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Hello, I just signed up for the business plan and as it says in the plan (photo attached), it says unlimited editors. I have created an app that collects feedback through a form so I need many external people to be able to edit the form. Is there a way to do it without being charged on the invoice for each user who edits (the option to do it through a form link does not exist, I need to be able to edit the interface, not the data).

 

 

It is not possible for free users to edit record data on the Business plan. It is possible for free users to fill out a form view (or an interface public form, but not an interface-only form). You can then use automations to edit existing records based on the info in the new record that is created by the form. (In Airtable a form always creates a new record, it does not edit existing records.)

If you need multiple people to edit existing data, you may want to look into using a portal service. I list some portal services here.


Yes, that is very easy to solve without turning your clients into paid collaborators on your base.

There are 4 different ways to allow external collaborators to edit records in your Airtable base — such as marking an event as “approved”.

Two of these ways cost money, and two of these ways are free:

  1. (PAID) Use Airtable’s portals, which costs $120 per month for 15 users, and $8 per month for each additional customer after that.
     
  2. (PAID)  Use a 3rd-party portal, which are typically less expensive than Airtable’s portals.

    The most popular portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
    NolocoJetAdminSoftrPory, and Glide.

    I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
     
  3. (FREE) External read-only users can edit your Airtable records for free by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

    Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form.

    Fillout gives you a formula that you add to your Airtable base, which automatically creates a special URL for each record.

    You clients would then click on the URL (or a button) in your shared view or shared interface. (You could even make them read-only users in Airtable as well, because read-only users are free. But that isn’t necessary.)

    So they would click on the the URL (or button) while looking at the record, which would take them to that record in Fillout, and they can approve the record there. For any other fields that you don’t want them to edit, you would just add them to your form in a read-only state.

    I demonstrate how to do some of this on this Airtable podcast episode:
    Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
     
  4. (FREE) External read-only users can edit your Airtable records for free by triggering a custom webhook in Make, which would then automatically run an automation that marks that task as complete.

    Same setup as #3 above. You would create a formula in your Airtable base, which would automatically create a unique webhook URL for each record.

    Then, your read-only user would click on the URL (or button) while looking at the record in Airtable, which would then trigger the automation to mark the record as approved.

    I demonstrate how to setup these custom webhooks for approvals in this Airtable podcast episode. I specifically talk about approving records in Airtable in this video.

    Note that my podcast episode demonstrate this in the context of putting the custom webhook URL inside of an email, but you can skip the emailing step.

    If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget for your project, and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

 


Nice article, @kuovonne! I really like using Noloco and JetAdmin for my portals — and I am currently using them with several of my Airtable consulting clients — but those are not currently on your list.


Also, Fillout can sort of be seen as a "lite portal"... it's not a "full portal", but can be used as a mini-portal in many circumstances.

Fillout also offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, control access to a form via SSO or email domains or a list of email addresses stored in Airtable, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld


Hi there!

At miniExtensions, we've created a third-party portal that integrates seamlessly with Airtable, and allows unlimited end-users to edit their data. This makes it easy for teams of any size to collaborate and manage records directly within Airtable.

If you need certain users to have admin privileges for creating and managing extensions (Forms, Portals or Shared Views), you can add them as collaborators, the number of collaborators you can add depends on your active subscription.