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Re: About Beta for adding branching logic to an automation’s actions

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Hi @Jordan_Scott1 ,

This is great news that will certainly be welcomed with enthusiasm by the Community!
Unfortunately, as far as I am concerned, I continue, against my preferences, to make a sparing use, not to say rare, of Automations
as long as I can’t protect myself from a complete blocking of my Business Logic in case I would have exceeded the Limits by buying additional Automation CREDITS from you!
This means that when I need Automation, I always first choose known external Integrators from whom I am sure I can buy additional Automation Credits, additional execution cycles!

This is not my first choice, and I deplore it, both because it is not the best recommended practice because external well-known Integrators (Glu-Factories according to @Bill.French ) probably load and overload your Infrastructure by means of the Polling technique, and finally, I miss out on the very relevant evolutions of the Automations and their UX that you have already proposed.

So I hope that your platform will allow in a not too far future to buy some quotas of supplements of this or that, according to the real needs, and in particular of the execution cycles (occupation of your VMs), supplements of automations to a base and other cases which enter this category.

Regards,

oLπ

4 Replies 4

@Jordan_Scott1

What @Olpy_Acaflo is saying is that one of the biggest problems with Airtable automations that makes automations unusable & unreliable for many businesses to use is that if you exceed the number of automation runs during a month — which is currently set to a very low 50,000 runs per month for Pro workspaces — then you are completely stuck.

Instead of allowing people to purchase more runs for the month, Airtable has made the draconian decision to simply DISABLE all of the workspace’s automations until the next month.

So Airtable has made the decision to essentially shut down an entire business until the next month. The business can’t do anything about getting more automation runs — they literally just have to halt their business operations and wait until the next month rolls around.

All other automation platforms — such as Zapier or Integromat — allow users to purchase more automation runs if they reach the limit.

p.s. Yes, I suppose you could argue that a company could upgrade to the enterprise plan for $3,000+ to get 500,000 operations, but this is not really a cost-effective solution when you can buy 10,000 extra runs for approximately $5 on Integromat.

Case in point — this is a brand new post:

Hi @ScottWorld & @Olpy_Acaflo - Just wanted to jump in here and thank you for this feedback on automations. My name is Dustin and I’m a teammate of Jordan’s. She flagged this conversation to me since part of my focus at Airtable is making sure important product scenarios like the one you’ve outlined get highlighted internally for consideration. Just wanted to confirm your points here are on our radar and that we appreciate how you painted the picture of how painful this can be.

Hi @Dustin_Smith
Thank you for your answer and your involvement.
I appreciate the renewal of Airtable Community Forum since the arrival of @Jordan_Scott1 new team
as well as the outstanding pedagogical work provided for us! (1)
@Aron , @Rose_K

I will follow this thread with attention because I am looking forward to enjoy
future regular use of your automations.

(1) warning: this is a little bit of humor but not without background.
You ( Airtable Documentations Writers & Videos Directors ) are far from the world’s famous and respected YEScode platforms portals
whose intro video is pure propaganda that doesn’t say much of anything technically deep
and whose documentation still doesn’t tell you after 3 pages what the heck you can use it for
while already detailing the procedure for creating a new project, secure, secure, and secure…yes, thank you, but at the cost of a labyrinthine procedure on its first run
(OK but what is the practical purpose of all this trip ?)
…before leaving you the choice between more than 100 APIs whose names hardly suggest where the subtle difference between them lies.
Let’s go! And let’s go to open them ALL, to go through them in the hope to make the right selection !
(I’m exaggerating a bit by caricaturing two GAFAMs in one fictional one but the background is not really wrong and does not constitute an obligation to escape from them either, but it is better not to have headaches to follow this path)
No, your airtable documentation is meant to be pedagogical, accessible and your work allows us to get the best out of it in a time easier to find within my sideProject!