Notion AI Credits: Standard, Select and What Agents Cost

Notion changed how it bills for AI on October 19, 2026. Each Business and Enterprise seat now comes with two monthly allowances: 1,500 Standard credits for work where Notion picks the model, and 500 Select credits for work where you pick the model or run your own Custom Agents. A third kind, Notion credits, is a shared balance an admin buys for the workspace. New workspaces are on this system now. Existing workspaces move over on November 2, 2026.

This post explains which work spends which credits, what Custom Agents cost per run, what happens when an allowance runs out, and what a small team should set before the switch.

We read these Notion pages on October 20, 2026: the launch post Agents, rebuilt to do more for less, and the help articles Manage your AI credits, Standard, Select and Notion credits: eligible features, What are Notion credits?, How AI credits work for Custom Agents and Understand pricing for Custom Agents. Every Notion fact below comes from those pages. We have not watched a full billing cycle on the new system.

Standard credits pay for work where Notion chooses the model. That is Notion Agent on Auto (Notion's model router), writing and translation, AI blocks, AI database formulas and inline editing. AI Meeting Notes also runs on Auto and starts using Standard credits on December 1, 2026, at about 10 credits for a one hour meeting.

Select credits pay for Notion Agent when you pick a model yourself, and for Custom Agents you set up.

Notion credits are the workspace balance. They pay for high credit consumption models that your plan does not include (Notion names Fable and Astra), Custom Agents the workspace funds, any agent run through the Notion API or a connected app, and, if an admin allows it, usage past a member's Standard or Select allowance. They cost $10 per 1,000 on a monthly plan or $13 per 1,000 on an annual plan.

Three rules make the per-seat allowances less flexible than the totals suggest:

1. 1They belong to one person. You cannot pool them across the workspace or move them between members.
2. 2Standard and Select are separate. Leftover Select credits do not cover Standard work, and the reverse.
3. 3Both reset monthly at the start of your billing cycle, and unused credits do not roll over.

Notion publishes estimates per task. On Auto, a simple task such as polishing an email or translating a message is about 5 credits, a medium task such as triaging support inquiries or writing a work report is about 10, and a complex task such as maintaining CRM contacts or configuring databases is about 25. The same tasks with Opus 5.5 picked by hand are about 50, 85 and 150. Notion says Auto gave similar results to frontier models across more than 20 common use cases at about 90% lower average cost.

That gap is the main lever you control. A member who leaves Notion Agent on Auto spends Standard credits at the lower rate. A member who always picks a top model spends Select credits at up to ten times the rate, and Select is the smaller allowance.

A Custom Agent spends its owner's Select credits by default, even when the whole team uses it. Notion's own estimates per run, at $10 per 1,000 credits:

• Q&A agent that answers policy questions in Slack: about $0.03 to $0.11
• Task routing agent: about $0.05 to $0.15
• Mail triage agent: about $0.04 to $0.10
• Status update agent: about $0.08 to $0.18
• Daily brief agent that reads calendar and email: about $0.10 to $0.30

Cost goes up when an agent reads more content, takes more steps, runs more often or uses a heavier model. After each run, the owner and admins can see exact use in the Notion credits dashboard.

This is arithmetic from Notion's published estimates, not a client result. A daily brief agent costs about 10 to 30 credits per run. Run it once a weekday, about 22 times a month, and it uses roughly 220 to 660 credits. The owner gets 500 Select credits. At the high end, that one agent uses the owner's whole Select allowance before the month ends, and then it pauses or moves to workspace Notion credits, depending on how the admin set things up. If the same person also picks models by hand in Notion Agent, they run out sooner.

The fix is to decide who pays before the agent goes live. Notion recommends that an admin fund agents the whole workspace uses from a workspace budget of Notion credits, so they do not drain one person's allowance.

When a member runs out of Standard or Select credits, the features that use that kind pause until the monthly reset. The other kind keeps working, so a member out of Select credits can switch Notion Agent back to Auto. Members can keep going on Notion credits only if an admin turns on "Allow workspace to use Notion credits after AI limit is reached" under Settings, Notion AI. That setting is off by default.

A Custom Agent spends credits in a set order: the owner's Select credits, then any extra Notion credit allowance the owner has, then the workspace's Notion credits if an admin allows it. With no credits left, it pauses until the reset. Notion warns that if a member hits their Notion credit limit, all of that member's agents stop at once. Admins get alerts at 80% and 100% of workspace Notion credit use.

One detail matters for existing workspaces. Notion says Custom Agents created before November 2, 2026 keep drawing from shared workspace credits. Agents created after that date default to the owner's Select credits.

1. 1Check each member's allowance under Settings, Notion AI, Usage. Notion says the amount can vary by plan and purchase arrangement.
2. 2Make Auto the team default for writing, summaries and questions. Keep hand-picked models for the few tasks where you have seen Auto fall short.
3. 3List every Custom Agent, its owner, how often it runs and what it reads. Move the ones the whole team relies on to a workspace budget, and set a spending cap on each agent so one cannot use all of its owner's credits.
4. 4Decide whether members may continue on Notion credits after their allowance. If yes, set a Notion credit limit per member. If no, tell the team that work pauses until the reset.
5. 5Review real use after one or two billing cycles, as Notion suggests, and adjust monthly credits up or down. Monthly increases apply at once and decreases apply next month.

Notion has also announced an AI Command Center for admins, with usage by member, feature and agent, spending limits, and controls over which models members can use and who can create Custom Agents. Notion calls it coming soon, and the steps above use settings that exist today.

These are designs we would set up. None of them describes a client result.

1. 1A request intake agent. Requests arrive in Slack or a form, a Custom Agent on Auto creates a task in a Notion database, assigns an owner from a people database and notifies the requester. It runs on a workspace budget with a monthly cap sized from the routing estimate above.
2. 2A spend check outside Notion. A weekly job reads agent use and posts each agent's month-to-date credits to the team's chat. Notion's workspace alerts start at 80%, which can be late for a small budget.
3. 3Plain integrations for plain jobs. Notion says everyday reads and writes through Notion MCP and the Notion API do not use credits, though rate limits apply. Copying form entries into a database, syncing a CRM field or creating a page from a template does not need an agent. We build those as ordinary integrations and keep agents for steps that need judgment. Our post on AI agents vs. automations explains where we draw that line.

For any agent we would write down what it may change, test it on sample pages first and give it a budget, the same way we size agent action budgets. Our pre-production testing checklist covers the test cases.

If a job follows fixed rules and runs hundreds of times a month, an API integration or a no-code tool is cheaper and easier to check. Our post on Zapier's AI step and Zapier Agents covers one route for simple jobs. If the agent needs data that lives mostly outside Notion, such as your CRM or help desk, it may cost less to run it where the data lives and write results back to Notion through the API. Note that an agent you run through the API or a connected app spends workspace Notion credits, not seat allowances. And if your pages are out of date, an agent will answer from stale content, so fix the content first. HubSpot made a similar move to credits this year; our post on HubSpot Credits covers how those limits work.

OrchestriAI is not a Notion partner or reseller. We connect Notion to the rest of a business through its API, as described on our Notion integration page, and we build AI agent systems and workflow automation with clear limits on what they spend and change. If you want to know which Notion jobs need an agent and which are cheaper as an integration, start with the free automation audit.

OrchestriAI is an independent implementation provider. Product names are used for identification only. OrchestriAI is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Notion. This article summarizes Notion's public blog post and help articles as of October 20, 2026. Notion says it may change allowances, eligible features and how consumption is calculated, and that features that are free today may use credits later, so confirm the current rules in your workspace and Notion's help center. This is not financial advice.