In the same boat… would be paying for airtable happily but I need a way to give contractors some minor utility above “read-only”.
I don’t think anyone here is asking for a free lunch for additional users on our pro/premium plans, but there’s an obvious permissions level missing.
There should be another permissions level (“box checker account”) that could Check boxes for job completion, move a single select menu from “in progress” to “complete”, adding some job notes to a file, etc…
They don’t need any authority on higher level actions like to create bases, create views, create column headings or to download .CSV’s or any of that.
I think you’d engage many more people having it like this and put them on the path to becoming a paid user.
I know I’m not the only one who can envision their entire team growing into paid users because of the additional functionality, but I can’t start there.
If airtable already has many teams who are paying for the additional users directly for the functionality of “box checking” and minor file updates and you don’t want to lose them, look at the data and see if there’s a way to add the “box checker” permission level but add in a “punishment” for doing it that keeps them from being upset that they’ve paid for it and you offer it for free.
Maybe for each “box checking” account that is unpaid the premium user loses 10gigs of cloud storage, or several months of rollback, or maybe there is a hard-limit of only 2-3 “box checking” accounts per upgraded plan. Don’t lose any of your people paying for these teams, but drop a bridge to the rest of your creative customers to pay you. There are lots of people who want to add some “box checker” access and would sacrifice other utility at the premium level to have a few accounts.
