Hi,
I have made a mistake in one of my automation, and what was supposed to run 1-2 times per week ran over 20 thousand times overnight. Luckily this happened on May 31st, so I did not need to wait for my quota to reset. However this made me wonder if there is some kind of safeguard feature in Airtable that would, for example, maximise the number of daily runs for each automation?
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Hm, not that I’m aware of I’m afraid. You could try to build your own logging system to track how many runs there are, add lookup fields to display the number of runs for that day, and make all your automation triggers check that lookup field as part of their trigger?
Unfortunately, you can’t do anything about that within Airtable itself.
However, I would recommend rebuilding your most important automations with a more advanced automation tool like Make’s advanced automations for Airtable.
Make is a no-code platform, but it is much more customizable and much more powerful than Airtable’s built-in automations. It also lets you trap for errors, set complex schedules, and much more.
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 ways that you could 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
Hey
Further context would be probably needed.
What is the current trigger for the automation? Would you minding describing the use case as well?
As both Scott and Adam mentioned above, this is not a native feature of Airtable automations.
However, you can build your own setup by having tracking how many times the automation ran (e.g. on a new table, have a list of your automations and keep adding +1 to a field called “Run Count”.
Airtable native automations have a couple of hard limits -count and runs (more on them here), and therefore for more granular needs I would suggest you rely on Zapier (I do not like it very much), Make, or n8n (you can also find a comparison on this different automation tools here). -If you self-host n8n (about $7 mo, you do not need to even worry about the amount of executions/runs!)
Hope this helps, and please feel free to send some additional details.
Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation
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