Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) — source corpus
- Free allowance
- Also 500,000 words/source cap and no page limit.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, phone unknown
- Binding limit
- per-object-capper-object-cap 200 MB
- Evidence
- reported10 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | Also 500,000 words/source cap and no page limit. unit TB; metered on unstated |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
per-object-cap 200 MB or 500,000 words. Notebook cap is per-user; source cap is per-notebook; 'sharing a notebook does not change the source limit for any collaborator'. Copy-protected PDFs are rejected outright. Consumer API is undocumented and Google has changed enforced limits without updating the published tables. |
| Identity | email a Google Account: the plans page states 'Sign up free of charge by using your gmail account', and the help centre requires verifying age in that Google Account before access. No card appears in that flow; whether a phone number is asked for was not read. |
| Egress | No egress metering or fee anywhere in the product. Reads happen through Google's own UI/API, not a CDN URL. |
| Per-object cap | per-object-cap 200 MB (200000000 bytes) |
| Retention | not stated |
| Interface | rest, cli No official public API for consumer accounts. Working path is the reverse-engineered internal batchexecute API: notebooklm-py (19,838 stars, pushed 2026-10-21) exposes Python, CLI, MCP server, and a local REST server; notebooklm-mcp (202) and notebooklm-rest-api (91) wrap it. |
| Tooling | pip install notebooklm-py; notebooklm source add, notebooklm ask, notebooklm generate, notebooklm download. Google Cloud has a separate documented Enterprise API (notebooks.sources.uploadFile) that requires a Workspace/Cloud entitlement. |
| Composes with | 100 notebooks x 50 x 200 MB = 1 TB per Google account. Google accounts are free and email-only, so N accounts linearise. Upskilling to Plus/Pro only raises the per-notebook source cap (100/300), so the notebook count stays at 200/500 — the free tier already gives the widest notebook multiplier per dollar. |
| Reliability | READ-BACK IS EXTRACTED TEXT, NOT ORIGINAL BYTES. There is no 'download source' button; the platform keeps a static extracted copy and the original file is not retrievable. Third-party extensions (Notebook Clipper, nlm tools, notebooklm-tui) export sources as Markdown/TXT/PDF of the extracted text; notebooklm-tui saves PDFs as per-page PNGs. It is a genuine 1 TB of free ingest, and a genuinely usable grounded-RAG corpus, but it is not a byte-exact archive. Rate limits apply and heavy use is throttled; the shared CI account-pool discussion in the wrapper's own docs is the tell. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 10
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | support.google.com/gemininotebook/answer/16269187?hl=en | 'The current limit is 500,000 words per source or up to 200MB for local uploads. There's no page limit.' |
| 2026-10-21 | support.google.com/gemininotebook/answer/16213268?hl=en | 'Notebooks | 100/user'; 'Sources | 50/notebook' (Standard column); 'Sharing a notebook does not change the source limit' |
| 2026-10-21 | github.com/teng-lin/notebooklm-py | 19,838 stars, description 'Full programmatic access to Gemini Notebook's features—including capabilities the web UI doesn't expose'; pushed_at 2026-10-21T19:38:11Z |
| 2026-10-21 | notebookclipper.com/docs/notebook/export-sources | export is 'the text Gemini Notebook extracted from each source, as Markdown, plain text or PDF' — not the original file |
| 2026-10-21 | ainotechou.com/notelm-source/ | '元のPDFには戻らない！HTML形式への変換' (does not return to the original PDF) |
| 2026-10-21 | docs.cloud.google.com/gemini/enterprise/notebooklm-enterpris | separate Enterprise API exists but is entitlement-gated |
| 2026-11-01 | support.google.com/gemininotebook/answer/16213268?hl=en | the standard plan is signed up for with a gmail account at no charge |
| 2026-11-01 | support.google.com/notebooklm/answer/16269187?hl=en | the 200 MB per-source cap is stated on the frequently-asked-questions page, not on the plans page the row named |
| 2026-11-01 | support.google.com/notebooklm/answer/16269187?hl=en | the 200 MB per-source limit is stated on this page |
| 2026-11-01 | support.google.com/gemininotebook/answer/16213268?hl=en | the standard plan is still 100 notebooks per user, and 50 sources per notebook on the same table |
Unknown values 3
- per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read