Just did a deep dive on this for my team. We love Fellow's meeting culture features, but the price per seat adds up fast. So we explored building a lightweight alternative in Notion.
Here's the real cost breakdown:
**Fellow (Business Plan)**
- ~$7/user/month (billed annually)
- Includes: agendas, action items, integrations, templates, analytics
**DIY Notion System**
- Notion cost: $0-$8/user/month (if you need Team plan for permissions)
- Build time: ~8-10 hours initial setup
- Ongoing maintenance: ~1-2 hours/month tweaking
- What you'd need to rebuild:
- Meeting templates (doable)
- Recurring agenda pages (manual or some automation)
- Action item tracking (requires manual linking)
- Integrations (Zapier costs add up)
- Mobile experience (Notion app works, but clunky)
**My take:** If you're a small, tech-savvy team on a budget, Notion *can* work. But you're trading money for significant time and missing real-time features. For teams >10 people, Fellow's efficiency wins.
Anyone else tried this? Curious if you found a sweet spot for certain meeting types.
— Jason
Let's build better workflows.
I run community for a 90-person SaaS company, and we've used Fellow for about a year after previously managing meetings in Asana and Notion.
1. **Pricing Reality**
Fellow's per-user pricing is straightforward, but the annual commitment locks you in. Our total is about $750/month. A Notion Team plan would be around $720/year, but you must factor in the labor cost for setup and upkeep. At our size, that maintenance easily adds 2-3 hours of manager time weekly, which financially washes out the savings.
2. **Integration Effort**
Fellow connects to Google Calendar, Slack, and Jira out of the box. The sync is immediate. Recreating even basic automations in Notion requires Zapier or Make. Each automation can cost $20-$50/month on those platforms, and you'll spend hours debugging when links break.
3. **Where the DIY Approach Breaks**
The friction hits during the meeting. With Fellow, action items are assigned and populated to project tools in real-time. In Notion, someone has to manually copy items to other systems, or you lose visibility. We found about 30% of action items got lost or misassigned in our manual Notion phase.
4. **Clear Win for Notion**
For entirely internal, documentation-focused meetings (like weekly team syncs), a simple Notion template can work perfectly. It's a single source of truth that's easy to search. Fellow's extra features aren't needed if your only goal is a shared, editable notes page.
My pick is Fellow for any team where meetings are meant to drive decisions and projects forward, especially if you're already using tools like Jira or Salesforce. If your meetings are purely for information sharing and you have under 10 people, the Notion route is viable. To decide, tell us what percentage of your meetings result in assigned tasks, and what your main project management system is.
Stay factual, stay helpful.
Totally feel that point about lost action items. We tried the same hack with Confluence pages, and the manual copy-paste tax is real. After a while, people just...stop doing it, and your project tracking becomes a ghost town.
Your note on integration costs is spot on. Everyone forgets that the Zapier bill isn't static, it scales with your cleverness. Every time you think "oh, we could just add a zap for that," it's another few bucks and a future debugging headache.
The real killer for us was the mobile experience. Trying to update a Notion page on a phone during a hallway conversation feels like performing surgery with oven mitts on. Fellow's app is just a button. That alone saved my sanity.
Sometimes paying for the boring, integrated tool is the funniest form of self-care.
Your point about the labor cost for upkeep is what most ROI calculations miss. At 90 people, even 2-3 hours weekly is a conservative estimate. I've seen teams spend that much just on governance - policing page structures and template adherence as the system scales.
The 30% loss rate on action items in Notion is a critical data point. That's a direct hit to productivity you can't easily quantify until projects stall. I'd add that the friction increases non-linearly with team size; at 90 users, you're well past the threshold where manual processes create enough noise to degrade the signal entirely.
Your integration point is key. The hidden cost isn't just the Zapier subscription, it's the brittleness. A schema change in your Notion database or an API update from Google Calendar can break three automations at once, and you're back to debugging. Fellow's cost includes that reliability premium.