Increasing number of automations per base

Welcome to the community, @MC2021!

I know, it seems nuts, but Airtable has limited the number of automations to 25 per base (and 25 actions per automation). Even on the Enterprise pricing plan!

I haven’t tried this myself yet, but my guess is that you could probably set up extra bases to sync tables from your original source table, and then setup 25 automations in each one of those additional bases.

But that’s a really messy way of doing things. And to make matters worse, if you go over your allocated amount of “automation runs” in a month, Airtable gives you ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to purchase more automations at all! You have to wait until THE NEXT MONTH to be able to run your automations again! I don’t know anybody for whom this WOULDN’T be a deal-breaker. Think about your business being forced to shut down for the rest of the month, because Airtable doesn’t let you purchase more automations to finish out the month.

You might want to turn to Integromat, the professional & powerful automation platform. It has no limits, its automations can be professionally scheduled, it has thousands of powerful features that go way beyond the capabilities of Airtable’s automations, and you can purchase more automation runs if you use up your allocation. It can also serve as communication between your Airtable database and other web services.

There is a bit of learning curve to Integromat. If you need an expert to help you get setup with Integromat, please feel free to contact me through my website at scottworld.com. (I am a professional Airtable consultant and a Registered Integromat Partner, and the Integromat link contains my personal referral code.)

I apologize in advance for contradicting such a learned and knowledgeable contributor, but I just looked and see you can use up to half a million automations for the Enterprise level.

Free = 100
Plus = 5000
Pro = 50,000
Enterprise = 500,000

Contradiction, yes - but practical? No.

So you’re a small company of ten people with a penchant for automation who must increase the database costs by more than ten times just to sustain automation?

Impractical.

Automation makes it possible for businesses to hire 2 more workers who each need Airtable accounts.

I was just correcting the number of automations available per level, not looking to debate practicality of expense, etc., but I don’t disagree with you.

No, this is the NUMBER OF RUNS, not the number of automations nor automation actions. These are 3 completely different things. The number of automations is capped at 25, and the number of actions per automation is also capped at 25.

Ahhh - got it. I misunderstood what you were saying. I appreciate the clarification.

Crazy, I wonder why?

Ha! These are the exact 4 words I say every hour of every day when I use Airtable! :crazy_face: :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: :man_shrugging:t2:

Airtable is a colorful & half-baked product that often makes little sense.

The thing that’s driving me the most crazy right now is that they’ve changed the hover action of the View name — it only responds to your mouse if you approach the view name from underneath. I’ll be posting a video of this later on today.

I just posted a video of this here:

Linking to Automations limit too low

Does anyone know if the 25 automations limit applies to all automations or just the “active” ones? I can see us hitting the limit soon, but we could manage by switching them on and off at certain times…

I’m LOL’ing because, by definition, this is no longer “automated”.

Haha! Yes I guess - or you could think of it as Switching on a machine to get ready to do work…? Depends on the use-case of course.

Until Airtable addresses this 25-automation limit, along with the other gigantic (and possibly catastrophic) limit of never being able to increase the number of automation runs in a month if you exceed the limit:

I would recommend turning to Integromat, which is a professional low-code automation platform that has full 100% Airtable support, and doesn’t have ANY of the automation limitations that you will find in Airtable or Zapier.

p.s. Note that I am a professional Airtable consultant and a Registered Integromat Partner, and the Integromat link contains my personal referral code. If anyone needs help implementing Integromat and has a budget to pay for a consultant, please feel free to reach out to me through my website at scottworld.com.

Also known as manual processing; the opposite of automated processing. Feel free to build all sorts of “automations” and leave them off until you want to manually run them.

Generally, automated solutions create hyper-advantages in profitability, precision outcomes, data timeliness, and competition. If Airtable truly cares about helping users achieve these business attributes, they will dispense with this silliness and find a way for the platform to deliver consistently on this promise.

I admit that I finally tried INTEGROMAT after feeling that I lacked the time to write a lot of GAS myself, although I was clearly inspired to (learn to) write it and I think it will still make sense once I have tested a first workflow with the help of NoCode by collecting feedback and reading my logs in my sheets.
After a brief familiarisation with this INTEGROMAT environment (through an infinite number of online tutorials), after one hour and then two terrible hours of trying to connect my personal Google account (paid-tiers 100 GB storage) without success using procedures as cumbersome as setting up an EC-two before finally hoisting it to the level of Google Workspace, a river of pleasure was waiting for me!
Indeed Airtable Support by Integromat seems very rich, and extensive, without having made use of everything either before writing these lines.
INTEGROMAT is a Nocode and Automation experience that already leaves me very enthusiastic: the UX is fighting in the lead with Airtable outstanding on this point as well.
INTEGROMAT complete Airtable with the NoCode as I dreamed it would be!
I will tell you more about it soon, with examples, if I have time, because it is obviously easier to copy and paste Code than Scenarios full of parameters.

oLπ

That’s great to hear! :slightly_smiling_face:

My experience is that it is 25 total, turned on or off. That makes the 25 limit even more ridiculous. Why does the number of automations even matter? It’s the number of runs that use significant resources.

Ah, that’s a shame. Automations are relatively new so hopefully the lovely people at AirTable will increase the limits before too long.

Meanwhile, most of my automations trigger scrips when records enter views, so in theory I just need to make the view filters cover a wider range of conditions and code the extra logic at the top of the scripts. So far none of the automations have used more than 10% of the max run-time or memory so shouldn’t be a problem…

Airtable, you need to allow more on the enterprise plan or you will lose customers like us who will move to something else. Please listen to your customer needs.

Thanks

I would be interested to learn how to code this logic in scripts. I’m a very novice JS coder and looking for the correct way to code something like this.

Actually, you would have. :winking_face:

There are simply too many advantages and so few competitive platforms to create what you just created. Get over it - these are the challenges of scale - you have to exercise a little forward-thinking when building anything and especially when you realize the dependencies are critical to your solution and growing in number. There are no less than 50 conversations in this forum about automation limits.

This I agree with - it is silly and most of my clients have been successful pitching Airtable support for double the limit. Have you contacted them directly?

Lastly, you should consider proxying automation - basically designing them to serve more than one purpose.

Come on Airtable. Please remove this limit already. There are other very long forum post about this issue as well - not just this one.

Yes please remove this limit, along with the other limits this makes no sense, particularly for enterprise clients

Bump. Yes pleeeze.

Stumped across this today. I was going to add my 26th automation today

This limit and the current field limit of 500 fields per table are the two notorious Airtable limitation caps that should both be doubled.

The 25 automation limit wasn’t documented until the Automation help-page was published so many of us created number of automations without knowing there was a limit.

Now will take hours to recreated merged automations to free up slots.

If both of this was prominently displayed on the account-plan-comparison page from the beginning, I would have planned accordingly so that I won’t hit those limits without knowing I am getting close to reaching them.

Oh, well…