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.

[Julien_Mottet1]

I know a client at around 1200euros/month

[Rebecca_Elam]

I just wish instead of imposing limits on us, you teach us how to be Good Considerate airtable users? Someone built automations with an ideal workflow in mind. But we are left to our own devices to destroy each others calendars or use 26k failed automation runs in a day because one table is synced to 2 destinations thus taking 10 minutes to show up whereas the other imported things are only synced to one destination taking only 5 minutes. Someone designed apps dashboards to not all load at once for a reason. Teach people they should use dashboards to increase load speed. Someone designed interfaces with all of the fixes we asked for. But y’all don’t show us how to really be POWER users. I’m tired of videos explaining what a linked record field does. There’s obviously an ideal way you want things done to reduce our cost per user. TELL US WHAT IT IS. don’t put us in timeout like children.

[ScottWorld]

Case in point:

The majority of my clients not only use more than 10 apps, but they use more than 20 apps.

Even a simple text messaging app from Twilio needs to be installed multiple times — once for each phone number. Same with the CSV app — one install per saved import. Page Designer — it is required to be installed once for each unique print job. The Summary App — one app per summary. MiniExtensions doesn’t work at all without its app.

The list goes on & on.

These clients of mine are small businesses with 3-15 Airtable users. They are paying $60-$300 per month. There is no way that they would pay $3,000 per month — or even $1,500 per month — to get what they get today. That’s what we call Highway Robbery.

Instead, all of them would switch to Coda or FileMaker or Google Table or Seatable or Infinity or any other Airtable competitor out there that gives them soooo much more than what Airtable gives them, but charges them a reasonable $60-$300 cost per month.

It’s truly hard to understand why Airtable would specifically pick a pricing strategy — and a feature restriction strategy — that is specifically designed to drive people away from the platform.

I can think of no other company that has ever done something as absurd as this.

p.s. This doesn’t imply that customers were happy with the previous limits, either. I lost plenty of Airtable consulting clients who had no choice but to leave Airtable because of the ridiculously low 50,000 record limit. And now, I predict that even more customers will flee Airtable — or not even get started with Airtable to begin with.

[Olpy_Acaflo]

Hi @Rebecca_Elam,
Yes, you’re right, but there are so many educational resources about Airtable (serious, verified sources) that I’m not even sure what you’re claiming doesn’t already exist somewhere…
The ideal would be to continue a work already started by the Airtable staff:
Gather all these resources (internal, community, verified third-part) in a single reference page whose link would be repeated in the header of the topics concerned by these quality contents.
A little while ago, I had drawn their attention like this.

Regards,
olπ

[Rebecca_Elam]

Post Removed because I don’t have a dog in this fight and have already spoken my peace. Hopefully we get some good news Thursday.

[Bill_French]

Kamille_Parks:

So the only alternative to use the gated features is to become an enterprise which is notoriously difficult and far too expensive to do.

This really hits the nail on the head concerning the new limit on the usage of simultaneous apps.

Going forward, new users and anyone interested in helping Airtable’s customers must assess if the current gaps in Airtable itself (for any perceived solution) can be closed with ten or fewer apps. If you can’t see light through that keyhole, you have only two options -

1. Find another tool.
2. Purchase an enterprise license.

Vastly, option #1 will be the only choice.

[Ambroise_Dhenai]

Really disappointed with that move, it will hurt the community and the business badly. As if there weren’t enough limitations to think of when building a business on Airtable, now there are even more.

It’s going to affect every business, if one of your employee changes your plan without your consent, it can go all boom. (or even yourself, if you’re not aware of the implication of the new plans)

It’s going to affect all App makers, what’s the point in investing time to build apps when those are limited to 10? It means I’ll be competing with all other available apps out there.

It might affect other tools that use Airtable as a data source.

And it definitely hurts whatever trust we still had into Airtable. I’ve been looking at NocoDB for a while now, and it’s becoming more and more the kind of alternative we need to replace the vendor lock-in of Airtable.

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

The majority of my clients not only use more than 10 apps, but they use more than 20 apps.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this pattern in dozens of customers who are sub-enterprise users, and in many cases - SMBs with a single Airtable developer, but dozens of users.

However…

We have to be careful of assertions like this and especially based on statistical averages. I would caution all parties in this thread and Airtable itself from making pricing policy decisions based on an average of any kind for any metric.

Even words like “majority” are anecdotal and statistically unworthy because we really don’t know the nature of your client base. It could be a feature-biased collection of stringent medical researchers in Dubai, or it might be dairy farmers in Scotland (you see how I wove that cute pun in there, right?).

In any case, Airtable must be cautious of anecdotal data and we should exhibit a little restraint to use it as a club.

Back to the issue…

I agree with your premise; arbitrary app limits cast a chill on the marketplace of opportunities to employ what we all regard as a brilliant UI and approach to data management in a very wide realm of business challenges.

The imposed ceiling is not about the product per se; rather, it’s about the range of solutions that are possible with Airtable, and it appears to be this single dimension that casts the shadow. Apps [today] are the pathway to closing Airtable’s many gaps. The gaps are well-know and well-documented in this community. Perhaps Interface Designer is the future pathway, but it too has many limitations [today].

Apps are the crutch…

In some strange way, the emergence of apps might be classified as a pain medication or just a crutch that provides relief for solutions that would otherwise be entirely impossible without them. Even small scripts come to the rescue in ways that provide critical functionality that would otherwise deem Airtable as woefully unsuited for certain objectives.

Maybe Airtable understands this and is reshaping the future to accommodate a more unified platform that has a few undesirable refactoring bumps along the way.

[Bill_French]

Ambroise_Dhenain:

It means I’ll be competing with all other available apps out there.

This is a very key point. The app limitation policy has transformed the competitive framework to include an additional dimension; a limited number of app slots. Now, apps must compete in a climate of artificial use constraints as well as functionality.

This is no different than injecting artificial incentives (or disincentives) into a free-market economic model.

Imagine if every consumer were constrained to an arbitrary limit of 100 miles per day for sedans and unlimited miles for pickup trucks that cost 20 times more than sedans. How would this change consumer behavior?

[Jen_Rudd]

I meant to edit my post earlier, I’ve gone back and forth because I honestly don’t know if anyone at Airtable is still reading at this point. But my thoughts still stand. The pricing model is a step in the wrong direction for mid-level (Pro) users and rewards the Free and Plus users, and punishes Power Users who followed the promise of what Airtable could be.

Since I work with multiple platforms, it’s frustrating when I need to find a new “Lego Piece” because my new clients can’t use the tool in the way that I have been using it for others.

For reference, I’ve been a Business Consultant for 11 years, after working in Corporate America for 10 years. My MBA is in Entrepreneurship and Business Analytics. My clients cross multiple sectors, but include SaaS companies. Ones you probably have heard of. I don’t come at this from a place of not knowing how any of this works.

My original post:

From the perspective of a Business Consultant that sources solutions for “small” businesses, I wanted to share how the pro plan limits severely impact how businesses will make the decision to select airtable over other cloud based database platforms.

I work with several multi-million dollar businesses who use airtable for a small sector of their business OR use it for the administration of their entire business- but they usually have 10 or less users actually accessing airtable. So their seating needs are lower.

And we use Airtable as the engine of their business, meaning we integrate it with other software (Zapier to connect Airtable to their bookkeeping platform, their document signing platform, to their scheduling platform, and so on). We often have upwards of 20 app blocks in one base. This can include different iterations of Page Designer since the content isn’t always dynamic and we need different layouts. We often use Twilio blocks to save specific correspondence to send out on a more manual basis, but copying and pasting correspondence scripts defeats the purpose of having the apps ready to go.

The 25 automation limit in bases, as well as not having better control of calendar views, for example, means that we might create satellite bases and sync the data into other bases to work through additional automations or more elegantly organize data.

Even elegant database management theory means that you have to partition data and query it on a routine basis instead of trying to save it all in one place. [See Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Sys...], so you might have 10 - 15 bases feeling into one base to call data. Or they might be syncing data from the other 10 SaaS products we are using to manage their entire business.

Conditional automations don’t completely solve all needs, because, again, multi-million dollar businesses aren’t simple and linear, at least ones that have the level of architecture I have created using airtable.

But cutting the number of apps and syncs to new Pro users basically says, hey, those who don’t want to invest heavily in airtable, here is more power for less, but YOU - you users who use too much space but don’t want to pay for 50+ phantom users, you should find somewhere else to build your Architecture.

I don’t think “Power Users” (like most of my non-Enterprise clients are) are unwilling to pay more, heck Streak for Gmail is $50/user per month, so having a step between Pro and Enterprise is absolutely valid. Squeezing the businesses that may be Enterprise in 2 years (with my excellent cross-platform automation skills, of course :winking_face: ) out of Airtable out of the gate is poor future planning. From my Business Consulting experience, of course.

I’ve seen droves of people leave Salesforce for the horrible price per seat, (and I remember when the price per seat in Salesforce was in the teens), and I’ve seen the rise and fall of software solutions in my scant 11 years in this industry. Don’t forget the middle, please.