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Updates to Our Pricing Plans


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122 replies

Forum|alt.badge.img+3
  • New Participant
  • 1 reply
  • August 30, 2023

This seems to be impacting a lot on our side. We heavily use multi sync feature and it has been removed all through out. You must take care of your existing customers with legacy plan at least.


cbell6889
Forum|alt.badge.img+4
  • Participating Frequently
  • 5 replies
  • August 30, 2023

We are already seeing some clients moved over to the new Team subscription. What happened to having three weeks (which was already ridiculous) notice?


Forum|alt.badge.img+8
  • Participating Frequently
  • 11 replies
  • August 30, 2023

@cbell6889 Did you/they get an email about it? 😮
Mind posting it?

That's really surprising.


cbell6889
Forum|alt.badge.img+4
  • Participating Frequently
  • 5 replies
  • August 30, 2023

No communication.

Found out via seeing that they were over on the new 10GB data limits. Then checked their subscription to confirm.

I would love to be surprised, but I am not.


Forum|alt.badge.img+8
  • Participating Frequently
  • 11 replies
  • August 30, 2023

Did you rule out the edge case where an employee might have done that?
Airtable does prompt us regularly about our plan being over limit, so that might be a human mistake as well. 
I hope it is, to be honest.


cbell6889
Forum|alt.badge.img+4
  • Participating Frequently
  • 5 replies
  • August 30, 2023

I appreciate the ideas but these guys aren't new clients.

The owner is aware of the changes and is already requesting quotes for enterprise. I would be happy to bet that they are competent enough not to make those sort of mistakes.

Not that it could be proved either way


Greg_F
Forum|alt.badge.img+16
  • Inspiring
  • 141 replies
  • August 30, 2023

There are 3 things I ♥ love ♥ about this announcement!

1. Making it a day after the changes have taken place!

Finally the Move Slow and Make Things prophesized by @Howie is out of the way,  going back to good old, move fast and break things...

 
2. Introducing hard API cap limit without ability to see the current usage!


@nityadb wrote:

 

We’re working to provide better ways to monitor your current usage in workspace settings and will have more to share soon.


Not like some business owners going to 💩 their 🩳 , not knowing if the e-commerce orders will show up in airtable towards the end of the month, or maybe just deliveries will not be dispatched... Looks like better to upgrade plans just in case?

3.  Relegating relatively recent employee @nityadb in front of community firing squad 😂

I guess the meeting went something like this - We are making wide reaching pricing changes that are crucial to the company profitability, that we know will be unpopular.. hey @nityadb you mentioned you wanted to engage with community? Oh we got a first post idea for you!  

 

Non sarcastic feedback:

- Airtable by all means packs immense value for money. Plans have not changed for a while, you have added tons of features over the years.  Having 10 bases for 10 different project with single user even at $54 is a steal. Having one base with 10 users is pricey, but still cheaper than trying to build equivalent from scratch. 

-   People understand (not equal to like) price hikes . Xero hiked prices 2 times this year. Not happy, but wont be changing soft because of that. Better a price hike, than cutting existing features

- The lack of API measurement and a cap - is a debacle. I would understand a cap here , but maybe at least ability to pay above usage for heavy accounts. 

- Record limit was always the number one issue for my biggest clients, so 500k is great improvement. There are still ones that will run 2-5 million range so no more nice things there. The only tools there that offer some visibility into data are less functional Airtable clones.   

Looking forward to seeing API usage and which clients will crash it....


Forum|alt.badge.img+17

It's a mistake not to introduce a "Builder" plan that charges x more than the standard user. I stand as the sole builder for both my own and my clients' bases. Additionally, API calls, Records volume, Automations, etc. should adopt a pay-as-you-go model.

These plans seem to have been crafted by individuals out of touch with reality. I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I'm not moving my team to the Business plan for now. I'll hold in anticipation that Airtable may have to reconsider its approach.


Scott_Hoek
Forum|alt.badge.img+15
  • Known Participant
  • 33 replies
  • August 30, 2023

Same — we’re holding out to see if they go back on this.  It wouldn’t be the first time they made a stupid-ass decision and then changed course two weeks later.

It’s just gonna be cutting it a biiiiit close if they don’t change their minds…


Forum|alt.badge.img+3
  • New Participant
  • 2 replies
  • August 30, 2023

This limbo is really not cool though.


David_Anderson1
Forum|alt.badge.img+6
  • Participating Frequently
  • 7 replies
  • August 30, 2023

As an Enterprise customer I am pleased the API limit will not (for the time being) affect us, however I feel for those not on enterprise plans and have built mission critical applications (as we have done) using Airtable as a platform.  The beauty of the Airtable offering was that it enabled No-Code developers to build complex applications utilising third-party integrations - in my case, Stacker and others we have deployed.  I am now concerned for the future viability of those organisations who have build solutions that enhance Airtable as a platform, because, lets be honest, for many Airtable doesn't do everything we need it to do.

Migrating away from Airtable isn't an option as we have invested so much time, money, and effort across 12 key applications (800+ tables), but does have me considering whether we should be looking at alternative platforms to build out our databases for new requirements. 

So disappointing as I've been a huge proponent of Airtable both within and external to, our business.

 


Forum|alt.badge.img+2
  • New Participant
  • 1 reply
  • August 30, 2023

Will webhooks be counted as API calls in the new pricing model?


Forum|alt.badge.img+7
  • Participating Frequently
  • 6 replies
  • August 30, 2023

This new pricing plan is horrible! Not everyone needs enterprise-level software. Especially small businesses, in which Airtable is a great fit for.

Removing the "Plus" plan severely limits small teams with a budget. With a team of 5 that's now twice the price. $50/month is reasonable. $100/mo for a small team pushes the budget. Now that I've tested it enough, I was ready to move our team to a paid plan. But I'm going to have to reconsider it. We don't yet need all of the functionality of the Pro/Teams plan. It's just really disappointing. 

While this may increase revenue for Airtable, it's also going to turn people away from using it as a solution. And I suspect you will have a considerable amount of customer churn. And this approach certainly does not generate goodwill.


Forum|alt.badge.img+3

As I'm on the free plan, I'm not entitled to anything, but these change of plans is making me look for alternatives. Trust is gone.


BillH
Forum|alt.badge.img+21
  • Brainy
  • 178 replies
  • August 31, 2023

Forum|alt.badge.img+8

how do we see our api usage?


BillH
Forum|alt.badge.img+21
  • Brainy
  • 178 replies
  • August 31, 2023

@Elizabeth_Aucti 

This thread is getting long and hard to scroll through but the best response I've gotten is

"We’re working to provide better ways to monitor your current usage in workspace settings and will have more to share soon."

That was last Friday.  If I hear anything further I will post it here.


methnen
Forum|alt.badge.img+5
  • New Participant
  • 3 replies
  • August 31, 2023

@BillH That's a better response than I've received so far. I got a response saying they would try to answer my question soon because they had more support requests than normal and then a few days later I got a canned response that didn't address my API usage question at all. 

Good to hear they plan to have a way to monitor you're usage, but this should have been there before announcing these changes.


Scott_Hoek
Forum|alt.badge.img+15
  • Known Participant
  • 33 replies
  • August 31, 2023

After pestering support for quite some time, I got escalated to a support lead who told me they're parsing feedback and we may hear something new soon.  Fingers crossed that someone at a conference table in San Francisco is about to see the light.


Forum|alt.badge.img+6
  • New Participant
  • 2 replies
  • August 31, 2023

I hope they'll cancel their changes... And take care of their existing customers...


Forum|alt.badge.img+10
  • Known Participant
  • 13 replies
  • August 31, 2023

We need a price difference between creators and editors. Plain and simple. 


Forum|alt.badge.img+10
  • Participating Frequently
  • 31 replies
  • August 31, 2023

Agree - according to this reddit thread, it looks like they already have Builder and Contributor user tiers for Enterprise.  Would be nice if they expanded that to Business.  I'd be completely ok with $45 Builder and $20 Contributor on Business.  I'd probably add customers and vendors on too if contributors were $10.  There's value in simplicity and not needing a third party like stacker to do the UI.  


Karlstens
Forum|alt.badge.img+20
  • Inspiring
  • 601 replies
  • August 31, 2023

100% @J_Jones - that’s exactly what I was expecting. Airtable must reconsider this entire ordeal, take in all this feedback back, and then come back to the table with a better deal.


nityadb
Forum|alt.badge.img+4
  • Author
  • New Participant
  • 3 replies
  • August 31, 2023

Hi everyone,

I appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback and want to let you know that we’ve escalated these concerns to our product and business teams. I know that a big point of concern and confusion has been around our new API usage limits and how they are enforced, so below is some more detail to give you a fuller picture of the changes: 

API limit monitoring

We hear your feedback about needing to understand API usage within workspace settings. While we don’t have a specific date to share when this will be available, we can confirm that this has been prioritized by our product team and they are looking to add API usage metrics to the workplace setting page in the coming weeks. We will confirm here and update the help center when this is live.

Enforcing API limits

While we have put usage limits on monthly API calls available on the Free and Team plans, our enforcement of those limits will not shut down your ability to use our API when you go over the limit of your plan. Instead, any API calls that exceed the limit on your plan will run at a slower speed until the next month of your Airtable service. 

To give you specifics on how this works, let’s look at the limits on our Team plan:

  • Team plans under the monthly usage limits are subject to our current rate limit of 5 requests per second as defined in our developer docs. 
  • Once the usage limit is reached, you will still be able to make API calls, but the rate will slow to 2 requests per second until the month resets. Since these are rate limits, the integration that performs the API calls will need to handle the rate limit accordingly in order to limit performance degradation or failures.
  • More information on rate limits is available in our developer docs.

When we made this change, we saw that four out of five customers have not historically used our API in a way that will exceed these limits, and should not expect to see any changes. We recognize that putting in limits will always feel disruptive, but hope that the way we went about enforcing them will help you feel confident that your workflows will not break.


dilipborad
Forum|alt.badge.img+20
  • Brainy
  • 216 replies
  • September 1, 2023

@nityadb 

It's quite surprising to see Airtable, a successful tool, increase its pricing and introduce more restrictions without providing a clear explanation.

While we may not have all the details, it's possible that external factors, such as investor pressure, could be influencing this decision. As a loyal user, I've appreciated the value Airtable offered at its previous price point.

However, the sudden change does raise concerns about transparency and the impact on users who rely on the service. I hope the company can provide more insight into the reasoning behind these changes and address the community's questions and feedback.


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