Requesting more automations

​@vaultsportshq 

Unfortunately, there is no way to purchase more automations.

However, you can try emailing support@airtable.com to see if they will give you more automations for free. Be sure to post back here with whatever the support team tells you!

In the meantime, you may want to see if you can merge some of your similar automations together by using conditional logic in your automations.

And you probably already know this, but you can get an unlimited number of Airtable automations — that are significantly more powerful & customizable than Airtable’s native automations — by using Make’s Airtable integrations & automations.

Even better, you can instantly trigger any of your Make automations directly from Airtable by clicking on a button in Airtable (or by clicking on a link in Airtable) that will trigger a custom webhook (with optional webhook response).

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

Here is a more advanced way to instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable, but you are required to have extra automations available in Airtable to use this method.

I 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. And in this video, I show how to use custom webhooks.

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’ve had success with creating another base, syncing the requisite tables, and then moving the simple automations over (e.g. stuff like email notifications) and so you could try that!

The main caveat is that automations on synced tables are pretty limited and you can only do one Update Record action per automation, and so I usually put stuff like email notifications in there

Other options you can try are:

1. Emailing support to ask them to increase the number of automation slots.  There are some success stories here but YMMV
2. Using a third party automation tool like Make, Zapier etc
   1. Zapier’s going to come closest to the way Airtable triggers automations, except you’ll need to use views and they’ll only trigger on a 15 minute cycle (as low as 1 minute depending on the plan you’re on
   2. With Make, each check for new records to run on will cost you credits, and so if you make it check every 15 minutes it’d use up 2880 credits per month, not including the actions it would need to take afterwards
      1. Note that this is per Scenario, and so if you have two Make Scenarios that check every 15 minutes, it’d cost 5.7k~ credits per month just for checking

I’d also be happy to get on a free half hour call to either try to consolidate some of the automations or create the synced automation base, and you can grab a time here!

As I outlined above in detail, there is no need to put Make on a schedule nor have it use up any unnecessary credits. You can instantly trigger a Make automation whenever you want with an Airtable button, a URL link in Airtable, or an Airtable automation (if you have extra Airtable automations to spare).

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

Hi — I saw that your Business base is close to Airtable’s 50-automation ceiling.

Before moving all 50 workflows into another paid platform, I would audit them by trigger and outcome, combine the overlapping ones behind conditional branches, and move only the true cross-system jobs to an external webhook.

The first deliverable would be a written map showing which automations can be consolidated, the expected reduction in automation slots, and what should remain native.

If you can share an anonymized screenshot or list of the automation names and triggers, I can first tell you whether a meaningful reduction looks realistic. We can handle it asynchronously; no call or follow-up needed.

Hey! Hitting the 50-automation ceiling is actually a common point where teams stop adding automations and start consolidating them. Before you pay for an upgrade, it might be worth auditing what your 50 are actually doing. A lot of times a handful of automations are doing overlapping jobs or could be merged into one script step (e.g., a single run-script automation handling multiple record updates instead of several separate ones). That can free up a bunch of headroom for free.

If you do need the scale, Airtable support can sell you add-on automation packs on Business — just open a support ticket and ask about purchasing additional automations rather than jumping to a higher plan tier, which is usually cheaper than it sounds.

Happy to help you look at consolidating your setup if you want to share roughly what kinds of automations you're running.