Same here — I cannot create an account with a password. If you try to go in and do an email signup, they will punish you for it by emailing you every time with a new password, until you suffered enough that you'll relent and give them access to your Google account.

Not a great first impression — especially not after their support tells me that this is for my own security.

Wow. Thanks for the warning. Why the fuck would anyone be so user-hostile?

I use Notion with a non google e-mail and don't mind the password being e-mailed to me. I have to re-auth maybe once a month, tops, and it's one less password to manage.

It is an extremely frustrating practice (emailing you the password). I find that I have to go through this every few days for whatever reason and I've had cases where the email from Notion took five minutes to arrive.

I need to log in every time I close the tab. (For me, one less password to manage is not a concern, I have a password manager for that)

> wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.

I would hardly say "no appreciable improvement". IMHO it's appropriate to price products based on the value derived, not the effort to implement each incremental "feature". And the ability to share is the most human feature. We are social creatures. To share and collaborate and be relational is to be human :)

So the price jump feels fair to me. We can get near full-knowledge of the product at a reduced price point, but to be human with the tool, we get hit with the real cost :)

EDIT: I also don't like the actual pricing structure, but that's only because I would rather participate in co-operative systems, and dislike capitalist ones. The above comment is my putting myself in their shoes :)

I absolutely agree with your general principle, as I read it: price is not necessarily determined by your cost (which goes up only incrementally with added users), but by the value (what the customer is willing to pay, which may go up more significantly).

Specifically, however, I am indicating by my post that I'm not willing to pay 4x the price, for privilege of sharing - it does not have that value to me and it's not where my expectations were level-set :). [I currently use ToDoist which makes it easier to start (no privileges/contact sharing required) and add guest-editors/share]

My post is meant to provide feedback: I'm currently not trying their product (and I've explicitly provided why - the seemingly minor request to share my contacts), and I may not become paying customer once I figure out a way to try it (because the jump to my desired level of service is too high). It is up to the developers, if they read it, to gauge how representative I am of the target audience and therefore how relevant my concerns are; I'm assuming somebody like Pateo11 would quickly setup A/B switch - signup with and without asking for contact permissions, and see the impact :)

This suggests an opportunity for a separately priced "family" option to allow sharing for non-commercial use. Say $7/mo for up to 4 users?

ABsolutely; putting a maximum cap of 4-5 makes it a nice distinguishable offering; and it probably doesn't need same features as small workgroup, so they can differentiate on features (artificially or not:).

Are there examples of co-operative apps or pricing? I'm interested in that as well, but don't know of any!

Note: Notion's free plan actually provides unlimited users. But it only allows 1000 "blocks" (a heading, paragraph, file etc. counts as a block), so I imagine two users sharing notes would run out of space fast.

Where do you see it asking for contacts? It didn't ask me when I signed up and when I check my Google Security settings it only says it has access to:

* View your basic profile info (per Google: name, email address, and profile picture)

* View your email address

Hi Weizilla; that's interesting!

At approximately 14:00EST, clicking on "Get Started", then inputting a gmail address, offered ability to login via Google; then, request for contact permission. There was no way to avoid it.

As of right now, 16:22EST, that behaviour is different and I'm no longer seeing the prompt. I've tried different computers & laptops/browsers, to ensure it's not some cached/cookied experience, but it _appears_ the actual request is no longer being sent. Not sure!

Not surprising they're watching this thread, it would be a pretty massive deal inside a small company.

There is a way around that. First of all, if you and your wife have two free accounts and share workspace subtrees with each other, you can double the free content limit.

And if you pay for just one personal account, you can still share content with a free account. This is very close to having two people sharing one paid account, feature-wise.

Its really easy to sign up for a Google account for stuff like this, and I have multiple accounts on gmail anyways in case I dont want to share my important personal email.

Thanks Danvayn! :)

Agreed, but -- Ironically, one of the reasons I don't want to share my contacts is that I did use the Google Account I use for commercial tryouts... so there'd be no value in Notion.so having access to the contacts, let alone spamming me with any potential "helpful" tips or contacts or recommendations based on such contacts :P

If you install a native app, doesn't it completely have you by the balls anyhow?

The world is not android ;) Permissions and proxies exist.

Notion is a web app to AFAIK

Android would actually leave you in a much better position than Windows or macOS here, since the app has to at least go to the trouble of enumerating and requesting the permissions it wants. PC operating systems don't typically sandbox desktop apps by default, so the Windows/macOS versions of this would have free reign over anything accessible by your user.

On the latest version of macOS (Mojave), applications need to request the users’ permission before accessing photos, emails, webcam, microphone, calendars, and contacts, like how they do on iOS.

Neat. Hopefully that becomes standard practice for desktop operating systems.

I'm trying to create an account via desktop web interface, FWIW.