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The decision to lock the Visibility function of fields in interfaces to business accounts is unfortunate. Of all the upgrades that going from Teams to Business grants, this is the most arbitrary one. The ability to turn off fields is a simple quality of life function that no one is going to be upgrading to get, it's a punitive measure against those of us who are not as well funded.

The poorest organizations using teams are also those that typically will most need the Visibility function in interfaces. They will generally have the lower paid or more transient staff that turning off fields and buttons will prove most crucial for.

Case in point, non-profits will often have volunteers who can greatly benefit from not being able to see or interact with functions until other steps have been taken or not taken. Airtable has chosen to doubly hit those organizations by giving no discount to them at the business level and turning off a key feature that they would benefit from in getting them to that level.

It feels arbitrarily mean spirited to lock paying customers out of this simple but very useful feature. Everything else about business suggests that it's for business that are large, doing well, and just need to upscale. It's an unfortunate decision.

What do you think? Have you upgraded a Teams account to Business for this feature? Or does it feel unnecessarily petty?

I mean, I’m the guy posting the Oliver Twist meme every time they post about a new Business/Enterprise only feature, so you know I agree haha. 

Over the 4 or 5 years I’ve been using Airtable it’s become more and more apparent that they really only care about Enterprise customers, and some of the minor feature gating is really annoying. I will say that I’ve heard you can get a non-profit discount at the business tier (it’s been mentioned by AT staff in the EDU user group) but I haven’t tried myself. 

Of course you can often work around Airtable’s self-imposed limitations by utilizing Fillout or making a ludicrous number of interfaces, and it’s still hard to deny the value proposition of the team tier.

That all said, the enterprise focus is nowhere near as annoying to me as the recent AI garbage, which has really made me concerned for the future of this platform. 

“I will say that I’ve heard you can get a non-profit discount at the business tier...”

Oh, interesting, they don’t say anything about it on their site, just that the discount only applies to Team. I worked with a non-profit briefly that went from Team to Business, and they lost their discount immediately. Thanks for the heads up!

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