Well there are lots of people out there that don't know how to or don't want to host a site on their own. and maybe they don't know how to code. So this would be a good option for them. Seeing lots of people like this for my current customers.

There are dedicated no code website building services. Like Wix, square space and tens of other great services. This is a bad solution for a solved problem.

I think it's more for existing Notion users that may wish to have a tiny microsite about something. Someone already invested in Notion isn't going to care about self-hosting.

A tiny microsite for $120/year tho.

This. $10 a month isn’t unheard of but when commodity VPS hosting is $5 a month (if not less) and stuff like WordPress.com is $8 a month and Netlify and GitHub Pages exist, I don’t know how broad this market is. Especially when you’re talking about the lock-in imposed by using this sort of thing.

A microsite with a cms that is neatly integrated with a produce that charges that much per user - sign me up!

I prefer to use Github Pages

As opposed to what? Hosting your own server for $120/yr in electricity, but with hardware costs on top?

What microsite costs $120/yr in electricity to run?

Mine, almost :)

https://danuker.go.ro/

Actually around $60, and I have more services on it, not just the site.

You know a site like this can be entirely static and hosted for free with github pages, gitlab pages, netlify, vercel, or any other free static site host.

Likely a digital ocean droplet, or other vps for $5-10 per month. Except neither of those Integrate with notion.

10$/month is 120$/year. Plus you have to do more work on top of that to actually build the site and integrate with a CMS.

Notion users will be in for a nasty surprise when they realize that DO is closer to a Raspberry Pi than a OEM PC.

All you get is a barebones OS without a GUI. You have to set up everything yourself: server (e.g. Apache), language (e.g. PHP), database and SSL. This is a non-starter for people that have never seen a command line interface before.

Ever heard of Wix?Square space? Netlify?

Two nice coffees per month, not so bad. Can fund it by canceling a rarely-used streaming service.

Notion allows you to export your stuff as Markdown. Couple of scripts later and you're ready to dump it into whatever other thing you want. It's not that bad.

Most people don't care, they just want a site that works. It's useful because Notion itself is WYSIWYG where whatever you type is what shows up, much more flexible than something like WordPress.

> much more flexible than something like WordPress

WordPress is endlessly extensible and customizable, so I don’t think Notion would be more flexible. Maybe Notion is simpler or easier to use, but at the end of the day, you’d still be very limited in what type of site you could build.

WordPress is also getting close to releasing a WYSIWYG editor for the full site, which is also extensible and customizable. But this is already available for content, which is mostly what potion would be handling anyways.

Looking over the list of potion benefits:

1. Nothing to install

2. It's simple - focus more on your content

3. Update and it's instantly live!

4. Use Notion (You already know it)

5. No page limits

5. Potion generates pretty URLs and preview images auto-magically from your page titles

Only 2 and 4 seem to be things which something like WordPress might not have, and they are very subjective anyways. For number 1, there are lots of hosted WordPress platforms which don’t have you installing anything. For 5, there are probably lots of plugins you supplement the default social image behavior if it doesn’t work for you.

I think this is a very cool project, and it’s always nice to see more experiments in the CMS area. But I don’t think flexible is the right word to use to describe it :)

Disclaimer: I’ve been a WordPress contributor, so I’m definitely biased. :p

The biggest benefit is you get to use Notion for the backend content creation. It is prett different from more traditional WYSIWYG editors like Wordpress’. I think for smaller sites including in some collaborative instances, Notion makes more sense than Wordpress. Of course Wordpress makes a ton of sense in so many ways. Including for most collaborative scenarios.

Mine is a hippie ish free organic growing virtual coworking community. So it is easier to get active members to add to Notion than Wordpress. I think this is an edge case though.

WordPress uses a WYSIWYG editor called Gutenberg for quite some time now: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/