New: Portals Beta

Thank you for posting about this beta. Can you answer a few questions?

If a company needs fewer than 15 portal users, is the price still $120/month?

You state “Billable seats for guest users will be counted when a guest user is invited to your portal app “. Does a portal user become billable upon being invited to the portal, or upon accepting the invitation and accessing the portal? For example, if someone is invited but never actually accepts the invitation, are they billable?

If portal users are added and removed throughout the month, such that over 15 people access the portal throughout the month, but there are only 15 “active” people at a time, will owners be charged for only 15 portal users?

Is it possible to add/remove/activate/deactivate/change permissions via the web API or similar?

Very excited for Portals, and we have a great case for using them.  

EDITED: Had an entire post about needing this feature, and then discovered it does exist but only for Portals.  Ha.  Had no idea - assumed filtering behavior was same for base Data views and interfaces, but no!

There is a LONG thread of folks looking for this feature, so glad it exists for Interfaces.  If this works with Portals, then I will be adding the feature to our account. 

Our use case:

We serve multiple small non-profit grantees.  Each non-profit may have one or two people who need to log into the portal (could be the same Portal for al of them) but we only want them to see their own data.  So one Portal with dynamic filtering based on user/org would work for $120 or maybe $240 per month depending on how many organizations need access, but if we had to make an individual Portal for each organization, with each of them using 1-2 spots of the 15, the cost would be prohibitive.  

(Updated post below.)

@Ayesha_Bose 

This is very exciting news! Hip hip hooray!! 🥳🎉

I think the pricing will be a bit prohibitive for many of my clients (especially due to other portals being significantly cheaper), but I do think that some of my clients will signup at this price point due to the sheer ease-of-use of it being built into Airtable, and the fact that it uses the existing interfaces that they have already spent time building for their internal staff.

I do have one feature suggestion.

I think one of the key things that can be significantly improved in Airtable's portals (and interfaces) is something that we can get easily with a 3rd-party tool like Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which is:

Letting customers update their own existing Airtable customer record without needing to drill down from a list to get to their own record.

This is possible with Fillout’s forms, and it is also possible with 3rd-party Airtable portals like JetAdmin, Noloco, Softr, and Glide.

My clients are looking for the ability to have a customer log in and be able to update their own customer record onscreen, which would just be one record from a clients/customers/users table.

However, they want the customer to be able to see their one “master customer record" on an entire page that doesn't have to be drilled into from a filtered list.

Currently, there are no interface pages that allow users to look at a single-record page.

This is exactly what Fillout excels at, but it is not available in Airtable.

In other words, if I'm logging in as a customer, I simply want the ability to log in and easily update my own contact record (i.e. my own name, email, phone number, mailing address, etc.) from a main screen (one page), without drilling into that information from a filtered list.

As it stands now in Airtable”s interfaces and portals, we have no way to display just one record on a screen without some accompanying list that they had to drill down from first.

Airtable currently requires us to give customers some sort of filtered list in order to drill down into their own master record.

We could do this with a filtered "Record Review" page that only shows them their one record, or a filtered "List" page that only shows them their one record, or a filtered "Gallery" page that only shows them their one record... but all of those options requires the user to go through a filtered list first before they can get to their own master record.

It adds extra confusion and unnecessary drilling down in order to get to the one master record that we want them to update.

The "Record Review" page is probably the most straightforward for these purposes, but having that left sidebar is unnecessary, if we're filtering it to only show them their one record.

Ideally, it would be great if we could get an "Overview" type page (or even a "Blank" page) that allowed us to show them just their own record from a table.

So the ENTIRE PAGE would show them just their one filtered record, without them needing to see a list that is filtered to show them their one record, and then they have to drill down from there.

Thank you! 😃

p.s. If you're reading this, and you'd like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

The idea is great, but the price its still way too expensive. It's just not feasible to scale it like this. It would be nice to have an option to pay per active user.

We have around 100 clients, but most of them aren't very tech-savvy, and only a few are likely to use the portal. We can't predict who exactly, and we definitely can't afford $840/month (100 users ÷ 15 = 6.66 x $120). It's a pity because we're willing to pay more for a portal, but this pricing model doesn’t work for us. I’m curious which type of company this pricing is actually suited for.

The only use case I can think of is using it internally within the company, but that would require each employee to register with a different email address, not the company’s domain email.

Its actually a bit frustrating

@Ayesha_Bose @Tristan-ARG 

Yeah, the pricing is a big misstep here, especially considering that Airtable portals like JetAdmin are $39 per month for 500 users! That’s 8 cents per user!

Alternatively, what Airtable could’ve done is what the database app FileMaker uses for its pricing model, where the price you pay is for SIMULTANEOUSLY LOGGED-IN USERS, not how many users you’ve invited.

For example, you may have 100 possible users, but you would never have more than 25 people logged in at the same time. Then, you would only need to pay for a 25-pack of users, and that would be enough to cover all 100 of your users.

But thankfully, Airtable users have alternatives. For a very simple "light portal", people can use Fillout's advanced forms for Airtable. For a full portal experience, people can turn to apps like JetAdmin, Noloco, Softr, Pory, and Glide.

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

Yes, actually this pushed me to check some options, like SOFTR as well. which is around 139 usd for 100 users.

SOFTR is the workaround I have been using so far, and with the introduction of the beta I got very excited.... until I saw the pricing. 

1. For Interfaces with around 6 guests it costs pretty much the same as paying for a seat - so no saving for my clients.
2. For more that 6, the saving is pretty marginal.

So for now, I hate to say that - I will unfortunately have to stick to Softr.

@idodan Note that with Airtable's portals, you would have to pay for a minimum of 15 users. So the minimum cost is $120.

First of all thanks for bringing this.
It's a feature that many regular airtable general users and Airtable Consultants are waiting for. 
Still a bit disappointed with the pricing.

I think Airtable targets only specific users who don't want to use or share their Airtable data with any other third-party portal tools. 🤔 🤔

@Ayesha_Bose Can you please clarify how these pricing models work based on @kuovonne comment? https://community.airtable.com/t5/announcements/new-portals-beta/bc-p/202765/highlight/true#M3659

I think it is important for most users.

👍

The pricing model is a joke. That's no way to price a "portal". Once again, it's all being developed with big enterprises in mind 💰💰 It's their good right, but I long for the days when they wanted to "democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs"...

Hi all!

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, it's been a busy and exciting week since we've launched this beta publicly! If you want to follow up on anything specific, please don't hesitate to email me at ayesha.bose@airtable.com.

Overall, thank you for your feedback on pricing. This is something that we're actively thinking about (especially as we continue to build out more features for Portals like custom branding), so really appreciate the signal here. While we're in beta, we're still looking to get feedback on a lot of the experience, including pricing, and we'll share more updates on this as we have them.

---

• @kuovonne :

  • If a company needs fewer than 15 portal users, is the price still $120/month?

    • Yes — you'll be able to purchase buckets of portal guest users and that's our smallest bucket now.

  • You state “Billable seats for guest users will be counted when a guest user is invited to your portal app “. Does a portal user become billable upon being invited to the portal, or upon accepting the invitation and accessing the portal? For example, if someone is invited but never actually accepts the invitation, are they billable?

    • They will not be billed until they sign into the portal (which is accepting the invite).

  • If portal users are added and removed throughout the month, such that over 15 people access the portal throughout the month, but there are only 15 “active” people at a time, will owners be charged for only 15 portal users?

    • Yes, as long as they are removed from the portal, they will only be charged for 15 guest users.

  • Is it possible to add/remove/activate/deactivate/change permissions via the web API or similar?

    • No, we don't support this, but I could see how this could be helpful for many use cases! I'll share with the team.
      
      
• @ScottWorld:
  • Single-record page: thanks for flagging this and sharing details on how this would be helpful! This is on our backlog and we've talked about this a bit, but will share your feedback with the team.

Thanks so much, @Ayesha_Bose! 🙂

Great to hear that single-record pages are on your backlog! 🙂

Also, has Airtable considered "simultaneous user pricing" like I outlined above? That could make portals extremely affordable for your users.

Thanks!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Yes! I want to pay for this feature, but give me some reasonable price ladder 😂

@Ayesha_Bose Thank you for the clarifications. 

Some more feedback …

Limiting portal pricing to one portal per person seems like it could cause issues. When different people are in charge of different bases within a company, it can be hard to know who has access to other bases. If two different staff members invite the same external user to their respective portals, it sounds like that external user will cost the same as a full internal user versus the lower portal seat price. However, neither staff member is aware that the external user has access to multiple portals to explain the higher rate. 

I also prefer the idea of pricing based on concurrent portal users, versus named portal users.

Another pricing idea is to charge per edit operation instead of by portal user. For example, a portal could have a monthly bucket of 500 (or 5,000 or 50,000) edit operations. This could be 500 portal users each updating their own record one time. It could be 5 portal users each updating twenty records once a week, with a few operations left over. This would be similar to how automations currently have run limits. (But if you go with this option, please enable users to easily or automatically purchase additional buckets of edit operations mid-month!) I know that there would be a lot of engineering required to support this pricing model, but it seems like a fairer way to balance out the cost of lots of portal users who might need to perform very few edits.

@kuovonne 

Ooh, that’s a clever idea of charging per edit!

Either that or concurrent users would be ideal.

@Ayesha_Bose As Kuovonne mentioned above, if you charged by the edit, we would need a way to purchase more edits, because this is currently one of the biggest obstacles in Airtable: There is currently no way to have more than 50 automations in a single base, and there is no way to purchase more automation runs. This is one of the big reasons that people turn to Make’s Airtable automations.

Thank you!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

yes!, pay per edits sounds good and fair!!

I apologize in advance for turning this into a rant within this thread but I'm frustrated with this latest offering:

Our company has been using Airtable for over 5-years now and we love it. However, we have seen a noticeable turn away from what made the product so accessible and powerful which is further evidenced by this latest beta with Portals.

First, we noticed less accessibility to support. Direct messaging turned to bots that delivered dead-ends, and then a ticketing system that was long in response times. When support was reached, the folks were really helpful, but enough time had passed that problems became moot as workarounds had to be employed. The support community, though is absolutely top-notch! Kudos to the experts that are active here!

Then we saw the pricing structure change (we're still on a legacy Teams plan). We investigated the Enterprise tier to access more security and administrative features, but were left with an astounding 3x price increase per user given the extent of added features. The scale of our group just can't expand enough to gain any benefit from marginally more helpful features.

Next came the AI features as an extra cost per user per month. We had used it in beta and saw some promise, but without being able to compartmentalize users and bases the added cost per user to leverage these features was just nonsense.

Finally, we have this new product, Portals, going into beta. Again, there's a pricing model that totally breaks the camel's back. While I'm sure that the product will be beautiful and accessible for average users to build, the problem again becomes an issue of scalability. Airtable, you all really need to look at how to break this micro-transaction model that bloats costs versus the benefits of the products. This just doesn't feel like it's in the start-up spirit that made Airtable so great in the past.

When the costs of all these features come to bear they simply outweigh the benefit. When a company is paying north of $50k / year for Airtable tools, it begs the question if there are more formal database solutions that should be sought instead.

I implore Airtable to rethink the strategy of these past couple of years and look toward bundling all of these features into neat and economical packages that are more powerful and palatable to more customers. Until then, our group will stay in our lane and pass on Portals or whatever else comes to avoid these costly additions. 

Is there a way to selectively enable/disable interfaces within a section? I have several interfaces defined that only internal administrators should be accessing and for shared public access I want to be able to choose only specific interfaces with limited access based on user permissions. I'm not seeing an easy way to manage that in the Portals beta. When I share an interface, a portal guest seems to get access to all interfaces within a section by default.

Ideally I'd like to be able to manage external (portal) users by selecting exactly which interface elements within any given base interface section they should have access to. 

That's too bad... the pricing is just sort of "cute" again.

It assumes the typical Airtable builder is a marketing agency... and maybe it is!

We already spend $400 a month, and would spend more, but won't be able to utilise portals under the current pricing model. 

@Peter_Nelson2

Is there a way to selectively enable/disable interfaces within a section?

No, that is not possible. Portals are simply interfaces that are shared externally, so they work identically to how interfaces work, which is that permissions are based on the interface group.

@Dean_Arnold

We won't be able to utilise portals under the current pricing model. 

You may want to explore some of these 3rd-party portal tools for Airtable, which are significantly cheaper than Airtable’s internal portals: Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Is it possible to run the customer portals on a custom domain?

@Goehmann 

Custom domains are not possible with Airtable's portals.

However, you can get custom domains with 3rd-party portals like Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

Please consider restructuring the pricing for portal users. This is an AMAZING solution, but cost prohibitive for smaller orgs.