Tax season is over. The bill for help getting through it is just starting.

Imagine a family of four sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday in March. One parent is running through the notice of assessment from last year and asks the AI three questions about which line items changed. The other parent is comparing two insurance quotes and asks five questions about coverage limits. Their teenager is filling out a first-time tax return and asks four questions about a part-time T4. That is twelve questions across one afternoon.

Twelve questions used to be free on Notion. As of today, May 4, 2026, they are not.

What changed at Notion today

Notion's Custom Agent credits went live this morning. AI usage that used to be bundled into the seat price is now billed separately at $10 USD per 1,000 credits on the Business and Enterprise plans. The free credit period that Notion offered while the AI features matured has ended.

Early write-ups of the new pricing have given a concrete sense of what heavy use looks like. One team's reported usage at the new rate works out to roughly $1,500 USD a month, on top of the per-seat subscription fee. The base Business plan is $20 per seat per month. A family of five on Business pays $100 per month before any AI questions are asked.

This is not a hidden change. Notion has been clear that the free period was always going to end. But it is a structural change. AI is no longer a flat-rate feature you pay for once. It is a meter that runs every time someone in the household asks a question.

The cost math, side by side

The point is not that Notion is more expensive. The point is that the bill at the end of the month is no longer something a family can plan around. A curious week of asking the assistant to summarize a stack of documents can move the bill by hundreds of dollars. That is fine for a venture-backed tech team. It is a hard sell for a household budget.

Why we chose flat pricing for Archevi

Archevi has had a single answer to the AI-cost question since we started: every family member gets unlimited AI questions on their household plan. Ask one question or ask a hundred. The price next month is the same as the price this month.

We made that call deliberately, and we are not going to change it. Three reasons.

• Families need to budget. Households already juggle groceries, mortgage payments, daycare, and insurance. The last thing anyone needs is a software bill that swings by hundreds of dollars depending on how curious the kids got with the AI this month. Flat pricing means no surprises.
• Per-question pricing punishes the people we built this for. The whole point of Archevi is to make the family's documents easy to ask questions about. If asking a question costs money, people ask fewer questions. The product gets worse the more it gets used. That is exactly the wrong shape.
• AI costs are getting cheaper, not more expensive. The cost of running modern language models on retrieval-grounded questions has dropped sharply over the last eighteen months. Companies that built their pricing around the old cost structure are introducing meters now to lock in margin. We built Archevi on the assumption that costs would keep falling. They have. So we don't need a meter.

We are not promising flat pricing forever in a way that no software company can guarantee. What we are promising is that we will not introduce per-question metering. If something has to give one day, the price of the plan changes. The shape of the deal does not.

Be honest: Notion is genuinely useful for the right team

This is not a hit piece on Notion. Notion is a great product for what it was built for. Knowledge bases, project wikis, internal documentation, structured team workflows. If your job is running a startup or coordinating a marketing team, Notion AI is a fair tool at a fair price for that work.

The mismatch is the use case, not the software. Notion was designed for teams who produce documents together and want AI help drafting and summarizing as they work. A family managing the documents of an actual life — tax slips, insurance policies, vaccination records, the will, the mortgage paperwork, the kids' school forms — is a different shape of problem. Different documents, different access patterns, different privacy expectations, different sensitivity to per-question pricing.

What flat pricing actually means at the kitchen table

It means a household can use Archevi the way it was meant to be used. Anyone in the family can ask the AI to find the policy number on the home insurance, dig out last year's notice of assessment, surface the line in the mortgage that talks about prepayment, or summarize the school's field-trip permission form. Nobody has to think about whether the question is worth the money.

The cost of getting an answer is the same as the cost of looking the answer up yourself. Zero. The only thing that changes is the time you save.

Try it with your own documents

Upload a tax return, an insurance policy, or a school enrolment form. Ask questions about it the way you would ask another family member who happened to have read the whole thing carefully. Every question on the free plan is exactly the same price as every question on every other plan we offer: the price of the plan, and not a cent more.

Upload once. Find anything. Forever.