@DennisyuTSS
Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest flaws in Airtable that customers have been complaining about since Airtable originally released automations in November 2020. This is such a big problem that I even listed this as my #4 top Airtable feature request here.
As you noted above, your automation runs will only renew monthly, but Airtable has given customers zero ability to pay for extra automation runs in the meantime. (Unless you pay $10,000 USD per year to jump up to the Enterprise plan, which has the same problem when you hit 500,000 automation runs.)
So what this means is that if you run out of automation runs, your entire business will come to a grinding halt until the renewal date.
This, of course, is completely unacceptable for any business for their entire operations to come to a grinding halt, which is one of the TOP REASONS that I highly recommend that everybody use Make for their automations instead of Airtable.
Make’s automations & integrations are infinitely more powerful than Airtable, it is extremely inexpensive, and you can always purchase more automation runs or upgrade to a higher plan BEFORE you run out of automation runs.
There can be a bit of a learning curve with Make, which is why I created this basic navigation video for Make, along with providing the link to Make’s free training courses. There are also many Make experts hanging out there who can answer other Make questions that you might have.
In the meantime, you may want to express your dissatisfaction with this issue by writing an email to support@airtable.com, but sadly, Airtable is a customer-hostile company that doesn’t typically listen to customer feedback.
You may also be able to get Airtable Support to temporarily increase your automation runs for free when you run out, but considering that Airtable Support often takes 2-3 weeks to get back to people, this isn’t much of a solution.
The best long-term answer is to recreate your automations with Make.
p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you need to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld.
