Dispatch #2: knowledge tools worth a second look

Notion’s Business tier now ships an autonomous agent

Notion’s pricing page currently lists a Notion Agent for autonomous task completion, AI Meeting Notes, and Enterprise Search as Business-tier features ($20/member/month) — a step up from the “limited trial” AI on Free and Plus ($10/member/month) (notion.com/pricing). There’s also a separately metered AI add-on for custom agents, priced at “$10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits” after a free trial — worth knowing before you assume the plan price is the whole bill. We put this next to Obsidian’s and Logseq’s local-first models in Notion vs Obsidian vs Logseq for developers.

Logseq is testing real-time sync — in alpha, not GA

Logseq’s GitHub page describes a new sync approach, RTC (Real-Time Collaboration), for syncing a graph across devices or collaborating with others — currently in alpha (logseq/logseq). If you’ve seen a claim that Logseq now has mature multiplayer collaboration, that’s ahead of where the project actually is as of writing. Worth watching, not worth betting a team workflow on yet.

The AI note-taking tool we’re not recommending, and why

While researching AI note-taking tools worth paying for, we checked Mem’s site to price it against Reflect, Otter.ai, Tana, and Notion. It returned a bare browser-compatibility error instead of a working product page. That’s not a confident basis for a paid-subscription recommendation, so we left it out rather than repeat a stale claim about pricing or features we couldn’t verify. If you’re specifically evaluating it, check the current site yourself before trusting any review that doesn’t show its own verification date — including, eventually, this one.

What’s actually worth paying for this cycle

Short version from the full review: Otter.ai is the narrowest and most checkable pick if you specifically need meeting transcription (Free tier: 300 min/month; Pro: $8.33/month annual for 1,200 min). Tana is the pick if you want a structured, model-agnostic context graph over freeform notes (Free: 5 meetings/month, 50 AI queries; Pro: $20/month early-bird). Google NotebookLM is free as of writing and structurally different from all of these — it grounds answers in documents you specifically upload rather than trying to be an ongoing daily notebook. Full pricing table and caveats in the full review.

From the same team

If a git-able, local-first vault is the deciding factor for you, we also operate Vaultsmith — Obsidian and Claude Code templates, including Second Brain OS. Disclosed house link, not a paid placement.

That’s Dispatch #2. Catch up on Dispatch #1, or see every issue at /dispatch/.