We have exceeded the automation limit on Pro plan, business critical operations halted, need help ASAP

[Egle_Vaskeviciu]

HI,

We have just reached the automation limit (100,000) and this is business critical operation. I have contacted Airtable through the sales page, but I need to increase the limit today. Can anyone please help us to get on Enterprise plan today?

Is there any way to get faster support, because this is super urgent?

Thanks

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Egle_Vaskeviciute!

Unfortunately, there is nobody here who can directly help you with your situation because Airtable doesn’t typically monitor these forums. You can try emailing support@airtable.com to see if you get a faster response.

The limit for pro workspaces is 50,000 runs (not 100,000 runs). It’s a real shame that Airtable doesn’t officially offer any way to increase automation runs in a month, but be sure to let us know if they are able to help you in your situation!

I haven’t tried this before so I don’t know if it will even work or not, but you might be able to move your base to a completely new pro workspace (and then invite all of your users to join the base there). It’s possible that that might restart the automation runs again from zero, but I’m not sure. However, that could be a gigantic pain in the butt to migrate everyone over to a new workspace, and depending on how your base is setup (automations, integrations, forms, shared views, syncing, scripts, and more), it could also break a ton of things in your base as well.

The Enterprise plan starts at $3,000 per month (or $1,500 per month for non-profits), and I don’t personally feel like that is a cost effective price to pay just to get extra automation runs, especially since you can pay Integromat $99 per month for 150,000 operations or $299 per month for 800,000 operations — and you can always pay for more operations.

If you’re able to do so, you may want to consider rebuilding all of your automations with a professional & reliable automation company such as Integromat, which always offers you the ability to pay for more runs, has better automation capabilities than Airtable, and has better customer support than Airtable:

Integromat

Integromat

Integromat lets you connect apps and automate workflows in a few clicks. Move data between apps without effort so you can focus on growing your business.

p.s. If you go down that path and need to hire an Airtable/Integromat expert to help you out, feel free to contact me through my website at scottworld.com.

[Bill_French]

Egle_Vaskeviciute:

but I need to increase the limit today.

This is a bad spot to be in, but also one that could be avoided.

I’ve maintained on this forum for many years that business spend very little (typically the minimum) time on these aspects of “mission-critical” systems.

1. Backup and recovery plans
2. Documenting every script and automation process regardless of which glu-factory or internal process was used.
3. Data model design and documentation

The one that’s missing from this list is central to @Egle_Vaskeviciute’s challenge - the architecture and optimization of automated processes.

There are ways to create significant optimizations that result in fewer triggered runs, or result in compressing more tasks into a single event run.

Even if you use the Enterprise level as an escape hatch, you are probably delaying the inevitable - that you need to apply resources to ensure that the event architecture of your automations are scalable.

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

you may want to consider rebuilding all of your automations with a professional & reliable automation company such as Integromat, which always offers you the ability to pay for more runs, has better automation capabilities than Airtable, and has better customer support than Airtable:

@Egle_Vaskeviciute Scott’s comment is good advice in as much as it holds many truths. Yes - you will have more agility to pay more for greater scale. However, there’s another edge to this sword - load on your Airtable instance that affects performance for all of your users. This is load that you cannot easily avoid and Airtable will not provide the pathway to simply scale your instance higher - i.e., more servers, more CPUs, more memory.

If you create a poorly designed event model and you have the ability to [seemingly] scale it through Integromat’s polling model, you may find yourself back at Airtable support complaining because your users are forever waiting for screens to refresh.

[Jordan_Scott1]

@Egle_Vaskeviciute - I just connected with our team and it sounds like they got you taken care of earlier today. Feel free to send me a message if there’s anything else you need or if I can answer any additional questions!