month’s higher recurring amount.

Auto Adjust is the silent plan change. It is off by default. When usage reaches the configured trigger threshold (the official example uses 80%), Notion buys the amount you set and raises your monthly credit amount going forward. It is not a one-time top-up. Each trigger increases the recurring amount again, up to your spending cap. Lowering credits for next month does not turn Auto Adjust off. You have to toggle it off yourself.

If you buy credits at all in September, leave Auto Adjust off unless you have set a spending cap you would actually pay (their example amounts are $10 / $20 / $50 per trigger and a $150 cap — those are examples, not a recommendation). With Auto Adjust on, you lose the usual 80% “approaching limit” alert; you get a confirmation that it already spent.

Failed credit payments do not take down the core Notion plan. Already-paid credits keep working; unpaid extra credits go on hold. The reverse is also true: a failed plan payment is a separate path (retries up to 8 times, then limited access, then Free).

The third ledger: seats that do not refund

Credits are the new meter. Seats are the old one, and they still dominate the bill for any team that is not a solo workspace.

Pricing FAQ and members-and-billing, checked 28 August 2026:

  • You are billed per member, per workspace. Same person in two paid workspaces is two bills.
  • Guests are free. They only see pages they are invited to. Adding a member is a billable action.
  • Add a member, no spare seat: paid-seat count goes up by 1. You are charged a prorated amount for the rest of the current cycle.
  • Remove a member: you do not get money back. You open one available paid seat. You may reassign that seat to someone else until the cycle ends, at no extra cost.
  • At each renewal (monthly or annual), paid seats are recalculated to match the members then in the workspace.

Worked picture, no invented seat prices: three contractors finish on the 10th. You remove them. Those three seats stay paid until renewal. Put the next three people in those seats, or you donated the rest of the cycle. Next invoice is based on who is actually there on renewal day — not on the peak you hit last month.

That is the same idle-seat shape as other per-seat AI tools: deleting a person is not a refund. Notion’s specific rule is the reassign-until-renewal window, then a true-up. Do not overlap this with a ChatGPT Business unused-seat writeup; the decision here is whether September’s People list is the list you want to still be paying on the next Notion renewal, while you are also turning Workers and Agents into credit line items. For the broader “are we paying for empty AI seats across the stack” test, use the small-team subscription audit.

Practical September seat moves:

  • Before you add anyone, hover the invite and confirm guest, not member. Notion will offer to upgrade the guest; skip it unless you intend to pay.
  • If someone was added by mistake: remove them, then you have three days from the invoice date to ask for a prorated refund of that add. The extra members must already be gone when you write in.
  • Do not “clean up” a yearly workspace in October and expect the annual invoice to shrink this year. Removals apply at the next billing cycle.

Refunds: the plan window is not the credit window

From the pricing page and refund help, checked 28 August 2026:

Paid plan, signup mistake, full amount (not prorated):

  • Monthly: contact within 3 days of signing up / invoice, and downgrade.
  • Annual: 30 days.
  • EU customers: Notion’s mandatory-policy example gives a 14-day full-refund window for a monthly subscription. UK and other mandatory-policy regions may also extend past 72 hours, but the applicable timeline depends on local law.

Accidental extra members: prorated refund if you write in within 3 days of the invoice date, after removing them.

Purchased Notion credits: refundable only if unused. If any portion of the purchased credits has been used, that purchase is no longer eligible.

App Store purchases go through Apple, not Notion. Google Pay / web purchases go through Notion. Refund requests must come from the workspace owner email or the billing email.

Do not use the 3-day window as a seat-reduction tool. It is a mistaken-signup and mistaken-add valve. Auto Adjust increases and mid-cycle credit top-ups are easier to start than to unwind.

A 30-minute September audit

Do this once, on desktop, as a workspace owner.

  1. Plan and AI (5 minutes). Settings → Billing. Confirm Business or Enterprise. If you are on a Business trial with a card on file, decide whether you want auto-renew before you keep any Worker. Settings → Notion AI → Usage is the personal-Agent allowance, not Custom Agents.
  2. Workers (10 minutes). Settings → Workers. List every Worker, owner, and schedule. Pause anything without an owner. In the CLI or the credits dashboard Workers tab, read the last 30 days. Multiply runs by $0.0023. If you would not approve that number as a vendor line, pause it before 15 October.
  3. Custom Agents (10 minutes). Credits dashboard. Note credits per agent, not vibes. If Agents are still “free to try,” write the date you will either buy 1,000 monthly credits ($10) or turn the agents off. Do not turn on Auto Adjust.
  4. Seats (5 minutes). Settings → People / Billing. Count members vs people who actually work in the workspace. Empty seats get reassigned or they ride to renewal. Guests for contractors who only need one page.

Write three lines in the same sheet as rent:

  • Workers after 15 Oct: $____ / month (from measured runs × $0.0023), or off.
  • Custom Agents: $10 / 1,000 monthly credits × packs, or off. Unused packs die at month-end.
  • Seats: current paid count, and the count you want on the next renewal.

If those three lines are blank, you do not have a Notion AI budget. You have a beta.

What to confirm on the live pages

Prices move. Re-open these before you pay:

The September job is narrow. Pause the Worker you cannot price. Do not pre-buy credits for an agent you have not measured. Do not delete people expecting a credit. 15 October is a billing date, not a reminder.