Updates to Our Pricing Plans

[nityadb]

Hello, Airtable community! I'm Nitya, senior product marketing manager here at Airtable. I wanted to share more information about recent changes to our pricing plans. 

Over the past few years, we’ve released many new products and features – including new sync integrations, extensions, and automation capabilities – and the way customers use Airtable has evolved. We’re updating our plans to ensure people have flexible options based on their needs, reflecting feedback we heard from customers and how they use our platform. For example, many Pro plan customers have asked for access to features that were previously limited to the Enterprise plan, and that extension limits were too stringent. 

Our new plans give customers a progressive journey as their organization’s use of Airtable becomes more complex, mapping the features and functionality that customers need with their stage of growth. Below is an overview of the key changes we’ve made and some background on these changes. 

Updating the Airtable Free Plan

Airtable’s Free plan gives you the ability to start building your own flexible apps. We’ve updated the Free plan to be more reflective of the types of usage we see from customers who are just getting started building apps in Airtable. With the changes to the free plan, you'll continue to be able to build your own flexible apps, but will notice a few changes in our storage capacity and limits. 

Specific changes to the Airtable Free plan include:

• Bases: You’ll still be able to create unlimited bases to manage your workflows 
• Record limits: 1,000 per base
• Attachment storage space: 1 GB total storage per base
• API limits: 1,000 API calls per month before rate limits are imposed. You can review current rate limits in our developer docs.
• Sync integrations and extensions: These will now only be available on paid Airtable plans 

If you’re a Free plan customer, there’s no action required on your part, but you can manage your plan and review usage at any time by visiting your workplace settings. If you are over the limits of the Free plan, none of your data will be removed or deleted from Airtable, but you will see notifications that you have exceeded new limits or are using functionality that is no longer available. If your needs exceed what’s included in the Free plan, we offer multiple paid plans that can help you manage your work in Airtable.

Creating a New Team Plan for Current Plus and Pro Customers

We will replace our current Plus and Pro plans with a single offering for small teams: the Airtable Team plan.

As an Airtable Team customer, you can create tailored apps for your team that power critical workflows using features like Gantt and Timeline views, forms, and advanced controls including private views and table permissions. 

For Airtable Plus customers

Plus customers will get access to the Team plan features without any increase to your bill. If you're a Plus customer today, you'll have the features you enjoy on your current plan, with a few updates including:

• Increased storage and record space: Scale your data with 10GB of storage and 50,000 records per base
• API limits: 100,000 API calls per month before rate limits are imposed. You can review current rate limits in our developer docs.
• Sync integrations: You will still have access to Airtable’s most popular sync integrations like Google Docs and Slack, but certain sync integrations like Jira and Salesforce will only be available on the Business and Enterprise Scale plans. 
• Basic permissions: Manage your team’s data and access with field and table editing permissions.  

For Airtable Pro customers

Pro customers will be automatically migrated to the new Team plan and will see similar functionality to what you’re currently using on Airtable today, with a few updates including: 

• Extensions: You can now add unlimited extensions to your Airtable bases
• Automations: 25,000 runs per month
• API limits: 100,000 API calls per month before rate limits are imposed. You can review current rate limits in our developer docs.
• Attachment storage space: 10GB total storage per base
• Sync integrations: You will still have access to Airtable’s most popular sync integrations like Google Docs and Slack, but certain sync integrations like Jira and Salesforce will only be available on the Business and Enterprise Scale plans. 

Although the vast majority of customers will not exceed these new limits we recognize that some of you will be impacted and do not take these changes lightly. If you’re a customer with bases over the Team data limits, all of your data will still be available in Airtable, however, you’ll need to upgrade to add any more attachments or records or continue using any active sync integrations available on a higher capacity plan.

Improving How We Serve Enterprises 

Finally, we are introducing two new Airtable plans geared towards multi-team organizations. Airtable Business is for small businesses and departments that need advanced features and basic admin capabilities, offered at $45 per user per month on an annual plan and $54 per user per month on a monthly plan. Smaller organizations can purchase Business on their own, and we encourage larger organizations to contact our sales team to discuss the Business plan. Enterprise Scale is for large enterprises building flexible and powerful apps that can scale across their organizations, and pricing is customized to the organization’s needs.  

If you are currently on Airtable's Enterprise plan, you will not see any changes today. Your account team will provide more information to your organization’s admins and billing owners so they can choose the right plan prior to your contract renewal. If you’re interested in learning more about these plans today, you can contact our sales team.

Looking for more info?

We’re here to help you throughout the process. To get more information about migration timelines, what happens if your account is over limits, and to see a full overview of the changes, please review this Help Center article. 

[Greg_F]

Today was the first time I felt uneasy recommending Airtable to a customer. 

It is a product fitting right into requirements of SMBs, this whole pivot on giving up current customers and focusing on enterprise is really undermining confidence. 

[David_Anderson1]

Well todays announcement of further lay offs and a focus shift to large enterprise customers makes the API and subscription levels seem largely irrelevant for most of us.  It now gives me a real dilemma… I’m an Enterprise customer but spend level is nowhere what I suspect they want.  So does this mean a massive ramp up in renewal fees to weed out the non-$1m spend customers and shift them on? 

Of course, the layoff news is more acutely felt for those impacted and to those… good luck and thanks!   

[J_Jones]

That's unfortunate - those layoffs were probably avoidable.  I wish they'd charge us for expandable storage, additional rows, and 'lite' users without builder permissions.  

Airtable resisted granular permissions feature requests for years and spawned a slew of competitors that rushed to fill the massive capability gap left by Airtable.  I'd bet that this price hike does the same thing - the SMBs leaving Airtable will be spending with Airtable's competitors and make the competition more intense.  I imagine that the bonus user growth will pave the way for SmartSuite, Softr, etc to raise more funding and develop even faster.  And with fewer employees, customers, and marketshare, I don't see how Airtable will keep up.  

[Greg_F]

Here is the announcement @David_Anderson1 mentioned:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2023/09/14/unicorn-startup-airtable-lays-off-27-of-firm-s...

27%... 

[HTDuck]

This is not a good sign for the future. Especially for small business owners, who were Airtable's biggest supporters since its inception. We've watched this story unfold too many times. A company goes chasing after Enterprise-level market when that market is already flooded with competitors, turning their back on those who got them to where they are. Airtable is a niche product that is convincing itself that it is a Big-Market player. 

Like many SaaS companies it over-employed too quickly vs. slow and steady, which builds sustainable business. And now it finds itself ignoring and abandoning their biggest fans.

This just creates opportunity for someone else to become the new "Airtable."

[Bill_French]

@J_Jones - excellent economic assessment.

I wish they'd charge us for expandable storage, additional rows, and 'lite' users without builder permissions.

And production snapshots in time. 100% of respondents to this poll indicate a willingness to pay more.

"... spawned a slew of competitors that rushed to fill the massive capability gap left by Airtable. I don't see how Airtable will keep up."

Yep.

One must ask - how does a company with $1.4b in financing fail to reach profitability?

[Bill_French]

@HTDuck nails it in my opinion. That is precisely the point of this article.

> Especially for small business owners, who were Airtable's biggest supporters since its inception.

When an airliner crashes, there's rarely a single cause. It usually requires three (or more missteps) to bring one down. Sometimes, the missteps are insignificant in and of themselves but result in catastrophic loss. I've lost count of the severe missteps Airtable has made since it became drunk on funding and seemingly lost focus of its core advocate - small and medium-sized businesses. You are spot on.

There are many advantages to picking single-platform solutions that may come with a few unexpected disadvantages -- for example -- the company that sells it to you isn't into you as much as you are into its product. Misaligned values can be deal breakers.

What if the CEO has no affinity for your class or size of business?

Rejecting Airtable for this sentiment is rational because the product offering is subtly biased against your interests. This is apparent as one of the more recent missteps Airtable made by pulling the feature rug for the SMB segment. The signal is clear - they no longer want your business if you are in this class.

Consumers react to incentives and disincentives; they each have consequences. Despite being a no-code leader, most buyers in the marketplace have begun to see enough disincentives to sway their choices or strategies in easily predicted ways but wholly unexpected from a market leader.

The hidden side of these consequences is the unintentional fueling of competitors. Money begins to move from Airtable to competitive products (such as SmartSuite) that while only a fraction of the comprehensive Airtable solution, will use those revenues and votes of confidence to close the gaps. This is made clearly evident by many thought leaders in the no/low-code space.

[Jonathan]

@Greg_F 

From the article:

“We are realigning to go after bigger use cases, and therefore bigger deals. We want to consistently get customers with million-dollar-plus spend rates, versus supporting lots of little ten-thousand-dollar customers from a sales touch standpoint.”

[David_Anderson1]

Which basically say's "Hey, you guys who helped build Airtable up, thanks now Fk off" 

[BillH]

The points being made, particularly by @HTDuck and @Bill_French , sum up most of my feelings.  Chasing enterprise level clients at the expense of the those who have been your foundation is a foolish choice, and probably one that will lead airtable to the long list of "contenders".  

I just don't get it.  In an enterprise environment decision makers look for stability and growth potential before making a sizable commitment.  Smaller products can get in the door, particularly when they provide quick solutions for niche requirements, but eventually they get replaced unless they have so much value added that they grow to the point where they become one of the major players in their field.

Airtable does many things well, but they do nothing so well and so uniquely that they are irreplaceable to large enterprise level requirements.  Burning bridges with SMB clients is bad enough, but doing so with partners in the industry is only resulting in those partners building their relationships with competing products, and in most cases scaling up to other data options, such as PostgreSQL, mySQL, and in some cases even nosql solutions.  

Bad move.