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Are Commenters Billable Users?

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When I go to upgrade to the new Teams plan, it says I have 14 billable users (and tries to charge me for such), but 9 of our users are only commenters.

  • The Pricing page FAQ says, "No charges will apply for read-only collaborators, commenters, or people submitting forms."
  • When I click "14 Billable Users" (on the upgrade page), it says, "…users with viewer and commenter permissions will get free viewer seats."

And yet:

  • It says here, "You can see every billable collaborator… This includes… any base collaborator with owner, creator, editor, or commenter permissions."
  • And here: "On self-serve paid workspace plans, any collaborator with a permission level of Commenter, Editor, Creator, or Owner is classified as billable.

I know Airtable is in middle of a price structure switch; not sure if this conflict of info is due to that.

Best answer by thatbbuchanan

I just confirmed with the sales/pricing teams that commenter-level users will be billable on Team plans. They found that the pricing pages I shared above are incorrect and they are changing the information on it asap.

This is very unfortunate, because I thought our consolation for the newly doubled price of Pro/Teams plan would be that commenters wouldn't be billable. Apparently not.

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kuovonne
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  • kuovonne
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  • August 30, 2023

This is probably due to the change in pricing structure. Commentators were billable collaborators on Pro plans, but are not billable collaborators on Team.

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I have the same issue. I have contacted sales that confirmed that I shouldn’t get invoiced for commentators. I have now contacting the billing support but haven’t heard anything since last week..

The information provided on the faq is a mess as it states that commentators are billable but then will also say to refer to the pricing page, which states the opposite.

can someone from AirTable provides some clarity here?

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  • thatbbuchanan
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  • September 1, 2023

I just confirmed with the sales/pricing teams that commenter-level users will be billable on Team plans. They found that the pricing pages I shared above are incorrect and they are changing the information on it asap.

This is very unfortunate, because I thought our consolation for the newly doubled price of Pro/Teams plan would be that commenters wouldn't be billable. Apparently not.

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  • November 3, 2023
thatbbuchanan wrote:

I just confirmed with the sales/pricing teams that commenter-level users will be billable on Team plans. They found that the pricing pages I shared above are incorrect and they are changing the information on it asap.

This is very unfortunate, because I thought our consolation for the newly doubled price of Pro/Teams plan would be that commenters wouldn't be billable. Apparently not.


It is November and it still says Commenters are Unlimited in the Team plan, but I am trying to upgrade now and they are definitely trying to charge me $30K.

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  • gcilift
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  • June 12, 2024

This is incredibly frustrating. We started using Airtable thinking that commenters are free and budgeted accordingly. This feels like a bait and switch. It doesn't make intuitive sense why these users are billable.

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Is there any clarity on this

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  • September 4, 2024
thatbbuchanan wrote:

I just confirmed with the sales/pricing teams that commenter-level users will be billable on Team plans. They found that the pricing pages I shared above are incorrect and they are changing the information on it asap.

This is very unfortunate, because I thought our consolation for the newly doubled price of Pro/Teams plan would be that commenters wouldn't be billable. Apparently not.


This is very frustrating - its now 9/4/2024 - a year after this was shared with AirTable. And i just signed up for a Teams plan based on this single reason, that I did not have to pay for a commenter since the competition had this charge and made their tool too expensive. And spent numerous hours building out our new tool - only to discover this when I went to invite users! Get this false information off your website! 

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MKWood wrote:

It is November and it still says Commenters are Unlimited in the Team plan, but I am trying to upgrade now and they are definitely trying to charge me $30K.


Its now 9/4/24 and I'm in the same boat... someone clearly "forgot" to fix this little profitable error on their site. Beyond frustrating! 

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gcilift wrote:

This is incredibly frustrating. We started using Airtable thinking that commenters are free and budgeted accordingly. This feels like a bait and switch. It doesn't make intuitive sense why these users are billable.


Agree! It's not even a switch and bait because the free commenter option does not exist - it's a flat out lie at this point. 

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aryan-03 wrote:

Is there any clarity on this


No, they are clearly not going to remedy this profitable error on their site. It's been over a year since this post!! Just moved my team over, only to discover this... their hopes are that once we have spent enough time building things out, we'll just grin and bear this inconvenient truth. Almost feels like a legal issue!  

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  • September 4, 2024
kuovonne wrote:

This is probably due to the change in pricing structure. Commentators were billable collaborators on Pro plans, but are not billable collaborators on Team.


It's been over a year and this is STILL an issue!! Unbelievable, and borderline illegal. 

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  • svmplsales
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  • November 3, 2024

This issue is still there. I recently added another account as 'commenter' because the FAQ price says so, but at the end of the month, I see that amount has been deduced for my commenter collaborator also. This is not good. Airtable needs to fix this

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  • m.grasser
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  • March 31, 2025

This is still the case. Not only is it frustrating, it’s borderline fraudulent.

Seeing that it’s a known issue that was raised over 1.5yr ago and remains unaddressed gives our team an immense distrust of the platform at large.

Please let us know how you plan to address this.

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