Need to increase the number of Automations

Unfortunately, this is one of the major limitations of Airtable. You may want to email support@airtable.com to see if they can give you a few extra automations — they sometimes do this for customers.

In the meantime, one very clunky workaround would be to synchronize some of your tables to another base and try to create automations there.

However, since synchronizations don’t happen in real-time, and because synchronization often results in read-only tables, this can result in additional complexities that you would need to solve.

For example, to handle the read-only situation, your automations would need some way to handle edits in other bases (such as custom JavaScripts or using Make)

Instead, your best bet would be to take a few simultaneous approaches here:

#1. If you can create additional bases to handle smaller isolated projects, you will get 50 automations per base.

#2. Try to combine as many different automations as possible into the same exact automation with conditional paths. So if multiple automations are triggered by similar things, you can combine them together into one automation and use conditional paths. NOTE THAT THERE IS ANOTHER LIMITATION HERE: Airtable automations can only have a maximum of 25 actions per automation.

#3. Outsource as many automations as possible — and create all of your new automations — with Make’s advanced automations & integrations.

Make has absolutely no limits on automations, automation runs, or automation actions. And Make can do automations that are infinitely more powerful than Airtable’s automations, including communication with every app on the web that has an API.

You can instantly trigger any of your Make automations with a simple button (or link) in Airtable that triggers a custom webhook, or if you have extra automation actions still available in Airtable, you can instantly trigger a Make automation by writing a custom Javascript.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. 

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

Try emailing them to ask whether they can up your automation limit, this has worked for a few people I know and the worst they can say is no heh

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If you’re open to third party automation tools that’d be the next easiest, stuff like Make.com, Zapier, etc.  The idea is to create a filtered view and point the tool at it, and when a record enters the view they’ll trigger and run.  These won’t be instant though, and the polling time will depend on how much you’re willing to pay

Specifically, for Zapier’s free plan it’ll poll once every 15 minutes and so it can take up to 15 minutes before the automation will run.  The paid plans will reduce that to 2 minutes or 1 minute depending on which you’re on

Make.com also polls once every 15 minutes and the paid plan will let you bring it down to 1 minute, but the problem is they charge you for each poll.  As an example, if you polled every 15 minutes it would consume 2.8k or so credits with the following formula:

• HOURS * MINUTES * DAYS / 15 MINUTES
  • 24 * 60 * 30 / 15

Make’s free plan gives you 1k credits, and so you wouldn’t be able to use the 15 minute poll on their free plan

I’d encourage you to try both options; Zapier’s more expensive than Make but is also more user friendly if you’re just starting out, and I think about it as either paying with time or money.  If you’ve got someone on staff that’s already familiar with Make then you should definitely do Make though!
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If they’re notification automations (sending out emails, Slack, Run Script actions that hit other services) then you could consider creating a new base to handle it.  The idea is to sync over the data you need and then set up the notifications there instead

Some notes:

1. Bases only sync data when they’re active, and so you’ll need to create an automation in the synced base to update some records on a schedule.  I like to do a scheduled automation that updates a Date type field on an hourly basis
2. When creating the views to sync over, try to only sync over fields that you specifically need for the automations and to keep up this maintenance.  This adds some overhead but when you’re trying to clean fields up in the future you’ll be thankful you did this 
3. If you’re on a Business plan this also works for simple updates to records