Why doesn't the new Notion Custom Agents work for me?

The custom agents are out in notion

Yesterday Notion launched it's custom Agent feature. As someone who uses a lot Notion and who is a bit of a geek this felt like having a new toy in the sandbox.

This feature basically allows you to create different mini AI bots that not only have their own custom prompt, but also can do two things that the normal Notion Agent can't do:

• Custom Agents can run on their own. For example you can set triggers like "run every day at 05:00" or you can set a trigger like "run whenever I get a new email". So they can do stuff while you do something else, and without having to think to launch them.

• Custom Agents can use other tools. For example a custom Agent in Notion can draft emails in your Gmail inbox, or archive stuff in your inbox.

As always with Notion, they have really created a great interface for the whole thing. It's super easy to create a custom agent. And it feels really "notiony" to build and use them.

The pricing makes no sense for a team of one

The problem of this new feature is not the feature. In fact, it's an approach in the same idea than Claude Code but for people who live in Notion, and it really fits for people who live in Notion.

The problem is the pricing. It's a credit based system. So you buy a bunch of credits and you can use them. With 10 bucks you get 10'000 credits. Which sounds like a lot . But after building two Notion Agents and playing a bit with them, I was already over 10'000 credits.

Fortunately for the whole rest of the month of Februrary and March you don't have yet to pay for credits so that you can get a sense of how much you would need. This means I didn't lose 10 bucks just playing a bit with the tool.

I'm not someone who has their employer paying for Notion. It's a tool that I pay by myself. I pay already about 20 bucks per month for it. And Im̀ happy with it, because every time I use it to record long interviews that I turn into books, it really pays for itself.

But paying extra for Custom Agents and especially with a credit system just doesn't work for me. The whole credit system for me removes the key benefit of such a tool: not having to worry and know things are handled. If I would use it, I would have to worry about how much cash that thing can burn.

What I'm using instead

I'm basically going to continue to use the "normal" Notion Agent for which you can have one big instruction page. And within that instruction page I'll continue to have a table with a list of shortcuts and the prompts that I want Notion to run when I write the shortcut.

I was doing this before the custom Notion Agents came out, and I'll continue to use this.

I will just not be able to use the automatic triggering, which for me isn't an issue at all. I also won't be able to use Notion to run things in other tools. I wasn't able to do that before, so that's not a change for me anyways.

And the good thing about the setup I have is that it's a monthly fee that doesn't change. I know what I pay for and I have no suprises or worries.

As I'm going to continue to write short biographies of people based on interviews I then turn into books, paying for Notion AI makes a lot of sense for me. But paying extra for custom agents, doesn't.

Backstage of this article

This article was illustrated on a refurbished Remarkable II tablet, and was typed on the same tablet with the type folio case. You can see the original note below if you are curious.