Hi everyone, hopefully this is posted in the right category, I had a hard time finding a better fit. Let me know if its not though, and I can move/delete the post.
I was hoping to get some feedback on whether or not Airtable might be a good fit for our start-up. Parts of this may be vague, as I can’t get into specifics, but hopefully I am still able to convey our concerns/needs.
We are a company that sells a hardware/software bundle to larger companies to be used for collecting and storing text data (imagine we sell a barcode scanner that collects data about various barcodes). Currently, the hardware uploads the “barcode” entries into an excel sheet that is accessible via the hardware/software bundle (it comes with a small tablet like device that can access the excel sheet). We are looking to transition into storing each of our client companies’ data on separate cloud databases.
We are considering using Airtable to host the cloud database, but had a concern about the pricing:
I am aware of the pro plan which offers 50,000 records/database/user, but the per user portion is worrisome. The database would only be edited using python requests sent from the company’s hardware device after every scan, so no single company employee would ever need to edit their company’s database manually. However, anyone in the company would need to be able to view the database entries. This brings me to my two questions:
With the pro plan, would it be possible to allow anyone we chose to view a particular database? We will initially be working with <10 companies, and providing each of them with a small website that has an embedded Airtable in it so that they can view the entries that that company’s hardware device scanned.
Furthermore, since we were planning on using distinct databases per company, would it be possible to allow separate devices to modify our different databases? We will initially be sending out a single hardware device to each company, so it will be 1 company with 1 hardware device that submits entries to that company’s Airtable, but we may ship more hardware devices to the companies eventually.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. It is much appreciated.