Sell Access to My Airtable

[Honey_Syed]

Hello, I have built a Airtable that some people have shown interest in.

I want to sell them access and charge them through Stripe. How do I automate the access part based on their subscription?

Like if the subscription status is active on Stripe then they should have access to it.
And they should lose access once they have cancelled the subscription.

I’m thinking of doing it with Zapier, is there any other solution?

Thanks

[Bill_French]

Honey_Syed:

How do I automate the access part based on their subscription?

I like the way you are thinking but unfortunately, there’s no API for setting permissions. It’s a manual process at the moment and will continue to be until the Airtable API is vastly expanded.

One Approach…

• Create a custom app for your service; make the app free and available in the Airtable Marketplace.
• Upon installing the app, inject into the base a sample of your data.
• Through the app, users would be able to experience a demo of your data without buying your service and it would serve as a sales tool.
• Design the app to authenticate with your subscription platform (Stripe API) to facilitate an “in-app” purchase which would cause the full data set to be installed into the subscriber’s base.
• The custom app would be responsible for populating each subscriber’s base/tables with the data you offer for a subscription fee and when that app detects the subscription has expired, the data is reset to the demo data only.

There are some challenges with this approach such as -

1. Will Airtable support this activity when approving your app in the marketplace? You might want to research that through support.

2. What if a user makes a copy of the base - your data would go with it as well. To overcome this issue, you want to ensure that the data has a shelf life and updates are almost as valuable as the initial injection. Also, you can use the custom app for more than authentication - build it to provide added value to your data.

[Honey_Syed]

Thanks :slightly_smiling_face: I will setup a password protected link and will change the password every month.

[Bill_French]

Honey_Syed:

setup a password protected link and will change the password every month.

Yep, some downside to that approach, but that works too.