Notion Free Plan: The 1,000 Block Limit Only Applies to Teams

Almost every article about Notion's free plan tells you there is a 1,000 block limit. Most of them do not mention the condition attached to it, and the condition is the whole story.

With one person in the workspace, there is no block limit at all. With "two or more", the cap is 1,000 blocks.

So the same workspace, with the same content, is either unlimited or severely capped depending entirely on how many people are in it.

Why this changes the decision

If you are a solo user — a freelancer, a consultant, someone running a personal second brain — the headline limit simply does not apply to you. You can downgrade to free and keep working at any scale.

If you are two people, 1,000 blocks is not very much. A block is roughly a paragraph, a heading, an image, a row in a simple list. A single well-developed project page can run to a hundred. A small team wiki will clear a thousand without anyone noticing it happening.

The practical implication is uncomfortable but useful: for a two-person team, the cheapest working arrangement is often two separate solo workspaces with no block limits rather than one shared workspace with a hard one. That is an awkward way to collaborate and it is free, and it is worth knowing before you conclude the free plan cannot work at all.

Seven days of version history

This gets less attention than the block limit and is more likely to cost you something.

Version history on the free plan drops to seven days.

Version history is the thing that rescues you when a page gets overwritten, a database view is wrecked, or somebody deletes a section they did not understand. On a paid plan you have weeks of margin. On free you have a week.

A week does not survive a holiday. It does not survive a quiet project nobody looked at for a fortnight. The failure mode is specific: you discover the damage on day ten and the good version expired on day seven.

5MB uploads

New file uploads must be 5MB or less each.

Existing files are unaffected, so a downgrade does not strip attachments out of old pages. But going forward, a workspace used as a document store stops being one. A photograph from a modern phone will often exceed it. A PDF with any images in it usually will. Video is out entirely.

For teams that drifted into using Notion as their file cabinet — and many do, because it is convenient — this is the limit that quietly ends the habit.

Off, not gone

Notion follows the same convention as Asana and Trello, with one nice wrinkle.

Custom Agents are "switched off, but not deleted". Existing automations keep running but become read-only — so the automation you built continues to do its job, you just cannot modify it. Of your charts, the first stays editable and the rest need an upgrade.

Existing private teamspaces remain. Verified pages stay verified until they expire. Guests with external domains are explicitly not removed when you downgrade, which prevents the worst outcome — a client losing access to a shared space without warning.

That is a carefully designed downgrade. Somebody thought about what breaking it would feel like.

What you actually lose

The removals are real, and they are mostly administrative rather than creative:

• SAML SSO and the SCIM API.
• The audit log — and Notion stops collecting audit events, so the gap is permanent even if you upgrade later.
• Form customisations and conditional logic editing.
• Advanced security settings reset to defaults.
• Custom data retention reverts to the 30-day default.
• Page analytics become basic; only one notion.site domain works.
• Guests capped at 10; no new private teamspaces.

The audit log one deserves a second look if you are in a regulated environment. It is not that you lose access to past events — it is that new events stop being recorded. An upgrade restores the feature, not the missing months.

Before you downgrade

1. Count the people in the workspace. One person means the block limit is irrelevant and this is an easy decision.
2. Check your block count if there are two or more, before assuming it will be fine.
3. Export anything you would be upset to lose — our Notion exit report scores that export at 25/30 and notes a workspace export can take up to 30 hours with a link that expires in seven days, so start it early.
4. Save anything from version history you might need, because the window shortens to seven days the moment the plan changes.
5. Move large attachments out while you can still upload replacements.

For how Notion's limits compare with Trello's ten boards and Jira's ten users, see what each project tool does when you stop paying.