Why We're Ending the NotePulse Free Plan

What is changing

Three things, in order:

1. Free signups closed today, 23 August 2026. New accounts require a paid plan.
2. The free plan ends on 31 August 2026 (UTC). After that date, free accounts stop tracking entirely.
3. Existing free accounts are reduced in the meantime. Your grandfathered page keeps updating its Views property until the 31st. You cannot add new pages, and the Last Viewed property no longer updates.

If you are on a paid or lifetime plan, nothing here affects you. Your pricing is not changing.

Where the money goes

Every tracked page view is not a free operation. When someone opens one of your tracked Notion pages, NotePulse:

• runs a serverless function to handle the tracking request
• writes a row to the database
• reads your profile to check your plan and limits
• calls the Notion API to update the properties on your page

That is four billable operations per view, and views are the whole product. On top of the per-view cost there are the fixed sweeps: a job that runs across every account daily, another that runs monthly. Free accounts sit in both. Free accounts also receive up to three warning emails a month as they approach their limit, each one a transactional send.

None of that is wasteful engineering. It is what the product does. The problem is who pays for it.

Why it is ending

NotePulse has been running since May 2025, about fifteen months.

In that time there have not been enough paying users to cover the monthly bill. The difference has come out of my own pocket, every month, for fifteen months. That was a reasonable bet early on: free accounts were supposed to convert, and some did. Not enough of them, and not fast enough to close the gap.

Subsidising free accounts is no longer something I can afford to keep doing. That is the entire reason. There is no strategy pivot behind it, no upcoming enterprise tier, no acquisition. The service costs more to run than it earns, and the only lever I have left is the one that was always going to be unpopular.

Why not just shrink the free plan instead

I looked at this first, and it does not work.

The costs that scale with usage are only part of the bill. The rest are per-account and fixed: storing and refreshing Notion OAuth tokens, including every account in the scheduled sweeps, and answering support email. Those stay the same whether a free account gets 25 views a month or 5. Cutting the allowance reduces the small half of the cost and leaves the rest untouched.

A smaller free plan would have meant a worse product for free users and a bill that still did not balance. Ending it is the honest version of the same decision.

What happens to your data

Nothing is deleted.

• Views already recorded stay in the database. If you come back on a paid plan later, your history is intact.
• Properties already written to Notion stay in Notion. The Views and Last Viewed values on your pages are your data, in your workspace. They do not disappear on the 31st, they simply stop updating.
• Only new writes stop. After 31 August, a view of your tracked page is no longer recorded and no longer pushed to Notion.

The "Powered by NotePulse Free" footer that was added to pages tracked on the free plan also stays where it is. You can delete it from Notion at any time; it is an ordinary block in your own page.

What to do now

If you want your tracking to keep working past 31 August, pick a plan on the upgrade page. There are two options:

• A monthly subscription, cancel whenever you want.
• A one-time lifetime purchase, if you would rather never think about this again.

If you would rather not continue, you do not need to do anything. Your account stays, your recorded data stays, and tracking simply stops. You can come back later and it will be waiting.

If you already pay

Thank you. Genuinely, you are the reason this is still running.

Your plan, your price, and your limits are unchanged. This announcement is about closing a gap, not raising prices on the people who already closed it.

Questions about any of this go to notepulse@indiecraft.net and I will answer them myself.