I want to use portals, but it is cost-prohibitive for me right now as a freelancer. I keep wanting to upgrade but can’t justify the cost when I’m not sure the other users will utilize it in the way its intended. Just seems all the upgrades have gotten incredibly expensive. may upgrade for a month and test it out. 

But the only option i saw was ‘15 users’ for an extra $120/mo ‘ i just need the portal for like 1 person to view/engage with...

Yes, I'm a bit hesitant to fork out and try it!

Portals are essentially the same as using interfaces, so you can test it out by sharing your interface with just one or two users who you would invite into your interface as Airtable users.

This could help you figure out if you want to start using portals at a discounted price over the price of full Airtable users.

However, even at the discounted portal price, it’s still pretty expensive compared to the 3rd-party portals on the market, so you may want to explore some of the 3rd-party portals which are much cheaper  

Some of the 3rd-party customer portals that communicate with Airtable are Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide. (I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.)

Also, for a free option, read-only users can edit an Airtable record for free by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which allows users to update Airtable records with a form. (I demonstrate how to do this in this Airtable podcast episode.)

For another free option, external read-only users can also edit your Airtable records for free by triggering a custom webhook in Make, which would then automatically run an automation that marks that task as complete. (I demonstrate how to use custom webhooks in this Airtable podcast episode.)

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 ​@Pdf,

What is your specific need? Would you mind sharing a bit more about your use case?

On my side, I try to avoid any type of portal as much as possible -to avoid the extra development and integration. What I noticed, is that most of the portal user needs can be fulfilled way leaner building automations for sending “create record” or “update record” forms to users. You can even pre-fill fields or text dynamically if you want to show information for the specific user on such forms.

To such effect I would highly recommend you check out Fillout forms as they are way more robust than Airtable native forms. Fillout has direct Airtable integration, and their free plan is usually more than enough. 

Happy to have the discussion.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Oops. Just saw Scott’s answer above!

Thanks ​@ScottWorld and ​@Mike_AutomaticN,

We are big Fillout users and I see that edit form working for one use case, the leaner option.

You're right, I will try sharing interfaces, and trying permissions out :)

So one portal case is a partner portal. We simply need to share info (in Airtable) behind a login and also have the ability to submit and edit requests. This is the leaner case and I think what you suggested works.

Second use case is 'field worker', adding and editing various data about home visits and their own profile via mobile, hence my interest the in mobile experience.

I should say that we do currently use Glide which has been handy for the mobile experience in particular, but I agree with Mike in that I prefer to keep maintenance overhead low and third party portals means doubling interfaces in some cases.

My main worry is that the login and giving credentials is not as smooth as third party actually.

Any thoughts?