We Replaced Four Tools With Notion and Got Two of Them Back

The pitch for consolidating onto Notion is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is real. We were paying for a wiki, a lightweight task tracker, a shared document tool, and a client-facing knowledge base. Together they came to $91 a month for our two-person studio. Notion, at the time, was $16. I did that sum in about four minutes — not the twenty-minute pricing audit I run now — and started the migration the same week.

Eleven months later we are still on Notion for two of those four jobs, and we have paid to bring the other two back. This is not a story about Notion being bad. It is a story about what “one tool for everything” actually costs, and the cost does not show up on an invoice, which is why the arithmetic looked so persuasive.

The wiki replacement worked completely and I would never go back. Our internal documentation had been in a tool where every page was a document, and documents do not link to each other well. In Notion, the database-of-pages model meant our project notes could carry properties — client, status, phase — and the same set of notes could be viewed as a table when I wanted to audit them and as a board when I wanted to work through them. That is a genuine capability we did not have before and it did not exist in the $91.

The document tool replacement also stuck, with one caveat that took months to surface: Notion’s export is not a real export, and what the export actually contains is worth checking before you depend on it. We produce written deliverables for clients, and I assumed I could get them out cleanly. What comes out of a Markdown export is a folder of files with generated names, images in a sibling directory with hashed filenames, and internal links rewritten to relative paths that only resolve if you keep the exact folder structure. It is technically all there. It is not something you can hand to a client, and finding that out on a deadline was not a good afternoon.

The task tracker is where it fell apart. Notion can absolutely model tasks — that is the demo everyone sees. What it cannot do is be fast, and tasks are the thing you touch twenty times a day. Every interaction has a perceptible delay: opening the database, filtering it, checking a box. Individually these are half a second. Collectively they made both of us stop trusting the list, and when you stop trusting the list you start keeping a second one on paper, which we both did without telling each other for about six weeks.

We went back to a dedicated tracker in month seven. It costs $10 a month for the two of us. I do not regret the seven months, because it taught me the specific thing I now check first in any consolidation: how many times a day will I touch this, and does the general-purpose tool feel instant at that frequency.

The client knowledge base came back too, for a different reason. Notion’s public sharing works, but the page is unmistakably a Notion page — the layout, the fonts, the little breadcrumb. For internal use nobody cares. For something a client looks at while deciding whether to renew, it read as us not having bothered. That is a soft judgment and I cannot prove it cost us anything, but I stopped being willing to test it.

Current state: Notion at $16, tracker at $10, client base at $19. Total $45 against the original $91. So the consolidation did save real money, roughly half, just not the ninety percent the first sum promised. If I were doing it again I would move the wiki and documents on day one and leave the other two alone, because the real cost of moving a team is never the data, which would have got me most of the saving and none of the seven months.