Join us for Table Talk next week for more information about recent Airtable updates

[Jordan_Scott1]

Happy 2022! I hope everyone’s year is off to a great start.

As you may have seen earlier this week, as of Tuesday, January 11th, Airtable has rolled out updates to our Free, Plus, and Pro plans*. These updates to our packaging are meant to give users access to more advanced features in Airtable, like apps and sync integrations. We’re also starting off the year with a few much-needed product improvements to our automations and view features.

We are excited about all of these changes and would love to have you join us for Table Talk on Thursday, January 20th to learn more. Airtable’s Self Serve Product Leader, Lauryn Isford, and Head of End User Marketing, Christy Roach will join us to share a behind the scenes look at the thinking and strategy behind our packaging changes, and Mary Cook from Airtable’s Automations team will also be joining us to talk about some new functionality we’re launching next week. You can submit questions in advance here.

For those who were already planning on joining us for next week’s Table Talk, this is a slight change of plans. We had previously planned to have Peter Deng, our Chief Product Officer, join us to talk about our roadmap. Peter is still excited to talk about all things Airtable Roadmap with you, and this has been shifted to Thursday, February 10. Thanks for your ongoing feedback and flexibility. We hope to see you at both of our upcoming Table Talk sessions.

*There is no price change associated with this update and no existing workspaces lose any capabilities. For more details about this update to our Free, Plus, and Pro plans as well as FAQs, please see this resource page published in our help center.

[openside]

A timely thread from Box CEO Aaron Levie relevant to this discussion just tweeted today. Can Airtable withstand the temptations and stay true to its vision? We’ll see if @Howie_Liu has it in him.

twitter.com

Aaron Levie

@levie

One of the hardest challenges of a startup or any software project is staying true to your vision, while also dealing with complex trade-offs and opportunities that come along the way. Yet ultimately, uncompromising strategies are usually the ones that scale. A little story…

2:28 PM - 15 Jan 2022 377 40

[ScottWorld]

This is what it all boils down to:

Airtable’s financial incentives are not in alignment with their customers’ best interests.

Why?

Because Airtable is flush with nearly $2 billion in VC funding, and they have been repeatedly told that they are worth $11 billion. So their “customers” are their VC’s.

They don’t see their customers, consultants, or developers as important (or even necessary!) parts of the Airtable ecosystem.

Airtable has continually generated badwill amongst their biggest fans & loyalists because of these misaligned incentives.

Here’s a hint for Airtable:

Start caring about your customers & developers & consultants before it’s too late.

[Hendrik_Yang]

Very well said. Many of us have invested significant amount of time learning Airtable partly we do hope Airtable can grow as big as Google Workspace and its marketplace. Just as what @openside has highlighted, Airtable needs to fix this pricing to grow but not with this way. I am sure Airtable has a team of PhD finance expert, forecaster, etc to come up with this ridiculous structure of pricing. Instead of bashing their pricing, I would propose this model:

• Usage based pricing whereby all plans have almost all access of features but limited with how many storage they are using.

Some of customers are not from marketing department, they do not need to upload tons of attachment into the base, they need more records (beyond 50k) and they should allow this in lower tier plan (plus or pro) either as an add-ons or included.

I am pretty sure Airtable top management is blindsided by recent funding and they think they can do whatever they want.

On the side note, I do appreciate @Jordan_Scott1 for her engagement and contribution to the community.

[Paul_G]

Wow, an interesting read, I truly feel for those businesses that have dedicated themselves to AT, unfortunately this has exposed proprietary no-code lock in at it’s worst.

Pre-IPO pump at the expense of early stage adopters. I am now expediting open-source options to avoid being painted into this corner in future. I had concerns early on Airtable with little to no DevRel activity - vindicated by this post, how sad.

I wish you all the best with your hedge fund investors and meeting their growth targets, I am actively moving off this platform…

[Olpy_Acaflo]

Hi @Jordan_Scott1 , Airtable, Community, Experts, Scripters,

I remind you that I use Airtable Pro (now Legacy) because I am a Teacher, that before 2019 I had intuitions, even a mockup of what I was looking for as a platform to base my work of Collecting, Sorting, Redaction, Illustration, Editing, Restricted Test-Diffusion of any material for my Courses, Exercises, Workshops and then I had a flash at the end of August 2019 when I discovered Airtable a bit difficult because I was using keywords that always made me go around Airtable instead of landing in it!

Very quickly my amazement went down one floor (November 2019) because Airtable, not yet equipped with all these noCode aspects of today, was not at all scriptable, neither in Python which I already knew enough to make something operational, nor in Javascript which I had a very basic knowledge, without code requirements as I learned here in the community and on medium.com since.

It’s when the Script Block beta fell in my mailbox around the 18/12/2019 that the game changed: in contact with most of those who wrote in this thread and who offered commented scripts and improvements or even more massive rewrites, commented, of our own attempts of scripts, I learned to do from airtable almost what I wanted!

The limits that prevented me from getting 100% satisfaction look, from here, not impossible to break but they resisted all my ultimate requests or begs:

• I still have no programmatic access to switches, toggles, options of my views;
• I’m still not able to collect nor to modify programmatically my formulas: so my plan to maintain my own library of formulas has fallen through, which has led to my massive replacement of formulas with scripts that I can manage in libraries after writing them reusable.

Since December 2019, whenever I’m on tools other than DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic or Adobe Apps, I’m 80% of my time on Airtable and 20% of my time on Google Workspace.

I have invested all this time, and my Airtable Pro (legacy) subscriptions, and a subscription to a small FrontEnd to make my own Interfaces that can be shared in readOnly endlessly and without exposing all my data contained in my database, and I have never had the opportunity to invest more of my own money because I don’t even represent a Business but a Non-Profit in the Education field.

On the other hand all my Students who are 22 yo average age have a contact with Airtable through me and as some of them are learning javascript because they are studying “interactivity”, some of them also have a contact with what is going on under the hat of my final presentations of supports of courses based on Airtable.

Of all that has been proposed in this thread by those who have helped me, improved me, made me productive of added value in my work, the one that seems to fit me best about Apps and App limits is this one.

kuovonne:

When pondering possible reasons for the app limit, one possible reason was the fact that having a lot of apps that “watch” records can slow a base down. Scripting app happens to only run when a user clicks a button, and thus is unlikely to slow down a base.

I feel that there are other extremely useful apps that help base users but do not “slow down” the base because they do not “watch” records. Could Airtable consider also exempting these apps from limits for Pro workspaces?

At the very least, Description app should also be exempt from base limits in Pro workspaces. The Description app is useful for documenting how a base works and how to use a base. If people have limited slots for apps, this app is most likely to never be used, yet it can provide immense value when onboarding new users to a base or dealing with complex issues that relate to maintaining a base.

Similarly, Base Schema can help users understand their bases better, and it only watches for schema changes, not record changes. It is the one app that I always recommend to anyone trying to understand their base, and many times when I show it to clients who struggle, they have a “lightbulb” moment. This app really helps people better understand the concept of links and backlinks, which is essential to developing on the Airtable platform.

Other apps that are extremely useful but do not watch records (and thus should have minimal performance impact) are the CSV Import , Search , Dedupe , and Batch update apps.

I understand that having multiple tiers of apps (those subject to installation limits, and those not) can be confusing. However, if you already are making an exception for scripting app, this two tier system already exists. Plus, there will always be a multi-tier system when you include third party apps.

mostly because:

Justin_Barrett:

The Pro plan that I have now gives me freedom . I don’t use a ton of apps, but if I feel like I need to add one, I don’t have to think about how many I’m using. I can add one, or two, or five, or whatever I need, and that’s the key word. What do users need ? If someone on the new Pro plan needs more than 10 apps…um, well, they’re stuck. There is literally nowhere to—oh, that’s right, there’s the Enterprise plan. How much is that? …I’m sorry, what did you say?! :flushed:

My first steps and decisions to invest so much time, and some money in Airtable were also very similar to this:

openside:

The reason I shifted my entire business focus to Airtable a few years ago is because I watched several videos of @Howie_Liu in the early days selling the vision of what Airtable could become ( I think I’ve seen every public video of him talking out there). His vision was a platform to re-invent software/app development. The core database behind the next generation of new product development.

I bought into that vision and saw the potential of Airtable. Airtable could become one of the top 5 major players in the future of the Internet with that kind of vision. The product is moving in that direction but not there yet, but the potential is still there, so I’ve continued to move forward with similar hope.

This pricing announcement indicates that is no longer the vision for Airtable. If this change happens, Airtable is no longer a platform, but a product. It no longer has the potential to be in the class of Google/Microsoft/AWS/Salesforce. It may be able to compete with Smartsheet/Asana/Monday - but now you need to compete head to head in a sales driven enterprise strategy based on features. Now, your lack of features will be even more noticeable when sold in head to head competition. You no longer have the vision of a platform to promise people coming in the door to test out your product.

To conclude, Airtable should definitely take this into consideration:

Bill.French:

You Misjudged The Definition of Your Own Product

Many of the responses here have articulated a detailed fracture between your internal definition of Airtable and the perceived possibilities that new buyers glean with the help of many people, products, and app flexibility. Most importantly, these perceptions are fundamentally based on apps that make it possible for customers to fabricate an ideal fitness-of-purpose; a fleeting possibility the more you constrain the number of apps.

These quotations are better written than I could have written to express this.
I thank again their Authors for having enriched, influenced, oriented my path in the now LEGACY Airtable Pro Plan
and

Justin_Barrett:

concluding with this statement that hit me hard:

I’ll have to be careful never to upgrade.

Sources: this fired me just before I opened @Justin_Barrett AATB NewsLetter:

Kamille_Parks:

Databaser:

And how much love and effort and input does it take for these :point_up: and other amazing community contributers to get some freaking respect…

Apparently, more than 3 apps in the Marketplace and/or more than 312 solutions here in the forums.

that was following:

Kamille_Parks:

Since all three of my questions are unlikely to be answered during the Table Talk I will post them here for posterity:

1. Why are new Pro users limited to 10 apps per base?
2. Why was this limit placed before greater than 5% of the Apps can be replaced with Interface Designer’s functionality?
3. What steps will Airtable take to rebuild its now tanked relationship with the developer community?

There are pros and cons to the changes in pricing plans. The “10 apps per base” limit for Pro users is indefensible from every angle I’ve looked at it and am dying to see what the justification could possibly be.

The first non-explicative I can think of to describe that change in particular is still “disrespectful”.

[Databaser]

“Upgrade now” (to Enterprise!) for more automations… :smirk: #pricingmodel

[ScottWorld]

Yep, as many people have complained about in these forums, Airtable offers ZERO ABILITY to pay for more automation runs when you run out.

Your only options are:

1. Send an email to technical support and ask them to give you additional runs until the end of the month (and it seems like they currently have an “unofficial policy” to do so), or

2. You have to spend $3,000 per month to gain 500,000 extra runs.

In a competitive marketplace, you would expect automation runs to cost approximately the same across platforms. You can get 800,000 extra runs for only $300 with Integromat, which is 160% more runs for a price that is 1,000% cheaper than Airtable.

Elias_Gomez_Sainz:

Can you stop posting your Integromat affiliate link ?

@Elias_Gomez_Sainz I have already spoken to the moderators a year ago about posting affiliate links, and they gave me explicit permission — IN WRITING — to post affiliate links. You will also notice that there is nothing in the community guidelines against posting affiliate links. But I also have explicit permission IN WRITING.

I’m really sorry that you feel like I shouldn’t be able to collect a few extra cents here & there for all the hundreds of volunteer hours I donate to solving people’s problems in this forum, and for referring people to a tool that solves their automation roadblocks in Airtable. :man_shrugging:

I also see that you have absolutely no problem with posting your own Integromat affiliate link, though. You just have a problem with mine. Got it. Good to know:

Export timeline view date range to Google or Mac calendars Importing / Exporting

You can add a calendar iCal link to you calendar app, and the events will appear there: Also, you could create an event for every project with an automation service like Integromat.

[Julien_Mottet1]

Why not 10 apps / user / base in the PRO PLAN ?

[Paul_Good]

Two major frustrations with the pricing updates

1. Limiting the 5 editing user on free apps. The free plan and getting collaborators is how is i’ve recruited many people into the Airtable Ecosystem.
2. The 7 apps for Pro plans. These people are your power users, building crazy cool things that inspire and showcase what this no-code tool can do. If your goal is to drive people to your next pricing tier, enterprise pricing just isn’t sensible possible for many SMBs and contractors getting other businesses into the Airtable ecosystem.

[kuovonne]

One issue with the pricing plan is that the pricing page does not state how much enterprise actually costs. The number that is currently being tossed around for enterprise is starting at $3,000/per month. There are probably enterprise customers who are paying both more and less than that, but let’s use $3,000 as a basis for comparison, at least until Airtable provides a different number.

This price for enterprise is about 100 times as much as the pricing for pro for a small business with a handful of seats.

Most of the increased limits from Pro to Enterprise are on the scale of 2x to 10x. Record limits are doubled. History is kept three times as long. Automaton runs are increased tenfold. Attachment space is an outlier because it increases by fifty-fold when moving from Pro to Enterprise, yet it is still dwarfed by the increase in price.

Now Enterprise also provides features that are completely unavailable to Pro users, but many Pro users do not need an admin panel, single-sign-on, account managers, etc.

When dealing with some issues, such as record limits, upgrading to Enterprise might be a solution, because record limits are soft limits. However, upgrading to Enterprise is not a solution for problems such as running out of automation runs. Running out of automations can happen without warning (although sometimes there are warnings), and upgrading to enterprise cannot be done in a matter of minutes to get business running again, and cannot be easily undone the following month when extra automations are no longer needed.