Sharing a base between a paid and a free user?

[Alvaro_Martinez]

Hi all,
I am a free user and I´ve been sharing a few bases with other free users for a while.
I am thinking of upgrading my account to a paid subscription, but I am afraid this might affect collaboration with non paid users. How does this work?
If this sort of collaboration is possible what happens to the product features available only for paid subscriptors when working on a shared base?
Thanks!

[HammerOz]

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.

[Kay_Bryant]

What are the other options?

[HammerOz]

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

[nea_lpatil]

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.

[jinelle_p]

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 :slightly_smiling_face:

[Marktable]

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!

[Jennifer_Lachs]

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?

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

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.

[Andy_Taylor]

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

[Arne_Johnson]

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!