New: Portals Beta

[Ayesha_Bose]

Hello! I’m Ayesha, a Product Manager here at Airtable. We’re so excited to announce that we now have Portals available in Beta for customers to unlock guest access for their organization.

What are Portals and why would you use them?

With Portals, you’ll be able to invite users outside of your organization as guest users to your interfaces. These guest users will see a custom sign-in screen and be able to collaborate inside your interfaces together.

We recommend using Portals for key use cases like:

• Client portals
  • Ex: A marketing agency giving their clients real-time access to project updates and deliverables

• Vendor management
• Ex: A plumbing supply distributor who works with major appliance brands and needs to centralize vendor info

• Customer support
• Ex: A digital product organization who is giving customers a way to see their roadmap and provide suggestions

How do you get access to the beta?

If you’re on a Team, Business, or Enterprise Scale account, please visit airtable.com/account for instructions on how to get access.

How do you enable Portals and invite guest users?

Any interfaces can be shared as a Portal (so you don’t need to build a new app if you already have one you’d like to share with your external collaborators).

Once you’re in the beta, you’ll be able to see a new tab inside the Share dialog on interfaces:

After you enable a portal, you’ll be able to select specific interface sections and share with guest users as Editor, Commentor, or Read-only access — just like regular Interface collaborators today.

What does the experience look like for a guest user?

Today, they’ll see a simplified version of the Airtable sign-in screen and be able to create a new account or login. Inside the app, they’ll be able to do everything a regular interface collaborator can do with a couple of key exceptions:

• They will not be able to share the app with anyone else
• They will not be able to navigate to the data layer or go back to the Airtable home to see other bases in your organization.

Other common questions:

• How do permissions work on Portals?
• Permissions behave the same way as they do on Interfaces in general (which you can read about in our support article).
• With Portals, we recommend two specific Permissions-related features to have the best experience:
• Make sure that someone only sees the data that’s for them: use our filter on the email address or collaborator fields to filter data to just the information that’s tied to the current user.
• Hide external user information: in your interface page settings, turn on the sharing restriction setting to prevent external users from seeing each other.

• What restrictions do guest users have?
• These users will have to be outside of your organization.
• They can only be added to interfaces that belong to 1 base. If you add them to the underlying data or any other apps, they will be billed as a regular collaborator.

• How does pricing work?
• The Portals add-on is available for Team plan customers starting at $120 per month for 15 guests and 1 portal. For Business and Enterprise customers, custom pricing is available. Bulk discounts are available for large volumes of guests.
• Billable seats for guest users will be counted when a guest user is invited to your portal app with editor or commenter permissions on the Team plan.
• Additionally, guest users will be charged as a full collaborator seat if they are added to multiple apps in your organization or if they are invited to the underlying base for your app.

• Other questions? Check out our website to learn more and our support article.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, so please let us know if you have any questions!

[kuovonne]

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?

[DamonH]

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.  

[ScottWorld]

(Updated post below.)

[ScottWorld]

@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 not just possible with Fillout’s forms, but 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.

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! 😃

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

[Tristan-ARG]

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

[ScottWorld]

@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:

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.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

[Tristan-ARG]

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

[idodan]

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.

[ScottWorld]

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

[dilipborad]

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.

👍