When Software Stops Being for People

There's a specific kind of sadness that comes with watching a piece of software you loved grow up and forget where it came from. Not the kind of sadness that makes you angry. More like watching a friend slowly change after getting a corporate job. They're still them. Technically. But something is off.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly about Notion.

The Promise: A Tool That Felt Like Yours

When Notion first appeared, it felt different. The pitch was simple and human: one workspace for your notes, your projects, your life. The early Notion had this energy you could feel. The templates were creative, the community was building wild personal dashboards, people were sharing habit trackers and reading lists and life operating systems. It was personal software, built by people who actually cared about how individuals think and organize.

And that wasn't just a vibe. The free tier was generous. The design was clean without being sterile. You could mold it into whatever you needed. A student organizing semester notes, a freelancer running their whole business, someone just trying to keep their recipes in one place.

Then: Personal dashboards. Life wikis. A blank canvas that felt like possibility. Templates shared by the community, for the community.

Now: Enterprise connectors. SOC 2 compliance badges. AI add-ons at $10/month. The landing page leads with "for teams" before anything else.

The Pivot Nobody Talks About

At some point, Notion started drifting. The features started arriving not because individuals were asking for them, but because enterprise buyers were. Advanced permissions. SCIM provisioning. Audit logs. The kind of stuff that makes a CISO happy but means nothing to someone trying to organize their college life.

I get it. Enterprises pay more, churn less, and sign annual contracts. A single enterprise deal can be worth thousands of individual subscriptions. That's just math.

But there's a cost. And the cost is identity.

"Notion tries to be everything and ends up being mediocre at most things. It's an amazing database tool pretending to be a notes app pretending to be a project manager." — a Reddit user

The default templates shifted from personal systems to sprint planners and OKR trackers. The pricing pushed personal users toward paying for features they'd never use. The whole gravity of the product moved.

Then AI Made It Worse

When Notion introduced Notion AI as a paid add-on, per user, per month, it felt like a confirmation. The tool that once felt generous was now nickel-and-diming you for autocomplete.

And this wasn't unique to Notion. Every productivity tool went through the same transformation in 2023-2024:

• Notion added AI at $10/user/month
• Coda pivoted hard toward enterprise automation
• Evernote was reborn as a corporate zombie after Bending Spoons acquired it
• Todoist, Obsidian, even Apple Notes scrambled to add AI features, some more gracefully than others

The pattern is always the same: take something personal, layer enterprise features on top, charge more.

Software Without a Point of View

What bothers me isn't that Notion became a B2B tool. It's that it lost what made it interesting in the process. You can serve enterprises and still have a personality. Figma does it. Linear does it. Slack, for all its faults, still feels like a product with opinions about how communication should work.

Notion increasingly feels like it has no opinion. It's a blank canvas surrounded by enterprise upsells. The product doesn't stand for anything anymore. It stands for whatever your organization needs it to stand for, and that's fine for a tool, but it's death for a product.

What I Actually Want

I don't want software to stay frozen in time. I want it to evolve with intention, with a clear sense of who it's for and what it believes.

Some apps still get this right:

• Obsidian — local-first, markdown, your files on your machine. Optional AI that respects your data sovereignty.
• Raycast — built for developers and power users, unapologetically.
• Linear — opinionated project management. Fast, clean, committed to a specific philosophy.

The common thread: these tools know who they are.

The Uncomfortable Truth

I still use Notion. It works. But "it works" is the most damning thing you can say about software that once made you excited.

The best software doesn't just function. It reflects a way of thinking. It makes you feel like the people who built it understood something about you. When that feeling disappears, you don't stop using it. You just stop caring about it.

And that's the real loss. Not that Notion became bad. It became forgettable. For a product that once felt like the future of how we organize our thoughts, that's a lot worse.

I've used Notion since 2020 and I'm writing this from a place of genuine affection for what the product once represented. The shift I'm describing isn't unique to Notion, it's a pattern across the industry. But Notion is the one that stings the most because it promised something different.