Notion, Figma, and Datadog publish three different answers to the free trial vs freemium SaaS question: a permanent free plan with hard limits, a free tier sitting under priced seat types, and per-product trials attached to metered billing. All three publish their rates. What is easier to miss is what happens to the invoice the moment a team crosses from evaluation into paid use.
What it is and who it’s for
In SaaS, a freemium model means the product keeps an ongoing free tier; a free trial means access is free for a bounded testing phase before standard billing applies. The three pricing pages in this comparison show how differently that plays out.
Notion runs a classic freemium plan. Its Free plan is $0 per member and includes unlimited pages and blocks for individuals, 10 external guests, file uploads up to 5 MB each, and 7 days of page history.
Figma keeps a free Starter tier with limited access to Figma products, including unlimited drafts plus UI kits and templates, and prices everything above it by seat type.
Datadog does neither exactly. Its pricing page carries a “Start Free Trial” button on essentially every product card rather than one trial for the platform, and it does not state a trial length anywhere. Several products also include a permanent free allowance: Agent Observability lists a Free tier of up to 40,000 LLM spans per month with 15-day retention and no credit card required, and Feature Flags usage below 1 million monthly flag configuration requests is included at no cost.
The distinction matters most to teams that have to predict a first paid invoice: a workspace tool bills the people you add, while an observability platform bills the volume your systems generate.
How it works
Notion prices paid plans per member. The page displays $10 per member per month for Plus and $20 for Business, with Enterprise on custom pricing, a monthly/yearly toggle, and a stated saving of up to 20% on yearly billing. Guests stay free of charge but can only reach the individual pages they are invited to, so a broad review audience does not push up the bill. Members do: adding one mid-cycle creates a prorated charge, and removing one produces no credit — the freed seat stays available for someone else until the billing period ends, and the seat count is resynchronized at each renewal.
Figma prices by seat type rather than by head. On Professional the page displays a Full seat at $16 per month, a Dev seat at $12, and a Collab seat at $3, with a monthly/annual toggle. Organization is billed annually at $55, $25, and $5 for the same three seats, and Enterprise at $90, $35, and $5. Only the Full seat covers every Figma product; Dev covers Dev Mode, FigJam, Slides, and Buzz plus view and comment access in Design files, and Collab drops to basic inspection in Dev Mode. On a paid plan, anyone else can view and comment without an extra seat, and a free viewer can still read measurements and property values, copy CSS, iOS, and Android code, and export assets.
Datadog prices each product separately, and each product carries its own unit and its own annual versus on-demand rate. AI Credits start at $500 per 500 credits per month billed annually, or $1.30 per credit on-demand. Code Coverage starts at $8 per committer per month billed annually, or $12 on-demand. Log Management ingest starts at $0.10 per ingested or scanned GB per month, with Standard Indexing at $1.70 per million log events and Flex Storage from $0.05 per million events stored, retained for a minimum of one month and up to 15.
Pricing and cost considerations
The published rate is the easy half. The harder half is what each vendor does at the boundary — the first upgrade, the first extra seat, the first month above a commitment.
| Vendor | Free access | Published paid pricing | What triggers the first extra charge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notion | Free plan at $0 per member; unlimited pages and blocks for individuals, limited blocks in workspaces with 2+ members; 10 external guests; 5 MB file uploads | $10 per member/month (Plus) and $20 (Business) as displayed, Enterprise custom, up to 20% off yearly; Custom Agents free to try, then $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits | Adding a member — the upgrade is charged immediately with a prorated adjustment, while downgrades only take effect at the end of the billing cycle |
| Figma | Starter tier, free, with limited access to Figma products, unlimited drafts, UI kits and templates | Professional Full $16 / Dev $12 / Collab $3 per month as displayed; Organization $55 / $25 / $5 and Enterprise $90 / $35 / $5, both billed annually | Assigning a seat type someone does not need — viewing and commenting is free on paid plans, and seats added mid-term are billed outside the annual invoice |
| Datadog | ”Start Free Trial” on individual product cards, with no stated duration; some products include a free allowance, such as 40,000 LLM spans per month in Agent Observability | Metered per product: $500 per 500 AI credits/month annually or $1.30 on-demand; $8 per committer/month annually or $12 on-demand; $0.10 per ingested or scanned GB; $0.25 per GB outbound per destination for forwarding to custom destinations | Usage crossing a product’s threshold — for Log Management, volume above a monthly commitment is billed as additional services at +50% of the annual price on the excess |
Notion’s transition is the most abrupt but also the most legible: upgrading charges the account immediately, reduced by the share of the billing cycle already elapsed, while a downgrade waits for the end of the cycle. A team that upgrades to test a paid feature therefore pays before it can step back down.
Figma’s transition is quieter and easier to under-budget. On a Professional annual plan, seats added during the term are charged as a separate monthly subscription at the monthly price, prorated from the day an admin approves them, and they keep arriving as monthly invoices until someone folds them into the annual subscription. On Organization and Enterprise, approved seats are prorated to the end of the annual term and invoiced quarterly. Either way, “billed annually” does not mean one invoice a year.
Datadog’s transition is a modelling problem rather than a billing event. A team moving from a trial into production has to forecast several meters at once, each with its own annual and on-demand rate. Our Datadog pricing guide works through how per-host and per-GB charges stack across teams.
How to choose
Start from the evaluation the team actually needs, not the label on the pricing page.
A freemium tier is the better fit when the team needs continued access to a limited feature set over weeks rather than days, and when the eventual cost driver is people. Notion’s Free plan supports that for individual work, and Figma’s Starter tier supports it for drafts — in both cases a team can keep evaluating the workflow before deciding who needs paid access, and in Figma’s case which seat type each of them needs.
A trial fits better when the product only shows its value against real volume and the meter, not the headcount, sets the price. Datadog’s units — credits, committers, ingested gigabytes, log events, stored events, instance-hours — mean the evaluation has to include a usage forecast, because a trial on its own does not reveal the monthly bill. Our Figma pricing guide and Notion pricing guide carry the per-vendor detail behind these comparisons.
Reversibility is the last filter, and it is not symmetrical across tiers. On Figma’s Professional plan an admin can downgrade or cancel from the Admin Dashboard; on Organization and Enterprise, downgrading or cancelling requires contacting Figma’s sales team.
Limitations and gotchas
The first gotcha is that “free” changes meaning as soon as a second person joins. A Notion Free workspace is unlimited for one person, but a workspace with multiple members gets a limited number of blocks; at the limit, the team can still read, edit, and organize existing content, but cannot add new blocks.
The second is that annual plans still generate off-cycle invoices. Figma bills mid-term seat additions on Professional as a separate monthly subscription, and Organization and Enterprise seats quarterly — a procurement team budgeting one annual payment will see more than one.
The third is that a single Datadog product can carry several charging dimensions at once. Log Management alone meters ingested or scanned gigabytes, indexed log events, stored events with a billing floor of 30 days per million, and outbound gigabytes per forwarding destination.
The fourth is that usage-based headcount metrics are not the headcount you know. Datadog counts a Code Coverage committer as an active Git committer with at least three commits in a month, and bills on the maximum number of active committers during the billing period rather than the average.
The fifth is that a failed payment is an access problem, not only a finance one. Notion retries payments up to 8 times within the following month, then restricts the workspace to limited access for a period before downgrading it to the Free plan.
FAQ
What happens to a paid Notion seat when someone leaves the team? Removing a member does not produce a credit or a refund. The seat stays available for a different member for the rest of the billing period, and the paid seat count is recalculated at the next renewal.
How long does Notion allow a refund after an accidental upgrade? Notion refunds the full amount if the subscription is downgraded within three days of signing up for monthly billing, or within 30 days for annual billing. Customers in the EU, the UK, and other regions with mandatory refund policies may qualify beyond 72 hours — Notion’s own example is a full monthly refund within 14 days in the EU.
Is there a cheaper path for students and educators on Notion? Yes. Notion says the Plus Plan, with a 1-member limit, is free for students and educators who sign up with a school email address, and that thousands of school domains qualify, not only .edu addresses.
How many AI credits come with a Figma seat before add-ons? Starter users get 150 AI credits per day, up to 500 per month. Full seats include 3,000 credits per month on Professional, 3,500 on Organization, and 4,250 on Enterprise; Collab, Dev, and View seats get 500 per month.
Does a Datadog customer pay twice for Code Coverage when already buying Test Optimization? No. Datadog grants one Code Coverage committer for every billed committer on Test Optimization or Code Security at no additional cost — a team paying for 25 Test Optimization committers gets 25 Code Coverage committers included.
