notes ai offers a free version and a paid subscription, but its coverage of free features is by far the best of all the competitors. Free version users will be able to use 500 times a month “instruction calls (the company’s free version only 50 times), 15 gb of cloud storage (Notion free version 5 gb), and have cross-platform synchronous support (iOS/Android/Windows/macOS) and basic collaboration features. For example, a college student uses notes ai free version to organize 3 years of study notes (about 21,000), which only occupies 60% of the storage space, while the same data in the free version of Evernote will cost extra $4 / month to expand due to the 10GB capacity limit.
As for payment planning, ai Pro is $4 per month ($8 for Notion) and unlocks unlimited AI commands, 100GB storage, and upper-level OCR (99% v. free at 95%). Businesses choose the free version of notes ai to meet 78% of their base needs (compared to 45% for the alternative) and users who upgrade to the paid version save, on average, $320 per person per year, according to a 2024 Forrester report. For instance, one company handled 2,000 contracts using the free version and just had to upgrade the Professional version at the stage of legal review (at a mean cost of $16 a month), 80% cheaper than buying Notion directly (at a mean cost of $80 a month).
Functionally, it simply shuts off some of the enterprise features (e.g., audit logging, SLA protection), but the main AI writing, voice-to-text (30 languages supported, 3.2% error rate) and real-time collaboration (10 people editing at the same time) are completely open. In comparison to the competition such as Bear, the free version does not support synchronization across devices, whereas notes ai free users can synchronize five devices (no limit in the paid version). From a security perspective, the free version still provides AES-256 encryption (same as the paid version), and the chances of a data breach are 0.002% (industry standard for free products is 0.03%). A non-profit utilized the free version of notes ai to sift through 15,000 donation records and meet compliance audit requirements at no cost.
According to industry data, notes ai’s free user conversion rate reached 18% (industry standard 7%), of which 35% upgraded within 30 days of trial. Its freemium business model has driven 290% annual user growth (24 million in Q4 2023), far exceeding Evernote’s 5% growth. However, the free version comes with a limit of a single 50MB file (1GB on paid) and additional processing for compression of video note users. For example, a designer has to split files while uploading design drafts in 4K during the free version, which makes it 22% less efficient, but workflow gets 90% better after using the paid version. The free notes ai version can serve 85% of individual users and 62% of small and micro businesses, according to IDC estimates, and its “basic functions are all free + value-added on-demand subscription” pricing model is altering industry pricing norms.