I Use Notion for Everything. Custom Agents Almost Solve My Biggest Frustration With Notion AI.

Let me tell you how I use Notion first, because it matters for everything that comes after.

Notion is my personal knowledge system. Everything lives there. I track every movie and show I watch, every book I read. My journal entries. My reading list. My subscriptions. Workout plans. A daily health dashboard where I log sleep scores, food with macros, workouts, HRV, and resting heart rate. I manage the clients of my marketing consultancy in there too. They never see it, it's entirely internal, but all my notes, briefs, and project context sit in Notion. If it matters to my life, it's in Notion.

So when Notion launched AI and then started building on top of it, I paid attention. I've been using it genuinely, not just poking at it. And over time I built something I'm actually quite proud of: a Health Coach and a Life Coach, both living inside Notion as detailed instruction pages.

What I Actually Built

The Health Coach isn't just a page with some tips. It has my full profile: age, height, starting weight, thyroid medication schedule, supplement stack, the fact that my mom cooks South Indian food which is carb-heavy and I can't just swap it out, that I carry my 18-month-old son Adi to the park and that counts as a workout on my Apple Watch, that Adi doesn't sleep through the night yet so my HRV is all over the place and that context matters when reading my recovery data. It knows my goals, my targets for protein and calories and fiber, and it cross-references my Daily Health Dashboard before saying anything. It's a real, deeply personalised coaching persona.

The Life Coach is a different kind of page. It reads my journal entries and helps me make sense of what's going on. It knows my patterns and the things I'm actively working on. It's not a therapist and it doesn't pretend to be. It's more like a wise, honest companion that knows my life in enough detail to actually say something useful rather than something generic.

Both took real effort to build. And they work, when I'm in the right context.

The Problem With Notion AI Right Now

Here's where things get frustrating.

Notion AI has one global instruction set. You can point it at one page as its persona or context, but that single instruction set applies to every conversation you have with Notion AI, everywhere in your workspace. If I set my Health Coach page as the instruction, and then I go to a completely unrelated page and ask Notion AI to help me rewrite a sentence, suddenly my health coach is rewriting my sentence. The contexts bleed into each other. There's no way to say: use these instructions only when I'm here, and those instructions only when I'm over there.

My current workaround is honest but inelegant. I open the page I want to discuss, say my Daily Health Dashboard with all my recent logs, and I manually add other pages to the context window: the Health Coach page, the Workout Plan, whatever else is relevant. So the AI knows what we're talking about. It works, but it's a taped-up solution. I'm manually reconstructing the context every single time. And the moment I drift to another part of my workspace, it's gone.

What Custom Agents Actually Are

Notion is pitching Custom Agents as an automation tool designed primarily for teams. You build a workflow, set a trigger, and the agent runs in the background without you having to do anything. Monitor a Slack channel, triage feedback, post weekly summaries, update databases automatically. That's the marketed use case: the "works while you sleep" kind of busywork that handles itself across a team.

An agent can watch a database for new entries, run on a schedule, read across Notion and Slack, create pages, post updates, all without you lifting a finger. Unlike the regular Notion AI, which is on-demand (you ask and it responds), Custom Agents are autonomous. You configure them once and they run.

But here's what caught my attention: the core of what makes an agent useful is the instruction set and the isolated context. You define what it knows, what it can access, how it should behave. And that instruction set lives separately from your global Notion AI settings.

Which means you could build a "Health Coach Agent" with my Health Coach page as its instruction base, and a "Life Coach Agent" with my Life Coach page as its base. Each with its own isolated context. You just open whichever agent is relevant and chat with it, without those contexts bleeding into each other or into your general Notion AI usage. No scheduling. No automation. No taped-up workaround. Just the right mind for the right conversation.

That's the use case nobody in today's launch coverage is talking about. For me, it's the most interesting one.

The Cost Question

Now the part that takes the shine off it.

Custom Agents are free to use right now. Notion launched them today and the free window runs until May 3, 2026. After that, you pay in Notion Credits at $10 per 1,000 credits. Notion says a typical agent runs somewhere between 30 and 60 times per 1,000 credits, which means each run uses roughly 17 to 33 credits depending on complexity. A simple agent costs fewer credits per run, a complex multi-step one costs considerably more. For a solopreneur with light personal usage like mine, it might work out to $5 to $15 a month, but there's no fixed number Notion can give you because it genuinely varies.

What stings is that I'm already paying $24 plus taxes for my Notion subscription, and Custom Agents come as an additional credit purchase on top of that. My use case is simple and entirely personal. I'm not running team workflows or automating Slack channels. I just want isolated AI personas that don't bleed into each other. And I can't justify another recurring charge on top of what I'm already spending.

The credits don't roll over either. They reset every month and whatever you don't use disappears. For someone with naturally uneven usage month to month, it's a frustrating design choice.

What I Actually Wish Notion Would Do

Forget Custom Agents for a moment.

What I really want is for Notion to rethink how Notion AI handles instructions. Right now it's one persona, one instruction set, applied everywhere. What if instead, Notion AI supported multiple personalities, each tied to its own instruction page, each activated when you're working in a specific part of your workspace?

My Health Coach persona activates when I'm in my Health section. My Life Coach activates when I open my journal. A writing assistant activates when I'm drafting blog posts. Each one isolated, focused, context-aware, without me having to manually reconstruct the context every time, and without paying for a separate credit system on top of my subscription.

That would be the real upgrade. No new pricing tier. No credits. Just a smarter version of a feature I'm already paying for.

Custom Agents, at their best, are a workaround for this gap. A powerful one, and genuinely useful for teams running real automation workflows. But for someone like me, a solopreneur who lives in Notion and just wants their AI to understand which hat it's wearing in which room, it's a solution that costs more than I can currently justify.

I'll be watching what Notion does with this over the coming months. The free window until May is a good chance to test it properly and see what usage actually looks like in practice. But for now, I'm staying with my taped-up workaround and hoping Notion eventually solves the real problem at the Notion AI layer instead.