Airtable AI - why cant I buy more? I cant just "stop my business" and wait till I can buy more AI?

​@CKARC 

I also just replied to your same question in this thread.

This is what I said:

Oh wow, that is nuts. I don’t think that any of us Airtable consultants realized that purchasing more “monthly AI credits” doesn’t go into effect until the next billing cycle begins!

And if you’re on an annual billing plan, what that means is that it could take up to a year for your additional “monthly AI credits” to be added to your plan!

To test this out, I just tried upgrading my “monthly AI credits”, and it told me that my additional “monthly AI credits” won’t kick in until my annual billing cycle resets — which is 9 months from now!

So if you’re on an annual plan, this becomes a double problem — you still have to wait until next month for your “monthly AI credits” to reset, but then you’re still likely to run out of credits every single month until your annual plan resets.

This is completely unmanageable. Like you said, that effectively shuts down an entire business from running their business.

You may want to email support@airtable.com to see if they can give you more AI credits for this month.

I would also let Airtable know that this entire billing situation needs to be fixed by filling out their feature request form here. 

In the meantime, my #1 best recommendation would be to rebuild all of your AI automations with Make’s advanced automations and integrations, which lets you integrate Airtable with OpenAI (ChatGPT), Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, or any other AI tool that you’d like.

Not only are Make’s automations infinitely more powerful & customizable than Airtable’s automations, but best of all, you will never run out of AI credits with Make because you can always pay for more AI credits that kick in instantly.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the many different ways that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

I use zero Airtable AI. Instead, I have script automations that send a webhook to Replit which is where the AI tasks are performed. It then sends it back to Airtable via API. Replit Agent built everything for me on its end super quick. It’s way cheaper to pay for the tokens yourself, you have way more flexibility, and you aren’t at risk of using up your credits. 

I swear no one at Airtable actually uses the AI product given how half-baked it is. And even less so compared to all the hundreds of products out there that are more powerful and easier to use by orders of magnitude. It’s like they built it to showcase for an IPO because it’s definitely not built for the power users / core customer base. 

Thank you, I have been in touch with airtable support multiple times and they keep saying “but you can buy more” and ive said multiple times “no, they dont kick in till mid next month”.  I think it must be a mistake they have as they all seem to think this is just me. 

its crazy, we have a bucketload of automations that are stopped now, data waiting to queue and nothing happening. Customers waiting

Yup, I can intgrate back to make or even api to a gpt, but thats clunky outside of the tables. This has been going on for months now and I cant understand why this is and why I cant spend money to fix it. 

Ive emailed the head of the AI product and waiting to hear there as well, i cant beleive this is by design. 
 

Wow, I’m really sorry to hear that you’re going through all of this!

It’s kinda nuts if this is by design. Although they did the same thing with automation runs — there is no way to purchase more automation runs, so if you run out of automation runs, your entire business grinds to a halt until the next month. (That can also be solved with Make.)

I hope that they can solve these urgent issues quickly!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Update on this - the head of AI has come back (wow!!) and this isnt by design, they are looking into it. This is one of the reasons I love Airtable, they actually have real people who are passionate about their product. To get an email back from an exec is unheard of (thank you !)

Thanks for the update on this ​@CKARC -- confirming that this is not the expected behavior of AI credits, and when a user purchases an AI credit pack, they should be able to begin using it immediately.

Glad you’re working with the team on resolving and please don’t hesitate to reach out if you run into any other issues!
 

Hi All - so the exact same thing continues. there is no way to buy additional AI credits, you can only change your plan to the highest plan AI (which I am on). If you are already on that plan, you cant buy more credits. All our automations have thereforefailed as they are reliant on Ai data to trigger. Ihave to sit and wait

Ive started using Zapier in this emergency to just use GPT native, the cost is already sunk, it is just a frustating manual process. 

 

Sounds like you’ve already made a large financial investment in Zapier, but I always strongly push everyone away from Zapier.

I am fully against Zapier because Make is infinitely more powerful & capable & customizable than Zapier, yet it is SIGNIFICANTLY CHEAPER than Zapier.

I wrote an entire post here comparing Make vs. Zapier, and if you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Yup, we have had zapier for 10 years. I have tried Make multiple times but its way too complex to set up and do iterations. I just end up going back to zapier. Airtable automations reduced that zapier cost as they do a lot of what I would do, but that is also capped and if we do a big run, we burn all our automations and cant buy more, and with the added issue of the AI not being able to use my own commercial AI account AND not being able to use more credits im backed into a corner

Hey ​@CKARC just wanted to pitch in to share my love for n8n. I run the self hosted version for about 25$ per month for pretty much unlimited automations and I do get to connect any apps/AI of my choice :D
 

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join the March 2026 AT Community led Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
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