I was considering upgrading to pro, trying to decide if I needed the enhanced features, and after reading through this thread I’m very hesitant. I am a consultant. Each of my projects represents a collaboration between at least 20 people, and the one I’m considering using Airtable for right now would be more like 100 people. Each of them would access the database over 2-3 months to add their expert knowledge to the data. Adding them as pro users for 2-3 months ($6000) was not in my budget. If I use a form, can they just submit their info that way, without really becoming an airtable “user”?

Because I still don’t understand what it will affect (like can I upgrade one workspace for bases it makes sense for, and not upgrade another workspace where I need the massive collaboration opportunity?) I’m afraid to upgrade anything.

Elizabeth

Absolutely, though be aware that forms can only be used to add new records, not editing existing records (unless you implement some workarounds in your table structures). You can also create read-only views that are embedded into a website if these temp-users need to view any of your tables.

Thanks, I think I was starting to figure that out. The link you shared is fantastic! (The learning curve in airtable is steep, in a good way… you become adept at understanding how to use it quickly.) The read-only web embed was actually the first thing that convinced me to look deeper at airtable for meeting more of my client needs. Really appreciate you taking the time to respond.

Elizabeth

Hi,

I read this. But I am sorry. I am now quite confused.

I have a pro account. But someone is helping me to set this up. So I just shared the air table sheet with him. Can he now use the tools and set this up for me? I will not set this up at all. He will but I have the paid and he has the free account.

Plenty of platforms have free edit level guest accounts recognising the modern consultant / client use case. I stopped using airtable for my business 2 years ago because of this.

What are the other options?

I wont provide specifics and alteratives obviously have weaknesses relative to airtable in other areas. Airtable is still fantastic and the free plan and paid plans offer excellent functionality. The only issue I have is I need pro features and I also need business partners to occasionally edit a base in my workspace. It is generally very occasional partner use. Forms and shared views are not sufficient access for them.

Is the business value greater than $20 ($30 AUD) per month for each occasional collaborator who likely has their own project system? Nope. A major challenge for the freelance/ solo consultants is how to collaborate with clients and others when everyone has different systems. Maybe advanced email workspaces are a better alternative as email remains the universal collaboration language. Still it’s an opportunity for workspace tools like airtable. End ramble

I am thinking of building workaround (with nominal charge ). Let me know if there is any interest.

Thanks


Neal


My email address is in my profile.

I agree with many of the previous comments here… For anyone using Airtable not as an employee of a company with a budget/bank account, but as an individual collaborating with others on various projects, the pricing model just doesn’t make sense. I’m an academic using Airtable for research project management - some projects are just my own and others have various co-authors. (And coercing them to pay for a tool that I want to use wouldn’t go over well - not to mention the fee comes as one bill, which I’d have to pay for upfront and try to get them all to reimburse me lol).

Trello added the “Trello Gold” pricing plan, which allowed individual users to decide to pay to access a few more features for their boards without having to start paying a users/month fee. When non-Gold users access your boards, they can interact with everything but can’t edit/add the extra features.

Seems like something similar for Airtable would be a pretty straightforward solution

We’re in a similar boat with our team. We have 4 team members in our pro plan currently and are hiring 3 more in the next 6 months. We switched over to Airtable from a combination of Google Sheets, Trello, and Basecamp about 6 months ago. The functionality in Airtable has been breathtaking and I am excited about the continued possibilities here.

We work as a organizer on projects with dozens of clients, contractors, and salesmen and would like to give each facet a view of their many-to-many relationships. Simple permission accounts would be a huge help for us.

Salesmen work with several clients, clients have several contractors working on their projects, and contractors may or may not be working with every client.

My goal is to allow clients to view progress on their projects, and give contractors the ability to see which clients they are working with.

I want contractors to be able to give status updates on all of their projects and then our clients can automatically see how their project is being fulfilled by the partners working on it.

I’ve already created isolated views for each client and contractor that shows them all the projects and statuses they are tagged in, but I am limited to giving them view-only permissions and cannot give even small edit access without paying full price on their user.

I agree with @Kevin_Merino and @Terry_Curry and would be happy to pay a smaller monthly price for these limited users, or perhaps a $50 or so flat fee for 10-25 “external contributors.”

It just doesn’t make sense to add 50 new people as paid collaborators at $20/M to achieve this with the current pricing structure. Our default solution has been to have contractors add their updates to a google sheet and our team then copy/pastes that into the correct records in our base. I think we could work around this with Zapier, or something, but am not confident we could get all the updates to automatically align with the correct records.

Does anyone have suggestions on how this could be achieved under the current Airtable permissions?

Thanks!

I agree with the comments above. I would love to upgrade and am happy to pay $20 a month but I’m a solopreneur and work with a VA for less than 15 hours per month. I have 2 people using my Airtable and it’ll cost me nearly $1000 per year, I simply can’t afford that.


So instead of happily paying you guys $20 per month for the rest of eternity, I am ‘stuck’ with using the free version and not giving you any money. It seems very counterintuitive.

Is there another way to let someone edit a few bases without having to pay for a full member?

If your VA’s use of your base is fairly time-bound, you could potentially work around the high cost by granting that person “editor” privileges while he/she is working, and then bump him/her down to “read-only” during times that he/she is not required to edit the base.

Airtable prorates charges by the day (possibly even by the hour…). They charge the full $24 for the user up-front, but if you demote them down to read-only for 25 days of the month in question, you will be refunded 5/6th’s what you paid at the end of the month.

The only catch here is that you have to stay on top of adjusting user privileges.

What are you using now? Thinking of leaving Airtable because of this.

I’ll just pile on that we’re stuck using free, because it doesn’t make any sense to add an infinite amount of users for all the collaborations we do in a transient manner. We’d love to use Blocks and a couple other things, but there simply isn’t motivation to pay y’all. I can’t imagine this is a profitable structure for y’all, forcing people to not pay you! Please change!

They need unlimited guest accounts that allow commenting and editing. No creating tables etc is required. I would start recommending the platform in a flash.

I’d give’em my CC# tomorrow!

Ok so I guess we have established that this is an ongoing issue and not much has happened about it.

I will need more records soon, but won’t be able to pay for the number of users I need. So Im thinking about workarounds.

Thoughts so far are to use a paid version for archiving all the information and free versions for doing the data entry etc. THen the tables that accrue a lot over time could potentially be copied and pasted into the paid base which the users can view but not adapt.

I guess other workarounds are to use forms with a paid base, and use the forms to update the paid base.

Is there anyone out there who has figured out a satisfactory workaround?

Thanks in advance!

And that would create a flood of new users who, while putting a fair bit of pressure on Airtable’s infrastructure, would also likely result in a number of new tire kickers and a sizeable injection of new paying users - rinse, repeat (exponentially).

Indeed, it’s how they could grow their business rapidly, well - at least their user base. But this idea comes at a cost - the infrastructure would take a hit and if it’s not ready for prime-time, my service will degrade as a result of your new collaborative-user windfall. I’m sure this is in their calculous of trade-offs.

You’ve probably noticed that Comcast doesn’t perform this calculous. When five new families each with five iPhone-carrying kids move into the neighborhood and start sucking on the Internet pipe, all y’alls are faced with really slow load times and streaming interruptions. Airtable probably doesn’t want to be that company, and neither do we.

The fact that there’s a practical ceiling on records suggests they’re not ready for prime-time, and despite perhaps wanting to do exactly what you suggest, they are simply unable or unprepared to do it for any number of technical reasons eat this time].

I don’t want to necessarily defend this posture by Airtable or even suggest I know or I’m speaking for them. But I suspect they’re holding the reigns pretty tight because they don’t want to risk the brand equity of their pretty thrilled eexisting] user base.

Might as well add my two cents here as well, to show Airtable that there is a sizable market of users for whom this is an issue. I’m a solopreneur with third party contractor-partners that I’d like to give collaborator access to simply edit a few records on a monthly basis (mostly to pass project tasks along a kanban when they’ve completed their part of the process). I was surprised to see that the pro account only comes with 1 seat and each additional seat is $24/month. An easy way to solve this would be to offer the first 3-5 seats free and then maybe $5-10 per seat thereafter. To echo others’ points, it disincentives what could be really great small-mid sized users from upgrading to pro.

I second all of what is said here. Marketing agency with contractors and only need limited edit capabilities for them and full edit for me. I cannot justify dropping $24 a month per contractor. Please change this. I will literally pay you and so will all of these people.

The cost is a deal-breaker. The upgrade is a bit steep for one workspace, but I could just about warrant it. Not per collaboration, though. Not when the market rate for other platforms that more or less have the same functionality is free. I’ll stick to the free version, google sheets or apple numbers until the price is right to justify using solely airtable.

Absolutey agree! I was about to drop quite some funds until I realied how weird that pricing is.

Change the pricing and add a way to link bases and move tabs from one base to another and airtable is the perfect all-in-one tool.

hola amigos, yo tengo una duda, yo pago por la versión PRO, pero mi método es el siguiente.


tengo 30 usuarios que solo usan la base para lectura


y 2 para editar y yo como único Creador.


lo que quiero es que los dos que pueden Editar no sea cobrable.


es posible.?


ya que solo modifican una celda selectiva.


no veo necesario el pagar por alguien que solo cambia la celda selectiva


alguien me puede apoyar con este tema?

We are also considering dropping AirTable for this reason. A great and powerful tool, but when you have a large community that need minor functionality, the pricing plans just don’t make sense for us to maintain. It’s a shame, but we are going to be forced out due to a large community of people that just need to do minor editing.

I understand the pricing strategy. A question to clarify. I pay annually for the Pro version so instead of paying USD24/Mo, it comes to USD/20$. If I invite a collaborator on my Base which is held in the Pro workspace, would I be charged a full year for that collaborator right away? Be billed USD24/ every month, or be billed USD20 every month for this added collaborator?


Thanks!