Airtable gets $52M in funding | Hacker News Reader

Airtable gets $52M in funding

businessinsider.com

459 pointslxm191 comments

Airtable is awesome.

We have been throwing out a ton of self-built admin forms and CRUD pages by Airtable bases. Now people inside the company can add new fields, versioning by default, super simple interface.

Largest con: No webhooks. Which makes you pull data every X minutes to find out if a record changed. I would throw them a lot more money (280$/month now) if they just had webhooks as it could replace a TON internal systems/reports.

Second con: Ids. I would want them to support client delivered record_ids. Right now airtable has it's own ID field (which can not be set). Therefore if you want syncing to work efficiently you need to store that airtable_id on your side to do REST updates (PATCH). Would be better that airtable record_ids could be provided by the client so I can inject database primary keys and not have to store/query their record_id

Likewise, I am foaming at the mouth to replace some internal google sheets with air table but as you mention, webhook capability is table stakes to front the effort.

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but have you tried sharepoint? It's a horrible product for just about any use case, but ad hoc data entry forms and view for them are where it really shines. It should have more than enough API wise.

I'm not sure if SP is actually in the same market as AT. For SP you still need a team of SP developers, not your average citizen developers.

You might want to look into Quick Base.[1] It is actually the little known elder statesman in this space and includes a lot of features Airtable doesn't currently support. Specific to this thread, one of them is Webhooks.[2] And while the product uses an autonumber for keys by default, you can change it and then import/update against your designated key.[3]

[1] https://www.quickbase.com

[2] https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#abou...

[3] https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/default.html#sett...

Unless I missed something, their plans start at $25mo (annual billing) with min of 20 users, maybe in same space but not very appetizing to get your feet wet. but i'm sure their pricing is designed with that in mind.

Zapier conveniently replaces web hooks and adds some mapping between fields.

Try it out, they have a connector (Zapier calls this an Action)for airtable that works great.

Edit: direct link: https://Zapier.com

When I last used this, it only supported polling (15 minutes at a time iirc).

It now supports real time web hooks.

Gosh I sound like a Zapier salesman :)

i don't think it works well. Tried it, not all updates come in especially if you're using lookup formulas.

If they can do Zapier push then a webhook should not be that hard to pull of either. But the request has been there for a long time (https://community.airtable.com/t/webhooks-for-records/1966) and I just don't think that their architecture is ready for it (yet).

Maybe the 50mio will do some good :-)

During the Sonoma County fires we had over 60 volunteeers editing Airtable verifying shelter information, fire locations, developments, lost and found and more. We essentially put a light Rails app in front of it to serve as a front end for the site sonomafireinfo.com. I don’t think we could have scaled and gotten volunteers onboard as quickly as we did without Airtable.

You couldnt get an app to scale to 60 people without this? Something seems off, 60 people is not a lot.

s/people/concurrent realtime volunteer editors collaborating to maintain and share accurate, relevant information for folks in a time of crisis/g

I think the better question is: during a life-and-death fire rescue effort, is it a better use of time to use Airtable as a backend or to write, deploy, and operate a concurrent editing backend yourself? There's a clear answer here.

Good point but most states have disaster relief infrastructure already in place for events like this? If this was scrounged up the day of it would make sense.

Why do you believe most states have IT-related disaster relief infrastructure in place? I worked for several years in CA govt, I would be surprised if anything beyond the major metros has much in place for coordinating shelters, etc. In fact, the sonoma fires are documented to have had lots of problems with reverse 911.

I have and there was always IT-related disaster plans and policies. But admittedly I have not worked in most states in this capacity and definitely not in CA so my experiences are limited.

I have been eager to explore the available tools for disaster relief because it seems like people scamble to DIY a solution for every disaster. I made my own Firebase relief matchmaking service when we had a 100yr flood a couple years ago. I would love to see easily deployed crowdsourced open-sourced tools that can be used as soon as possible in these scenarios.

If you think local government has IT infrastructure just for disaster operations, or if it does, that you can add a user to it in less than two business weeks, then you haven't worked in local government.

I have worked in local government, and have dealt with these departments. While most cities probably dont have this infrastructure, most states do and open it to local muni's for these exact scenarios. Like I said if they had to create something last minute this is great, I was just surprised at their appreciation to scale something to 60 users.

The state is not that efficient in coordinating with a municipality.

That state may not be, the one I worked for was, specifically setup to come to the aid of muni's in cases of emergency. But these plans and contingencies were obviously created out of previous tragedy/experiences.

I think scaling it to 60 concurrent users editing Airtable at the same time without a hitch and able to onboard someone to be useful within 10 mins of them coming in the door was what we liked.

Why are people downvoting your question? Seems like a legit thing to ask.

I suspect HN behaves a little like how many folks treat their national army... you can't ask a question that may imply a bad decision during an important human/national event.

÷ "Why wasn't your system able to scale to 60 users during natural calamity?"

~ "How dare you question such a noble cause? Have you ever even worked with govt?" (Downvote)

÷ "Yes I have, we had systems in place that worked you know. Most states do."

~ (oh fuck, she knows what she's talking about) "States and municipals don't cooperate, so fuck off now"

So maybe, instead of attacking the OP, try answering the question directly, more honestly?

Make your points with logic and class people, not assholery.

because the answer is obvious, and someone already replied with it

We didn't want to write a lot of logic and UI when Airtable was a perfectly good DB/Admin backend. Our goal was rapid response. We built a site off the ground in an hour with useful information and onboarding someone with a tool like Airtable was much easier than custom interface.

People=Volunteers. We had over 130,000 unique visitors to the site relying on us for up to date accurate information.

Is your rails middleware open source? It might help other disaster/emergency response efforts in the future.

Yes, https://github.com/chimera/sonomafireinfo.org

I like airtable, but the per-base row limits (50,000 before you reach "contact us for pricing") are too small for many of the things I'd like to use it for.

And there's something a bit odd in their pricing model, isn't there?

The plus tier is $10 per user per month with a limit of 5,000 records per base; the pro tier is $20 per user per month, with a limit of 50,000 records per base.

Suppose I want to use it to replace a spreadsheet where our staff record some kind of work they have done.

If I have a staff of 2 I can pay airtable $20 per month on the plus tier and each person can do work generating 2,500 records in a shared space before I have to upgrade.

But if I have a staff of 50 and I pay airtable $500 per month on the plus tier, each person can only generate 100 records before I have to upgrade. Even if I pay them $1000 per month on the pro tier I'm still worse off on this metric at 1000 records per person.

I was wondering about this too but I _assumed_ the users compounded the limit versus divide it. Does anyone know for sure how the limits work with multiple users?

Bases are essentially full databases. You can have as many bases as you want. You can share your base (e.g. view only, not edit) to anybody [nonpaying users, nonlogged on users, etc]

If your base has 5,001 records, only users with a $20/month plan can edit that base.

Everyone in your company to my understanding has to have the same plan though. So, you can't have one staff member at a $10/month plan, and another at $20/month plan.

Do you know if you need a separate login, say for the situation where you want to use the product at work and as a separate, single user?

if they are comparing Airtable with Spreadsheet, why there is a constraint on # of records unlike spreadsheet(although Excel sheets are limited to 1.048m or so records per sheet but that's plenty I think to work with)? They do have another constraint for free account allowing only 2GB storage but then that alone should be enough and they should just allow adding as many rows as one can until one gets maxed out with this 2 GB storage.

My guess is that it's mostly a technical limitation (and that the reason why services of this sort haven't taken over the world is that everyone else runs into a similar limitation).

And there's cost of its underline infrastructure, presumably it's on AWS or Azure, all cost real $$$. Users with free account, I will assume a bulk load of them, even though limited to 1200 records per base, the resources cost still eat into their bottom line.

It's also a provisioning problem. Let's assuming that the new pricing model is based on usage per user, like 50,000 records per user, and how are you suppose to track each individual record, even that is possible, it would not be very practical as the every CRUD operations would require a record count referenced to the user. Keep X records per Base makes the operation a lot easier and technically much more feasible.

I wouldn't suggest anything so complicated. Rather (if it isn't a technical limitation), I'd suggest they increase the per-base limit for customers who pay for more users, or else add a third paid tier above 'pro'.

They do have a 3rd tier. “Contact us” is probably the tier you want.

Yup I considered migrating from google sheets but limits seemed too low for what I wanted. Sheets isn’t great, I split to multiple spreadsheets when I hit the limit but it works for me

Actually you can do a lot of amazing stuff already with google sheets, like sheet2site.com and sheetsu.com. However, Google api caps the free daily request to 1000.

I think they realize that most orgs that are creating a lot of records will share credentials to reduce cost, so they need multiple tier limits to upsell. I’m okay with this because we share an Airtable login. :)

Are you supposed to share login? Does Airtable's policy permit that?

I don’t know. They have some features that use authorship, but if enough people use a custom select column to handle assignments, etc, I could see them making login share more difficult. In a large enough organization, login share is impossible to maintain because of the need for access control.

Wearing my SaaS product manager hat I’d say shoot them an email describing your expectations and suggesting your price point. I’ve rejigged product packaging myself in response to high quality/specific presales feedback and reached additional market segments as a result.

And conversely, I have an unmarketed plan with <well known IaaS provider> despite being a tiny customer with no leverage - the point being that the packages marketed aren’t always the complete range available. But you have to ask.

This is especially true for SaaS where the margins are huge and business models are designed to simplify and obfuscate the true costs of running a business.

The whole charged-per-user SaaS culture is stupid.

SaaS had to be priced somehow, then someday someone came up with the idea of charging per-user and everybody followed that up, but it is not smart. Most SMB end up sharing accounts, which makes your product look worse than it actually is and at the same time makes your users miserable.

I think for many companies at least it's just the easiest way to somehow approximate value created for the customer. When the business matures one could argue that services should gain a stronger measurement of value created for their customers and charge correlating to this.

With regards to the SMB scenario I agree - and probably it would make sense for many services to have a base bundle tier with 5 or so accounts. And then price it based on some minimum value created. But also hard to do this if your competition is offering 1 user for $2.99.

That's one of the reasons I love Basecamp's pricing model - a flat $99/month for as many users as you'd like.

We recently decided to follow that path, but for us additional users will not have any significant increase in cost.

SMBs work that way, but it's an interesting way into the enterprise through "dark procurement" (essentially teams going rogue, buying a service without IT's knowledge, IT finds out, a business case is made... and boom... 2000 paying users instead of 1, having managed to subvert the usual pitching processes).

I agree, it's not right for a lot of products (some of which are better charged at a flat fee, or a per "thing" basis), but it's not a stupid decision for a lot of businesses.

I agree with you that per-user pricing doesn't make for an ideal SMB experience. We specifically avoided it for our SaaS tool for the reasons you mention.

That said, the costs of SMBs getting away with one login do not outweigh the benefits of getting to charge enterprises per user. Most of these tools with free tiers and per-user pricing (Slack, Airtable) make most of their money from enterprise, not SMB.

Therefore I don't agree with you that it's "stupid" or "not smart".

Glad to see this company get more funding. Last year I ported all of our companys excel and access files over to airtable. Currently tweaking with their API to work with a MS-SQL database using amazon Lambda and RDS at the moment. Their API documentation is fantastic, some of the best I've seen as well. They even have some of the best case studies for workflow management as well, posted on their blog, for setting up a relational database management setup in different use cases.

As a user who's also part of their alpha-test program, its exciting to see all the changes they made this year. They added blocks which lets you add app-like integrations such as forms, kanban, maps integration, page designer (think of mailmerge for word) etc. I personally have only dabbled in about half the things offered here, but its crazy how many things you can do with airtable.

I also wrote a popular excel VBA script for airtable too, for bulk downloading and renaming images found here on their forum. https://community.airtable.com/t/bulk-image-downloader-and-r....

Airtable has lots of potential use cases for startup apps as well, I highly suggest reading this article from a philosophical standpoint. http://sirupsen.com/minimum-viable-airtable/

Can I ask what actual business functions these spreadsheets are for?

I use it to manage purchase orders overseas and use it as a traditional product database. Anything that I would use MS-access for I use airtable instead.

On this page, https://airtable.com/templates, there's a database called "Product Catalog". Thats what I use

I find it useful for tracking people who attend music camps I run, whatever they have chosen, paid for, dietary issues etc. It’s very friendly for setting up things like Booleans, formulas, different types of data, without having to know much. It’s easy to use and easy to share with others. It’s not perfect. But it’s nice.

So if you're going to be putting them in a db, why did you 'port' them to airtable? Wouldn't it be cheaper to store the files on s3 and insert in the db when you get your schema and everything solidified?

sorry I didn't mean "port" literally, I meant it as a slang term. I meant "move everything over".

Airtable uses s3 to manage the file upload assets (I think). I like using Airtable over a traditional RDBMS since its extremely user friendly and easy to update your db schema. I don't have to memorize anything on the backend (E.g. with MS-SQL, it was always in an uphill battle working with sql-server management studio, figuring out what settings I need to tweaked, etc). Airtable's GUI is super intuitive if your familiar with excel / MS-access. It took me a few days to learn and figure out airtable, MS-Access took me about 3 months+.

This and your other comments read like ads. I don't mean to say that you're not being genuine, but when I (and presumably others) read a thread like this and see overly-enthusiastic reviews it raises a degree of skepticism. I wouldn't like to criticise you, especially since you just seem to be trying to inform others about a product you're pleased with, but i think there's a general problem on hn with comments above a certain threshold of complimentariness. Some are obvious shills, but there's a big grey area where it's harder to tell.

I don't know man, I might not be the target audience (MD of a software company) but I just don't get this.

It seems only slightly more useful than say a Google spreadsheet on a platform that yes might have blocks and templates but I didn't see anything there that made me want to switch away from Google Spreadsheets, Trello and a couple of other systems I use to run my 20 person £1mm turnover business.

I'll keep it in mind but having played with Airtable I just don't see the value. Still, wish them all the best.

Spolsky's discussion of Excel is probably the best way to understand Airtable: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...

> Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.

> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

If you view it from the lens that most Excel users employ the spreadsheet to create lists and tables (data organization), then Airtable is one way to improve that workflow.

Yes, people use excel to create databases without having to fuss about data-types and referential integrity (and without knowing they would even have to fuss about them).

Using Excel spreadsheets multi user database instead of as a spreadsheet calculator is one of my pet peeves. Unfortunately it's also exactly what happens when organisations are lacking in processes and tools and less technical people have to try to make their own. So, I welcome any app that actually give people the multi user database that they actually need instead of e-mailing excel files to each other and losing track of versions.

But then Google Sheets might be a better call.

If that's the target audience, then I see Airtable failing also. Surely 80% of the benefit of an excel spreadsheet, or google sheets, for a common user is how bare bones and simple to navigate the two products are?

"Oh hey, I just need to fire off some data rapidly in an organized way. Boop, done." And that's the trick, isn't it? The need to rapidly organize previously un-organized data. It's not a case of, "I know exactly how I want to rapidly organize some data."

With Airtable, it would be "I now have to navigate this decoupled spread out GUI and learn what all these abstract terms mean, when all I want to do is calculate how much we spent on ice cream last month."

In essence, it is making the workflow slower for those types of people.

On the other end of the spectrum, from a programmer's point of view, GUI's ALWAYS slow things down. This is why programmers who used VIM / Emacs were faster than those using modern IDE's. It's why hot-keys are important to both technical and non-technical workers. Presentation does not equal productivity. The presentation is what Airtable is pushing as the abstraction for non-technical users.

If the target audience for Airtable is instead small-business startups - then those startups are going to be in for a world of hurt when they need to get into real business development. They will have wasted time, energy, and resources to get set up on a lego platform that they'll need to migrate away from.

Looking at the pricing model and data limitations, there's nothing that would make this a better choice than just hooking up to AWS or something similar, directly. Using Airtable would require maintaining some form of middleware for SPA's...and there's no way in the world that you wouldn't be hitting their caps rapidly. Just an extra cost.

I'm not saying this product won't work well for a market niche, but that niche is a lot smaller than the buzz words thrown around in today's publications.

52M isn’t chump change in funding. Glad to know VC’s think it’s a big problem.

Personally I am working on an Airtable/excel like product but rather than a spreadsheet, you can easily make structured hierarchies. Think rows, which could have more rows, or link to other cells. A very easy way to capture relational data.

You can just start writing stuff in cells Define headings and data types later. Like git, it stores version history, let’s you work offline and let’s you sync with others. Let’s you upload markdown, or pictures and files into cells. Define a stricter schemas later. Restrict editing/viewing of cells based on formulas so others can’t easily break what you’ve created.

I wrote a little manifesto at orows.com and working on a prototype. Once I have about a 100 users, I plan to quit my job and work on it full time.

Think github, but rather than files, an object graph.

It's a lot more user-friendly than Google Sheets, what with the various input methods and the easy 'views' that hide/show/whatever the underlying raw information. Plus, it's really easy to link tables to each other. I might not have looked well enough, but I don't think GSheets can do that without some scripting involved.

I think being a competitor to Sheets is the business - there's space for 2 online spreadsheet solutions (Excel online is is a step below).

I wouldn't compare Airtable to Google Spreadsheets or Excel for that matter. It looks more like a non-buggy Web 2.0 FoxPro, an RDBMS with a user-friendly UX.

I wish it was a Web 2.0 FoxPro. It’s maybe the closest, but the price model is too much.

You could buy foxpro for $1200 and create 100 databases with all sorts of janky workflows used within your small business. Paying $20/user/infinity for lower amounts of records doesn’t quite fit that niche. And so the hacked processes with Google Docs and now Excel365 continue.

Hopefully with this new funding, Airtable can fix their pricing model and become successful as Access was.

What's the price sweet spot here assuming unlimited (or near unlimited) records allowed?

For me, it’s a one time fee that I can self host or run against AWS or something of my choosing.

But I’m pretty weird. I suspect one that has really simple and easily measureable prices. Like $500/year for a terabyte of storage in as many bases as you want. This should let most small businesses not worry about cost. Kind of like how FoxPro let people build so many solutions.

The model now is not very predictable so it’s hard for small businesses to use.

I think 365 charges $100/user/year for 1TB. That’s for write/edit permissions. Maybe double that or something. So 5 users would give 5TB total for $1000/year.

Raw storage may not be the right measure, but it is better than cells since it is easier to report on. Just constantly showing raw or logical space.

Imagine if gmail charges by number of email messages in inbox and number of recipients rather than storage. That would be hard to predict.

And FoxPro was great, so if Airtable is Web 2.0 FoxPro they might be onto something :)

Yes, this is actually pretty surprising in the hindsight is 20/20 way. I disagree that FoxPro was great, it had too many bugs and issues for that, but the 'concept of FoxPro' was indeed great.

You're right - FoxPro was a great concept, maybe not that much in execution.

Excel still is excellent for the most tasks for most of us. It's not going away any time soon. Google certainly has tried with google sheets. They all might just co-exist in harmony fulfill each individual niche even with some overlap.

We use it at work for project management.

It's an app that sits somewhere between a database and a spreadsheet, bringing the best features of both, that is easily "programmed" by non-programmers, and with a nice looking interface to boot.

Pg's startup idea YC would fund from 2008:

22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there's an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based. Like make it easier to get data into it, through forms or scraping.

Don't make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists. (Which means you probably want to write it in one.)

From: http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html

I bet every developer that has used sheets in a business setting has come to realize that there was a need for an intuitive web database with relations and forms. I was thinking about doing something like this the other day, also saw it Pg's startup list.

I bet there's still room for such a solution if it was targeted specifically to developers. I personally really liked Parse because of this functionality.

Definitely! You should check out https://base.run - it's a solution targeted to developers that want to quickly build and test out ideas or internal tools

I wonder what pg thought of dabbledb

Well deserved funding.

Airtable is one of those products that really changes the way you work or even think about building workflows. I use it as a middleware for uploading content to a side project website I own. Nothing out there is as flexible and easy to use as this (their API is also a piece of cake.)

They care deeply about their user experience and are always shipping features at an impressive pace. Really happy to see them growing.

Simply put. Airtable is like Smartsheets but for cool people :D

+10000 Airtable is badass. It is simple and elegant and fills a niche

We've used Airtable for replacing various parts of our internal backend dashboards for non-technical people. Syncing over the API + Zapier is doable, but I wish they made two-way sync easier. And the fact that they don't have cross-base lookups is a major pain point.

For anything that requires quick fiddling and no API access, I still prefer traditional spreadsheets. Airtable's strict relational limitations means you cannot quickly enter some static data in an arbitrary field (e.g. a currency exchange rate). This makes quick back-of-the napkin calculations really awkward, even impossible.

Airtable seams cool but i have a hard time understanding where in the market they are.

Like between Excel and a relational db app? Not sure about that.

Some things that often fail in excel is:

* You cant easily verify what the user writes.

* It is hard to stop users from destroying the formulas that make it work.

* It becomes slow when the row count starts to go up.

* You cant have user roles where some users is suppose to be able to see one thing and edit another and another user is to edit another thing and see something else.

* Data relationships are also mostly not there.

I think they are trying to be "access in the browser" but they are not all the way there yet.

>* You cant easily verify what the user writes.

Sharepoint somewhat handles that with file locking and had some revision history and permissions support. Most people just put spreadsheets on shared folders, so of course they get blown up.

Airtable is basically an enterprise swiss army knife for solving trench-fighting issues. That's basically the market, freeing up developers to handle main projects to make it worth the company's time to employ them.

Some rando department needs a form for their new employees or needs to spreadsheet-collaborate? Instead of building some custom webapp, Airtable is a central point for those kinds of things where a more specialized workflow solution doesn't exist.

I wish our company had this 10 years ago. Everybody was using and mis-using Excel for everything, whether it's requirements, project tracking, documentation, manually updated dashboard and dashboard.

We're not abusing Excel anymore, but we've ended up specialized software for everything. Ironically we've lost ability to create something that is exactly tailored for each person's need.

Excel is SUCH a double-edged sword, isn't it?

I think Airtable's marketing hasn't always been ideal, because I don't really think of it as a spreadsheet product. In fact, I've actually tried using it to do spreadsheet-like number crunching and it's just not that good at it.

What it really is is a darn-fine visual database that only looks like a spreadsheet (potentially...there are other views as well). The ability to create fairly sophisticated, structured data models along with an easy to way to collaboratively edit that data is pretty impressive. I've been using it both in my freelance business as well as to manage lots of household planning stuff along with my wife, and it's done a great job. I wish the Pro plan were cheaper...I'm only on Plus right now and want the features of the Pro plan. But I understand the need to charge for good tooling. (Also a happy paying customer of Basecamp here.)

Happy to see these guys doing well. Got turned onto their product middle of last year and have started using it for all sorts of stuff. Its a great middle ground between an excel file and building a custom app for things. Super flexible with very little learning curve. Girlfriend and I even use it to track which wines we've tried, like, and ratings and stuff for them.

I discovered airtable not long ago, and planned to give it a try soon.

What frightened me was exactly that middle ground though, my processes are too tied to the mail think products like streak meet it better.

I will definetly test it

I've had success using Airtable with an email flow for an applicant tracking system. I:

-posted a job ad with a specific reply-to email address

-every time an applicant wrote to that email address, a row would automatically be added in an Airtable base

-I would review their application and if I wanted to pass them on to a next step, I would select a pre-defined drop-down value in their row in the Airtable base to mark them as something like "Go" or "No go".

-This would trigger Zapier to send an email to the applicant with instructions on how to take our screening questionnaire in SurveyGizmo

-Depending on the results of the questionnaire, I would select another drop-down value, triggering another email, etc.

It wasn't perfect but it did help me to automate what had been a very painful process.

This sounds like a very interesting idea as a cohesive product. A normal user wouldn't be able to set this up themselves.

Could be. I haven’t researched it but my impression is that off the shelf ATS is quite expensive.

Would you use a spreadsheet for that?

I'm asking sincerely, since most of open examples I see of people using Airtable and Fieldbook and other similar software is for these simple use cases -- in fact for tracking wines or whatever, a spreadsheet is maybe much better.

Now when I tried to use Fieldbook for a somewhat complex bunch of data that gets currently added, 5 tables with references between them it has quickly bloated and become slow to the point of not being usable anymore.

So I'm left with the impression that people mostly use these apps for simple use cases where a spreadsheet, or a Trello board, or even a text file would be better; and that complex use-cases are not supported at all -- as they wouldn't be in a spreadsheet.

Maybe look at Anaplan for those more complex workflows/processes.

> Now when I tried to use Fieldbook for a somewhat complex bunch of data that gets currently added, 5 tables with references between them it has quickly bloated and become slow to the point of not being usable anymore.

I've had the same experience, glad it's not just me. It was a few months ago so I don't remember the exact details, but I could not model the complex relationships I wanted in Fieldbook (which I've used before) or Airtable (my first time). I didn't gel with the Airtable UI either.

Care to elaborate what kind of complex data modelling you wanted to do?

Airtable is a fantastic product. We use it religiously.

For those that may be interested, one of Lambda School's students has been building out an ORM for Airtable to abstract away some aspects of the API. https://lambda-school-labs.github.io/Airtable-ORM/

Do you know what documentation tool this uses to handle the layout? It looks awesome.

It's Slate https://github.com/lord/slate, which could use some updated docs, but it looks good

This is pretty similar to DabbleDB. I wonder why this was so much more successful than DabbleDB. https://techcrunch.com/2006/03/11/dabbledb-online-app-buildi... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY

I'm not sure it's more successful yet.

Because DabbleDB was ugly and not very user friendly?

Yeah that sounds about right.

Does anyone know how this compares to Coda[0]? I saw a post a while back about Coda and signed up to get an invite but haven't heard anything since.

[0]https://coda.io/welcome

I know a bit about that, as I tried both. Spoiler: We kept using Airtable and Dropbox Paper instead.

Pros Coda: - As implied above: it is quite good at merging the features of a "word processor" (more like Google Drive, Dropbox Paper) with Airtable like functionality (Spreadsheets that are very easy to use, filter, display differently... I.e. building small pseudo apps. Basically: you can add text above and below your "Airtable" - Multiple documents inside a document (navigation on the left side). Pretty good for Wiki like things

Pros Airtable: - Better in displaying data (colors etc), adding attachements, e and other visual benefits that make it accessible to non nerds. - I know the pricing model. Coda doesn't tell (me) what they will charge. I simply didn't want to become dependent on something I don't know I can afford (many users)

Thanks for the insight! I haven't played with either but this is pushing me a bit towards airtable :)

Hang in there - I applied for the Coda beta several months ago, but only got the Beta invite a few days ago.

First impressions, quite good really, but we've only created some small tables and pages in it so far. I am a developer by trade, and usually eschew apps that are based around "programming for non programmers", but I can see that Coda IS quite useful for people who are non technical. I especially like that I can create 'sub views' from a master table to share with users so they can see a summarised view pertinent only to them.

Biggest drawback, as another commenter has pointed out here, is that I have no idea what the costs (if any) will be for our company once they finish the Beta. For that reason we will avoid putting anything mission critical on there until we know more.

Airtable is exactly what https://transpose.com/ Transpose could have been. But better. Been using it for just about everything you can think of. Did not know about the Blocks feature. Awesome. I got fairly good with Transpose until they closed up shop. Fieldbook and Airtable definitely can do things that Trello (cannot do tables) and Evernote (can do tables but very limited) cannot. There is a huge middle ground between Goog Spreadsheets and MSFT Excel. I hope they do not sell out to anyone. The day they do will be the end of their flexibility.

I hate to burst your bubble- but taking on investments like this probably indicates they’ll be looking for a buy out/sell out eventually

How so? Raising Series B/C usually prices companies out of smaller M&A deals. I would take it as a signal they're in it for the long haul.

Unless airtable becomes its own thing worth a multiple of 50M $... they’ll prob need to sell. It just doesn’t seem like an IPOable business to me.

I dont know, I rely on Excel for everything in my day to day work, and it is so flexible and terrible at the same time, I would gladly pay for a different tool that makes me look 2x smarter. The whole corporate world that insists on doing something 'in Excel' is a ripe market for such an IPOable business

People have been trying that for years.

The article literally says that's not the case. They hope to get an IPO. I know doesn't mean it's 100% true but it's still right there.

"Airtable isn't yet profitable, Liu said, but can be "cash flow positive at a moments notice." And an IPO is the eventual goal, he says, because he doesn't want to sell his company again. "

To be fair, lots of founders say this to press, and tell a completely different story to investors. I don't know anything about Howie Liu but in general there's roughly zero correlation between what a founder tells reporters about acquisition plans and reality.

Thanks for pointing that out- I did initially miss that point. Let's see if Liu sticks to that plan.

Most companies could be cashflow positive by firing their employees or selling their technology.

Airtable runs businesses and I can easily see them becoming a platform (with other businesses being built on top of them) in the next few years. Amazing product and they've nailed something no-one else has for decades (merge excel and db advantages into one product).

For everyone that does not get what makes this different from Google Sheets have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGUCqWa0Msc where the CEO of Airtable (Howie Liu) is live coding an example on top of Airtable

Google spreadsheets is a collaborative excel Airtable is much more than that (forms, views, versioning)

Using zeit's now on that demo. Damn that service is so convenient.

The video made me discover zeit. It changed my life :-0

I think Zoho Creator is everything that is being asked for in the threads below for airtable. Cheap Pricing, Tonnes of drag and drop field types, powerful webhooks and api for integration (in fact there are a lot of integrations out of the box) , good partner network with hundreds of developers already running multi million businesses from the platform, able to scale to over 3 million users per app, big plans at reasonable prices, drag and drop approach PLUS developer IDE for coding if you want to get into detail. Dashboards, HTML combined with CSS and javascript type language. I have met the CEO of Zoho Creator and he is NOT going to sell out to the VC's or a large company any time soon. It has been bootstrapped for over ten years. One of the major problem I have had with platforms is them being BOUGHT OUT by large companies (ie Podio and Citrix, Foxpro and Microsoft) and then they KILL them or don't keep upgrading them like the orig founders had envisioned.

Anyone else getting a bit of a dodgy PR vibe about this post and all the glowing comments, or is it just me?

I'm really happy about airtable. My use case is basically "shared access/excel-like with easier row grouping and simple projections". I used the API as well.

The feature I miss most is charts/graphs. Really hope they'll add them one day.

It seems that charts exist as part of their blocks offering:

https://airtable.com/blocks

But only for customers in the Pro tier.

Thanks. I looked at blocks, but on a mobile view it only shows the maps option, not everything else :-(

I was actually looking for something like this, good to know a product like this exists.

I use a combination of Trello and Google Drive for most things, everything from my personal life, to hobbies, to side projects, and work items. I love Trello but sometimes I want something a little bit more. I think I'll to duplicate things I'm working on for a few weeks or so in here to see how I like it. Maybe I'll replace Trello or maybe there are some integrations out there already to sync somehow, or maybe If I'm bored and have time on my hands I'll try writing something myself.

The app looks great but hopefully they add Kanban support for iPhone soon.

Have you used fieldbook. It’s pretty amazing too. Like spreadsheets, but more involved.

Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914

[alternatives link removed]

These alternatives are not alternatives at all.

Thanks! I glanced very briefly after a Google search, and will reply later when I have time to my own comment with a legitimate list of alternatives.

We've tried out Airtable but ended up using Podio and eventually, Fusioo - http://www.fusioo.com. More of a database (not spreadsheet) for bigger companies though and they don't run a freemium model.

I would suggest taking look at Quick Base [1]. We've been using it for years and I've found it hits the sweet spot for us in the complex spreadsheet/light database space.

I've been following Airtable for a while and I have high hopes they continue their upward trajectory. I like where they are going, and they seem like the most likely alternative if we were to move, but Quick Base still seems to have a leg up in a lot of areas. Cross Application/Database Connections, Webhooks Support, and automated table sync from Dropbox/Box/SFTP just to name a few.

[1] https://www.quickbase.com

I agree. I think Airtable's interface (ease of use, responsiveness) is leagues ahead of Quickbase, but Quickbase still offers a more complete feature set, and in many cases one missing feature can cripple a use case (e.g., QB offers predecessor/successor dependencies for project tracking by linking to other records in the same table, Airtable does not).

all the alternatives are fairly mediocre, I tried them all. The closest thing is google spreadsheets, which really is not designed for RDBMS / light database work. You can read my review on alternativeto.net as well.

https://alternativeto.net/software/airtable/reviews/

I see above you mention moving a lot of your business processes to it from Excel and Access. What would you do if Airtable was acquired and sunset? I'm in risk management, so a lot of my day to day is planning for the unexpected, hence my concern and interest in alternatives (perhaps an open source front end paired with OpenFaaS on the backend for integrations).

That's a risk I'm willing to take.

Airtable doesn't have an official, automated local backup system yet. Their forum post indicates it as well https://community.airtable.com/t/offline-local-backup/754/77.

Ideally, airtable should download a copy of all my database files into dropbox at least once/day, but that feature doesn't exist.

It should also have a automatic file downloader backup (e.g. when you upload an image, it goes to their amazonS3 server → that should ideally be backed up locally as well). Doesn't exist either. Just have to use the plugin I wrote for the time being

There is a 3rd party solution for backing up airtables using its API. Its on this forum post. https://community.airtable.com/t/zenbackups-airtable-databas.... Personally, I have not used it.

Another thing from a risk management standpoint. Airtable has only 1 API key, and that key has access to EVERYTHING. If someone knows both your API key + your airtable's base ID, they can do anything with it. Issue GET requests for data, PATCH and update values in your database, etc.

You're sounding like an irrational Airtable fanboy here.

At least Fieldbook and probably also Ragic are very similar to Airtable and fill the exact same niche, with some small diferences, and they're not mediocre at all.

Probably true, I am extremely picking about UI/UX and have opinionated views on software.

Airtable does have much better documentation (case-studies, intro videos, API docs, forums), better marketing, wider adoption and growing numbers of features, these were some of the reasons I chose it over other options at similar price points / features.

Normally when I adopt a software for long term use, I benchmark as many aspects as I possibly can (e.g. setup a simple db schema, see how many metric reviews on reddit|slant|g2|alternativeto.net there are, dig through all of their documentation quickly to see how easy or difficult it is to search things, check how user friendly forums are, compare features, gauge their business-level decisions / longevity, etc)

My use of "mediocre" might be overstated here, they are fine alternatives just not to my liking.

Feels to me a bit like Filemaker Pro!

Other than that, isn't their real competition Quickbase?

I'm always shocked when I discover something tech-related that "millions of people are using". How did I miss this?

As an avid Excel and GSheet user, it's nice and slick with a few more bells and whistles. Very clean and probably good for an organization with members who are not very good with sheets in general or have a hard time mapping data mentally; akin to a better designed SmartSheet.

Just went to sign up using my Google account... why do they need to view my contacts?

To filter out the users that are not worth the effort to do support for.

So privacy aware users?

Assuming the best intentions: To make it easier for you to invite your team.

I’m having trouble understanding what I would use Airtable for.

I run an online business and work with a few long term contractors. We mostly communicate in trello or slack. There isn’t really any inventory to mamage.

I’m assuming there’s an airtable use for me. But I haven’t been able to figure it out from their marketing. Is there a use case in particular I should look at as a start?

(Personal life management stuff would also be useful. I do have a small inventory system for both my office and apartmnet, for example. Mostly just keep some in stock, add to list when low)

Your profile says you are an LSAT tutor. How do you keep track of everyone you tutor, whether they've paid, etc?

Oh I should update that. I very rarely tutor now. Mostly my site is set up to sell courses.

When I do occasionally take a single student, I just put an entry on a pending money section of my finance tracking spreadsheet.

I looked at air table, I just wasn't sure it would give me (or my clients) what I wanted. Having looked around I opted for Zoho Creator, one of its tag lines used to be MS Access for the Web :-), and back then it pretty much was but its moved on leaps and bounds now, unlimited records, customer portal, mobile, its own script style programming language. Integration isn't bad either with its own API, and a number of Inbuilt integrations to Apps like Onedrive, GDrive, Quick Books etc.

Completely agree, I make hundreds of apps and actually generate a large monthly recurring revenue from building and selling SaaS apps based on Zoho Creator. I have scoured the globe for something as good. Air table looks flash but is WAY behind zoho creator. Airtable do not have any language so you can't develop workflow, automation or validations of any reasonable complexity...

Very True. We are solution partners of Zoho, and have used Zoho Creator to develop really complex workflows for our customers involving inbuilt/custom integrations. I would say Deluge (Creator's scripting language) is its strength on top of being a flexible low code platform, which I haven't come across elsewhere yet.

It's pretty, it works, it's pricey..i like some of the marketing around it and the buzz features they have. Honestly I found that like a Google spreadsheet with the Blockspring addon works best for most of my scenarios..

P.s. Along the funding they announced a new feature, and the blog post that goes with it has an embedded map that breaks responsiveness on mobile...did no one really double check before announcing a major feature release?

I really want to use it, but I'm not fully clear on the use-cases. We already have specialized tools for project management such as Asana. We already have specialized tools for sales, such as Salesforce.

Seems like Airtable is the step between a simple CSV / excel file and a hyper-specialized tool for that problem. So if you're not quite ready for the latter, but you are experiencing pain with Excel, then Airtable is the way to go?

So... time to dig through the terrible ideas of 20 years ago, and see which ones are now good ideas when adding "... on the internet"?

And I'm only being partially sarcastic. Their implementation looks neat, but having seen ugly Excel "apps" in the past, the idea of "spreadsheets programmed by anybody" makes me cringe.

IMO, if they're smart they'll have some kind of easy migration to "real" applications.

They do seem to have a schema which I like. You can say a column is a "pick from list" or a "date" and it'll enforce it and provide the best ux for picking the thing you need. This is much better than Excel. It's like an Excel/Access hybrid but for the web and very usable.

Alas, it's not an application development environment

I just saw Airtable for the fist time and it looks awesome. Yet I am a little concerned about the vendor lock in. Does anybody know a self hosted alternative?

Why worried about vendor lock in? Every base comes with API and export options. It's very easy to take your data with you?

Actually we mirror all the data every 24 hours with some simple GET requests in combination with postgres JSON columns

Well, getting the data out of it is just one part. I mean everything what makes Airtable better than excel, will be gone when they turn off their service.

That's a major issue if you want to use their service for anything that actually matters. You never know how fast a change is coming to such a platform and how much time you have to adapt.

For comparison: I am not a particular fan of MS Access, but I think the use-cases for Access and Airtable have much in common. With Access you have a certain vendor lock in too in terms of technology. So when Microsoft stops developing Access, you have to search for an alternative as you do not know if the runtime will be available on the next OS generation. Nevertheless, you can use the software as long as you have a machine which can run the current version (probably years).

In contrast, if Airtable gets shut down and will not be available in 3 month (e.g. if they get bought by someone who wants to integrate their tech into another product and shuts down the current service), you will have exactly 3 month to find/develop/deploy a replacement. Not cool.

Airtable is such a nice product. My friend actually uses it as a headless CMS, in that regard it's so much easier to use than Contentful IMO.

It's amazing how we are still using grid design for every thing and not much has improved other than few UI improvements. Maybe it's natural for our brains to map lists and tables.

And why do we need so many of these sheet apps. I remember my colleague showing me smartsheets. I wasn't impressed then too. Why spend so much time and energy to move to slightly better sheet.

I just played with Airtable a little, but I was a bit disappointed about the performance. If I copy+paste 250 rows, it takes 10 seconds.

I for one hope Salesforce acquires Airtable and integrates them into Quip. That will be a kick-ass workflow and documentation system.

the price just went up (after their round) :-)

I hope they don't sell and keep building the mission

How much was it before?

Doesn't the article state that the founder of Airtable sold his previous startup to Salesforce and regrets it and doesn't want to go down the same path again?

Ah yes, the etacts debacle. Agree. I meant more the Quip integration (which would make sense) vs Salesforce as a company. But good point.

I hope <my favorite big company> acquires Airtable and integrates them into <my favorite app suite I'm already using>.

Sounds easy, don't you think?

Good product, but they are still making something very similar to spreadsheets, instead of creating something new.

IRL It looks, like they have created more powerful and effective internal combustion engine, but still not a Tesla, thereby keeping more market for old-looking software and leaving less place for something really new.

I had a quick play to create a project plan for the team. Yes it's very nice indeed. And intuitive if you happy with Excel/Google Sheets. However I like how you can effortlessly create a 'schema' on the fly. So it isn't as fast and loose as Excel.

Airtable is fantastic. My only wish is that they formalize a “Airtable open format specification”. At the moment, in spite of all its shortcomings, an excel file is far more portable than an Airtable doc. We need the Airtable data structure to become an open standard.

It's great to see, that people see real value in the market for project management SaaS solutions. We started developing Zenkit (https://zenkit.com) 1 1/2 years ago and have since then seen an explosion of new and amazing solutions coming to the market. I take that as a sign, that we're in the right market. I'm very excited about our future, and Airtable's. Congrats to Airtable for closing a new funding round!

Airtable is more than just project management as Howie put it that the goal of Airtable was to go after all potential business cases right away by creating a one size fits all platform, a horizontal approach. Project management market is already too crowded IMO.

Can someone tell me what they use airtable for/what it replaced? Is it kind of like sheetsu? (www.sheetsu.com)

this makes me sad because this is the idea I've been building in my head for a long time now. :( I need to make a free and open source alternative based off of my ideas..

maybe you can contribute to one of the existing open-source alternatives ?

What's the major difference between Airtable and FileMaker?

Theorem: All great Mac software is re-created as web-based apps.

Corollary: coming soon to your browser, HyperCard.

How does sheets, airtable, etc... store data in the back end?

It appears to be that Airtable stores data in relational database, perhaps MySQL or PostGres. Not 100% sure.

This kind of reminds me of FileMaker. What am I missing?

You are right, it is actually quite similar

I hope they will finally implement webhooks.

I don't get it

me neither, but i also don't use spreadsheets much

Nice Howie!

Anyone used this for inventory tracking and management?

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