Adding a temporary collaborator on annual plan without paying for a full additional annual seat?

Your #1 best bet for this is to give her read-only access (which is 100% free), and then when she needs to edit a record, you can have her click on a button which opens that particular record in Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free, and it allows you to edit Airtable records via a form.

Fillout also offers hundreds of other advanced features that Airtable’s forms don’t offer, such as advanced field validations and creating new linked records with a form.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

• Using Fillout to edit an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

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

Is there any way to add a temporary collaborator on an annual plan and only pay for the month they are active?

I don’t think so I’m afraid.  You may want to open a support ticket and see if they have any suggestions that might help

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Or is there a recommended setup for short-term contractors who need editor-level access without triggering a full annual seat charge?

Depends on what kind edits they’ll be doing, really.  If you’re okay with a workflow where the user opens a form and submits changes, then Fillout works well and will let you do 1000 submissions per month on their free plan: https://www.fillout.com/

Downside is that you’d need to build out Interfaces to invite them to as read-only users instead of just inviting them to the base

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Fillout also has an AI app building arm, and so you could potentially build out an app for the contractor to make edits in, and I’ve heard pretty good things about how easy it is to work with.  One thing to note is that if you’re on a Teams plan I believe this’ll eat into your monthly API limits: https://www.zite.com/

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If you’re on a Business plan, maybe you could:

1. Create a new workspace and put that on the Business plan
2. Create a base in that workspace, sync the relevant tables over and then turn on two way sync

That way you’ll be paying for $54 x 2 instead of $54 x 12.  Two way sync tables have some limitations though, and so you’d want to test this out a bit before committing to a new workspace

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If you’re on Teams, a potential workaround might be to use Portals for this, which costs $120 per month for 15 users to have Interface access?  You’d be saving $120 and you’d need to build out the Interfaces though