I just used up 17,000 of the monthly 30,000 automation limit. What do I do?

[Don_Tran]

Many departments in my workplace heavily rely on automations. Towards the end of month, we sometimes reach a limit of around 30,000 and it's a hassle linking records manually.

Earlier I just changed a filter and triggered 17,000 automation runs before I could disable the bad automation, which sends emails when a record is created in a synced view.... It's only the beginning of the month. I'm stressing out. I had optimized and sacrificed many automations; I undid all that work in an instant.

What should I do to prevent automations from entirely stopping in two weeks?

[kuovonne]

The first thing I recommend is to contact support, explain the situation, and beg for more automation runs. Currently there is no way to purchase more automation runs. Maybe with enough people contacting support about these situations, Airtable will eventually implement some way of purchasing additional automation runs.

If you upgrade to the next service level, you can also gain automation runs that way, but that may be cost prohibitive. I mention it in case you were on the fence about upgrading and this might be the issue that pushes you to do the upgrade.

You can also see about moving some of your automations to a different platform that allows you to purchase additional automation runs, such as Make.com or Zapier.

For future planning, I recommend being very careful about configuring automations. It sounds like your automation is triggered by a record entering a view. I no longer use that automation trigger, and it exists mostly for historic reasons. You can get much the same result by using a "record meets conditions" trigger directly in the automation.

Sometimes it is also possible to consolidate automation runs by using repeating action groups and/or scripting. With a repeating action group, a single automation run can update thousands of records.