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I will be using this, and dropping a lot of my paid AirTable bases...and let me please explain why. Airtable makes it VERY hard to collaborate with people outs

I will be using this, and dropping a lot of my paid AirTable bases...and let me please explain why. Airtable makes it VERY hard to collaborate with people outside my organization. We are a team of 7 people. No longer a scrappy 1-person startup, but not an enterprise client by any-means. If I want to add a single person to an Airtable base, that's $24 a month please. I have one client with 12 people that want to collaborate on the base by posting comments. I can't justify $288 a month just to keep the comments for all time.I contacted Airtable about this and was told the "Enterprise Plan" would be a perfect fit. Minimum $15k a year commitment. Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?

donmcronald 6y ago
> Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between? Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks. And they have the same tone deaf solution; upgrade to Ultimate. Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with.
- ShakataGaNai 6y ago
  Ah $240/year, I wish it were that cheap. If you want the security goodies is $1200/year/user. You have to make the impossible choice of getting everyone involved with the tool, or getting all the features. Because you can't afford the features AND the users.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with. Disagree. The issue is that they don’t want cheap users. It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation, and usually cheap users are the most demanding to support in relation to their revenue. A user that pays $50/year and has 5 questions to support us very different than 5 questions from a user posting $5000/year
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    The problem is getting those 5000/month accounts if nobody wants to use your product before they get there.
    - Swizec 6y ago
      You’d be surprised. Those users come from sales more than self serve. Very different business model.
      - alisonkisk 6y ago
        Who is going to buy your high touch sales offer if they see no one uses your product? Is this a thing where all the YC companies buy each other's stuff to prop up the revenue numbers until IPO?
        Swizec 6y ago
        Have you tried buying from salesforce? Very high touch, very expensive, very unfit for small businesses, hugely successful and widely used. Different audiences, different approaches. Many successful businesses are such that none of us have ever heard of, but are making millions, sometimes billions. We haven’t heard of them because we’re not the target market and talking to us is a waste of resources.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    I see the support excuse all the time, but I don't understand why it needs to be that way and I don't really believe it to be honest. Sell me a small business version that includes per-incident support. If someone has a problem and balks at the idea of paying fair value for the support they need, then I agree they're not worth having as a customer. If the goal is to ignore or be actively hostile towards the bottom 80%, I guess a lot of SaaS companies are succeeding. To me though, they're building poorer quality products that aren't going to capture enough up and coming businesses and the long term impact is going to be a bunch of bloated garbage with a ton of half baked features where everyone is competing for the "enterprise" dollars. > It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation To me, that's what it's really about. It's pump and dump quality SaaS that's built for an IPO, not for the users.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  > Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks. Google Form linked in your readme, done deal.
loceng 6y ago
"Why is this happening in the SasS world???" It's the VC-finance industrial complex expecting a drive towards an IPO to exit while offloading the risk and unsustainable fees to the general public via misaligned stock brokers buying/selling to get fees vs. only benefitting long-term if their picks earn profit.
viraptor 6y ago
> Why is this happening in the SasS world? Because it works for them. I mean, they likely have customers for that $15k plan. And if they do, why would it be worth their time discussing <$24 plans that require extra dev time with you? (I don't mean it as a complaint - just awareness that for-profit companies will do for-profit things)
tyingq 6y ago
It does seem odd for those "low code" tools to not have a way to deal with "external users". For example, it would be logical to create a tool for accepting job candidates. The internal facing piece would be limited to some reasonable number of users, but the outward facing piece would have to allow anyone to submit a record. I do know that knack.com has a pricing model based on number of records instead of number of users. Might be an option for you, depending on how many records you have.
- PebblesRox 6y ago
  Airtable does allow you to create a publishable form view so that anyone can submit a new record. You can also add read-only users to a base without having to pay for them. But giving them any kind of edit access (even just the ability to add comments to records) requires a full-fledged user account.
ig1 6y ago
There’s a few factors at play; 1) There’s customers who will pay 15k for the exact same users/features as you’re willing to pay <3k for. If they offered a cheap package then those customers wouldn’t pay for the expensive package. 2) Sub enterprise customers are a pain, they’re often as expensive as enterprise customers (acquisition, support, etc) but with significantly less revenue and higher churn. When a company decides where to focus it’s going to go where the money is.
- social_quotient 6y ago
  I’m small’ish agency and we have clients with lots of stakeholders often that just need to be added to artifact systems like this for formal reasons but they aren't active enough to justify the costs. I totally get that they need to make money to keep making a good product and stay alive. It’s a difficult problem. One idea - If small clients are a pain (because of support) then support should be a specific thing that can dialed in a bit. AWS is fantastic here. Noisy people are gonna pay for it... but if I’m small, yet not noisy, then I don’t get hurt and can continue to drink the koolaid.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  The simple answer is to charge for support like every enterprise company does
azernik 6y ago
Price discrimination is a hard problem! There's a conflict between soaking your customers for as much as they're willing to pay, and making your product accessible to customers that won't pay that much. Finding a feature set that the first set of customers absolutely needs and will pay extra for, but the second set can live without, is hard.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  The problem is that pricing is expected to be the opposite of what it really should be. Companies with 10k users expect a discount, but the reality is they should be paying a lot more because building a product to serve 10k users is much harder than building a product to serve 10 users. On the flipside, why should I, as a small user, share in the cost of things like scalability, HA, SLAs, etc.? I don't need those things. Based on what I've seen in larger businesses, those things can be paper features. It doesn't matter if the small business edition has the same scalability and HA as the enterprise edition. Large businesses will still pay for the enterprise edition because they need to be able to show they paid for HA, etc. to cover their own asses if anything every goes wrong. Charge for scalability and reliability, not features IMO.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    Is it 1000x times harder to server 10K users?
    - higeorge13 6y ago
      In some cases yes. I worked for a b2b company, which was not designed as multi-tenant and all their customers were under the same db and the same service. Now imagine response time for small business vs enterprises (yes they had a few of those paying premium, lol), sometimes the later was infinite.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    Hard disagree. Scalability and reliability, and SSO[0] are basic features any piece of software should have. Even a one-person startup shouldn't have to accept a tool being down for a month or all of their data lost due to a fire in a datacenter. Charging extra for any of these is a very shitty business model. 0 - sso.tax
spoonjim 6y ago
80% of the software revenue in the world comes from a few thousand companies. The big software vendors don’t give a shit about chasing that last 20%.
markfer 6y ago
That's ridiculous. Collaborating with clients should almost always be free. Just out of curiosity, what kind of collaboration are you doing with clients? I'm the CEO of a platform specifically for businesses and their clients, and we loosely compete with Airtable.
ComodoHacker 6y ago
Are your tables large enough Office 365 can't handle it for a reasonable price?
- auxym 6y ago
  Do you mean excel, or has Microsoft come out with an airtable clone? Excel is a really poor substitute for airtable.
  - ComodoHacker 6y ago
    I mean Excel, and specifically for GP's use case.
  - zokier 6y ago
    MS has also PowerApps and Power BI. I have never touched them, and I hope I never need to. But they seem to play remotely in the same area.
  - jasdine817 6y ago
    SharePoint Lists is designed to compete with Airtables.
jerieljan 6y ago
> Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between? The in-between for some software out there is "Guest access". Services like Notion, Miro and Mural have this figured out, but it is very disappointing that most do not.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Joeri 6y ago
An enterprise IWMS system I worked on solved this by charging only for enabled accounts. An admin could enable or disable accounts, and every month a report would show how many unique accounts were enabled that month and determined the billing. That shouldn’t be that hard to implement for airtable or any other SaaS, so it is puzzling why that option isn’t offered.
- eb0la 6y ago
  I remember Qlikview (reporting/data discovery software) had a per minute license for this. There are a lot of inactive users in reporting apps. A lot of people just log in once a month to see a single report and this was a useful way to get more users onboard. It looked scary at first because you didn't knew beforehand how many minutes you should buy. Mising standard and by minute license worked great, though

donmcronald 6y ago

> Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between? Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks. And they have the same tone deaf solution; upgrade to Ultimate. Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with.

ShakataGaNai 6y ago
Ah $240/year, I wish it were that cheap. If you want the security goodies is $1200/year/user. You have to make the impossible choice of getting everyone involved with the tool, or getting all the features. Because you can't afford the features AND the users.
Swizec 6y ago
> Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with. Disagree. The issue is that they don’t want cheap users. It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation, and usually cheap users are the most demanding to support in relation to their revenue. A user that pays $50/year and has 5 questions to support us very different than 5 questions from a user posting $5000/year
- Aeolun 6y ago
  The problem is getting those 5000/month accounts if nobody wants to use your product before they get there.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    You’d be surprised. Those users come from sales more than self serve. Very different business model.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      Who is going to buy your high touch sales offer if they see no one uses your product? Is this a thing where all the YC companies buy each other's stuff to prop up the revenue numbers until IPO?
      - Swizec 6y ago
        Have you tried buying from salesforce? Very high touch, very expensive, very unfit for small businesses, hugely successful and widely used. Different audiences, different approaches. Many successful businesses are such that none of us have ever heard of, but are making millions, sometimes billions. We haven’t heard of them because we’re not the target market and talking to us is a waste of resources.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  I see the support excuse all the time, but I don't understand why it needs to be that way and I don't really believe it to be honest. Sell me a small business version that includes per-incident support. If someone has a problem and balks at the idea of paying fair value for the support they need, then I agree they're not worth having as a customer. If the goal is to ignore or be actively hostile towards the bottom 80%, I guess a lot of SaaS companies are succeeding. To me though, they're building poorer quality products that aren't going to capture enough up and coming businesses and the long term impact is going to be a bunch of bloated garbage with a ton of half baked features where everyone is competing for the "enterprise" dollars. > It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation To me, that's what it's really about. It's pump and dump quality SaaS that's built for an IPO, not for the users.
hanniabu 6y ago
> Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks. Google Form linked in your readme, done deal.

loceng 6y ago

"Why is this happening in the SasS world???" It's the VC-finance industrial complex expecting a drive towards an IPO to exit while offloading the risk and unsustainable fees to the general public via misaligned stock brokers buying/selling to get fees vs. only benefitting long-term if their picks earn profit.

viraptor 6y ago

> Why is this happening in the SasS world? Because it works for them. I mean, they likely have customers for that $15k plan. And if they do, why would it be worth their time discussing <$24 plans that require extra dev time with you? (I don't mean it as a complaint - just awareness that for-profit companies will do for-profit things)

tyingq 6y ago

It does seem odd for those "low code" tools to not have a way to deal with "external users". For example, it would be logical to create a tool for accepting job candidates. The internal facing piece would be limited to some reasonable number of users, but the outward facing piece would have to allow anyone to submit a record. I do know that knack.com has a pricing model based on number of records instead of number of users. Might be an option for you, depending on how many records you have.

PebblesRox 6y ago
Airtable does allow you to create a publishable form view so that anyone can submit a new record. You can also add read-only users to a base without having to pay for them. But giving them any kind of edit access (even just the ability to add comments to records) requires a full-fledged user account.

ig1 6y ago

There’s a few factors at play; 1) There’s customers who will pay 15k for the exact same users/features as you’re willing to pay <3k for. If they offered a cheap package then those customers wouldn’t pay for the expensive package. 2) Sub enterprise customers are a pain, they’re often as expensive as enterprise customers (acquisition, support, etc) but with significantly less revenue and higher churn. When a company decides where to focus it’s going to go where the money is.

social_quotient 6y ago
I’m small’ish agency and we have clients with lots of stakeholders often that just need to be added to artifact systems like this for formal reasons but they aren't active enough to justify the costs. I totally get that they need to make money to keep making a good product and stay alive. It’s a difficult problem. One idea - If small clients are a pain (because of support) then support should be a specific thing that can dialed in a bit. AWS is fantastic here. Noisy people are gonna pay for it... but if I’m small, yet not noisy, then I don’t get hurt and can continue to drink the koolaid.
alisonkisk 6y ago
The simple answer is to charge for support like every enterprise company does

azernik 6y ago

Price discrimination is a hard problem! There's a conflict between soaking your customers for as much as they're willing to pay, and making your product accessible to customers that won't pay that much. Finding a feature set that the first set of customers absolutely needs and will pay extra for, but the second set can live without, is hard.

donmcronald 6y ago
The problem is that pricing is expected to be the opposite of what it really should be. Companies with 10k users expect a discount, but the reality is they should be paying a lot more because building a product to serve 10k users is much harder than building a product to serve 10 users. On the flipside, why should I, as a small user, share in the cost of things like scalability, HA, SLAs, etc.? I don't need those things. Based on what I've seen in larger businesses, those things can be paper features. It doesn't matter if the small business edition has the same scalability and HA as the enterprise edition. Large businesses will still pay for the enterprise edition because they need to be able to show they paid for HA, etc. to cover their own asses if anything every goes wrong. Charge for scalability and reliability, not features IMO.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Is it 1000x times harder to server 10K users?
  - higeorge13 6y ago
    In some cases yes. I worked for a b2b company, which was not designed as multi-tenant and all their customers were under the same db and the same service. Now imagine response time for small business vs enterprises (yes they had a few of those paying premium, lol), sometimes the later was infinite.
- sofixa 6y ago
  Hard disagree. Scalability and reliability, and SSO[0] are basic features any piece of software should have. Even a one-person startup shouldn't have to accept a tool being down for a month or all of their data lost due to a fire in a datacenter. Charging extra for any of these is a very shitty business model. 0 - sso.tax

spoonjim 6y ago

80% of the software revenue in the world comes from a few thousand companies. The big software vendors don’t give a shit about chasing that last 20%.

markfer 6y ago

That's ridiculous. Collaborating with clients should almost always be free. Just out of curiosity, what kind of collaboration are you doing with clients? I'm the CEO of a platform specifically for businesses and their clients, and we loosely compete with Airtable.

ComodoHacker 6y ago

Are your tables large enough Office 365 can't handle it for a reasonable price?

auxym 6y ago
Do you mean excel, or has Microsoft come out with an airtable clone? Excel is a really poor substitute for airtable.
- ComodoHacker 6y ago
  I mean Excel, and specifically for GP's use case.
- zokier 6y ago
  MS has also PowerApps and Power BI. I have never touched them, and I hope I never need to. But they seem to play remotely in the same area.
- jasdine817 6y ago
  SharePoint Lists is designed to compete with Airtables.

jerieljan 6y ago

> Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between? The in-between for some software out there is "Guest access". Services like Notion, Miro and Mural have this figured out, but it is very disappointing that most do not.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Joeri 6y ago

An enterprise IWMS system I worked on solved this by charging only for enabled accounts. An admin could enable or disable accounts, and every month a report would show how many unique accounts were enabled that month and determined the billing. That shouldn’t be that hard to implement for airtable or any other SaaS, so it is puzzling why that option isn’t offered.

eb0la 6y ago
I remember Qlikview (reporting/data discovery software) had a per minute license for this. There are a lot of inactive users in reporting apps. A lot of people just log in once a month to see a single report and this was a useful way to get more users onboard. It looked scary at first because you didn't knew beforehand how many minutes you should buy. Mising standard and by minute license worked great, though