Using a paid account to work with people that have a free one

[Kenton_Smith]

I am a freelance designer that uses the free Airtable account with my clients. My clients have access to the Airtables I have created as an editor, so they can add text and images to projects I am working on for them. I want to do more automation and integrate some apps, so I can see I need to pay for Airtable.

My question is, what happens to my clients once I move to a paid account? Do I have to pay for a seat for them to be able to edit my Airtables? Are they only able to view my Airtables with a free account?

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Kenton_Smith!

Unfortunately, Airtable charges you for the workspace, so you would have to pay for any collaborators who have greater than “read-only access” to any base in your workspace.

Airtable doesn’t know the difference between “paid users” and “free users” — it only knows the difference between “paid workspaces” and “free workspaces”.

What this means is that Airtable is often collecting money multiple times over for a single person.

For example, I am a professional Airtable consultant with dozens of clients who are currently sharing their bases/workspaces with me. Each one of those clients is paying a monthly fee for me. So even though I am only one person, Airtable is collecting 100+ monthly fees for me.