LACK OF SUPPORT

This is deliberate on the part of Airtable. You now have to upgrade to Business to receive email Support. This is one of the big changes that is wholly inappropriate. If you are a paying customer, on any tier, there is an expectation that when you have a question about the service, you are able to contact the company for support. I've been in the same email loop this week, and the questions I have aren't appropriate for the community to answer; I need support, and you shouldn't be able to discriminate between tiers of paying customers to provide that support. Sorry you are dealing with this. 

Appreciate your response, Zach.

This is the first time I hear of a company that would choose which customers are worthy of receiving direct support based on the amount of Money they're paying...

We're paying a substantial amount of our budget to AirTable, never anticipated that even support might not be an option at any point, and that's apart from the sudden plan changes, the experience overall just went from bad to worse.

Airtable is focusing on companies with 1,000+ full-time employees. If that’s not you, it might be time to look elsewhere.

That sounds snarky, but I don’t mean it to. The majority of my Airtable work is with super-small entities and non-profits, and they are all reeling from the price change and the short ramp-up. Airtable is telling us who they want as customers. We need to listen. 

Yeah, I was very shocked to discover that Airtable no longer provides support for people who are actually paying them good money on a monthly basis!

This is just... painful to deal with, we entrusted AirTable with the entire infrastructure of our company, and though there are limitations, we were happy figuring out workarounds all the time, but how on earth am I supposed to address a concern or a question that I have regarding my account if the service I'm dealing with literally says:

"Naah.. we can't support you with what you currently pay, if you pay more though, we'll be more than happy to!"

I really hope that someone from management would respond to this post, and just reason with us, how is it reasonable that you provide support to your customers based on what they pay? we're not talking about 24/7 support here, just the bear minimum support with the 72 hour ETA that you guys set all along.

This lack of support has not been made clear ANYWHERE in the documentation we've received (hardly surprising, now that I know about it).

Since AirTable has foisted their support for non-1000+ user businesses off onto their "community," we'll be looking for something else. Probably design our own Access database or something.

Ridiculous.

People here should know - its not just Pro customers, or Business customers. We are an enterprise customer & have been since 2020 and we can barely ever receive a response from our Enterprise account manager now because we only have 100 billable users. We signed a Co-Marketing agreement & a 3 year agreement last year with Airtable to hopefully get out ahead of any plan changes, and yet now they don't even communicate with us.

I've witnessed this evolution with many platforms over my career - if they can provide a solid product that can't be beaten in its industry, it will be fine - but Airtable has enough competitors in this realm now, competitors that are listening to this community's gripes & complains about the product and improving the model. Mark my words - what we all used to think was the end all product won't register on our radar of solutions in the future & the platforms that ARE listening to your needs will take their place. 

The question now (and perpetually, it seems) is whether finding another solution and then investing the time and effort to make the switch is worth it. Airtable seems to have decided their customers will think it isn't.

So now my company will have to look for an alternative. Again. And all the time we spent implementing Airtable has been completely wasted.

To some extent it's like a line from an old comic strip, "We have met the enemy and it is us".  As long as this community exists and members are willing to provide help with other members problems Airtable has been able to treat us as a resource.  It never really hit home until I got an automated response on my question on the new pricing changes and how we could find out api usage, telling me I should check with the community.  

I'm not suggesting we stop, in my case nobody would notice (although I hesitate to think of where members would be without people like Kuvonne, Bill French, Scott and many others), I just feel like I've taken a path that will lead to a dead end.  In the meantime I'm looking for other short term solutions and trying to rebuild my Postgres skills.

One option - no guarantees you'll get answers: join TableForums. The people who plowed five+ years of their lives into supporting Airtable have pretty much left the building. They hang out on TableForms to escape the poor platform Airtable chose in 2022 to replace Discourse.

You might enjoy this rewind (or puke a little in your mouth), which captures the history of how we got to this point concerning support.

Not often I get quoted. Nice! 😄

Well written article (what I could read anyway, since I'm not a substack subscriber). Good job.

Subscribe for free - you get seven days of access to this and all the other premium articles. It's definitely worth the read on this terrible topic. And I can quote you directly if you'd like.

It's the worst. The bots and automated replies don't even work well.

We have emailed them 10+ times with billing issues...they have not responded a single time. We are on a business plan. Just terrible, non-existent customer support. The worst I have seen in many years.