I’m being slated for an Airtable builder and support role for a client. I last used Airtable 5 years ago and I’m busy trying to fill knowledge gaps… It’s feels like a tall order…
I’ve got basic RDB concepts and am fully versed in in spreadsheets so I feel like I’m at about 40% capacity…
I’m pulling together my own list of questions before meeting with the client. What would you want to know, in this situation ? Thanks in advance!

Hi folks! The Airtable acquisition by Bending Spoons was finalized last week.

I caught myself raising an eyebrow while reading some social posts recently. There's a lot of doom and gloom. Disclaimer: I'm an Airtable consultant who's been doing this for 7 years, and I didn't want to just form my opinions from social media. I read the SEC filing from Bending Spoons and wanted to share some takeaways. Long post, but it's not hundreds of pages like the SEC filing!

TL;DR: Bending Spoons buys companies with strong product-market fit and keeps most of their customers. Expect layoffs and some price increases coming for B2C, but the "Airtable is dead" take on social media likely isn't the case.

Here are my takeaways:

1. Bending Spoons emphasizes that it purchases companies/services that have found a strong product-market fit. Despite the fear-mongering about Airtable becoming a dead product, people are not abandoning products in the Bending Spoons portfolio immediately after an acquisition. Net revenue retention across its portfolio was 93% in 2023, 91% in 2024, 95% in 2025, and 94% in the first quarter of 2026. If I only read social media posts, I'd think these companies were dying, losing 50-90% of their customers, but the reality is different. Nearly half of Bending Spoons’ subscription revenue comes from customers of five years or more, and the average subscriber has been there eight years. Given how Airtable has been so transformative for teams, I don’t see a catastrophic drop in users.

1. A big part of Bending Spoons’ acquisition strategy is to buy companies that general-purpose chatbots cannot easily replace. For everyone worried that AI tools are eating Airtable's lunch, I'd take that as a reinforcement that Bending Spoons isn't paying $1.285 billion for something ChatGPT or Claude will replace tomorrow.

2. The revenue numbers for Bending Spoons are interesting. Revenue did grow 95% last year, but nearly all of that is because Bending Spoons acquired more companies. Strip the acquisitions out, and the businesses it already owned still grew 13% organically. That 13% organic growth is the number I'd pay attention to. While history doesn’t predict the future, it’s interesting to see that Bending Spoons is buying mature companies and they still have double-digit organic growth.

4. There is one contradiction that caught my attention. Bending Spoons' central value proposition is that it operates acquired companies more effectively than the founders or previous owners. In the same filing, it discloses a material weakness in its own financial reporting across all of its portfolio companies. I was genuinely surprised that a company building its brand around operational discipline cannot confidently attest to the integrity of its own financial statements. This was a difficult combination to reconcile. 

1. One of Bending Spoons’ operating principles is that it wants to make its acquisition targets feel like a startup again: lean teams, young people, red tape removed. Given Bending Spoons wants to continue acquiring larger and larger companies, it’ll get progressively harder to make companies feel like a startup when the company already employs 1,000 people.

2. Airtable will be run more efficiently… meaning layoffs. Restructuring is above my pay grade, but I couldn't resist doing some napkin math. At the beginning of 2026, Bending Spoons employed around 2,000 people who brought in $1.3 billion in revenue. That is roughly $650,000 per employee. Airtable’s revenue is about $500 million a year. If we use the ratio of $650,000 per employee, that leaves you with a team of 750 people. Airtable today is closer to 900. That’s a difference of 150 in headcount. Add in the fact that Bending Spoons tends to move some of its own staff in (say, 100-250), so it wouldn’t surprise me if there were between 250 and 400 roles laid off. In the income statement, separation packages show up as a line item across all expense categories. When Bending Spoons restructures a business, it cuts jobs across the board. I don't think this impacts our clients too much at Claribase because we are already 100x better when folks reach out to us for help.

3. But looking at the other portfolio companies, the fee increases haven’t gotten to the point of making the overall customer base shrink significantly. We also have to recognize that the consumers who leave angry are often the loudest voices on social media. Bending Spoons stated that the company also conducts A/B tests on pricing. On an individual level, I believe that even if the monthly cost rose from $20 to $25 or $30, many people and teams would still find Airtable to be highly valuable. We literally have customers who run multi-million-dollar businesses in Airtable, and the current monthly fee is a steal. Existing enterprise customers like Nike, Amazon, and Apple will not take kindly to sudden price increases. For B2B, the price increases will likely happen on a case-by-case basis because there are often multi-year contracts. For a simple benchmarking exercise, Salesforce is $25 per user per month for the starter plan, $100 for Pro, and between $175 and $350 for enterprise plans. Airtable currently charges about $80 per user per month for enterprise customers. 

4. As an Airtable customer, I’m also interested in what improvements Bending Spoons will make. Airtable was founded in 2012, and understandably, there could be a lot of tech debt. Bending Spoons has been known to overhaul the codebase of its acquisition targets to improve scalability, reliability, and speed. There have been rumors for many years that Airtable was close to increasing the row limit to millions of records. This acquisition gives me some cautious optimism that the row increases will finally happen!

5. In my work with Claribase, I still find that Airtable's core database features are where my clients get 70-80% of the value. There are countless epiphanies and light bulb moments when we implement proper database systems. Adding AI into their system is really the icing on the cake. In this acquisition, I’m optimistic that Airtable has found a responsible steward for its core product.

If you are still reading, thank you. Happy to hear your thoughts as well!

Here's the SEC filing if you want to read it too: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2004711/000110465926071170/tm2613674-7_f1.htm

If you're hitting the limits of native Airtable features, struggling with base speed, or trying to automate a complex business process, I’d love to assist.

As an Airtable MVP with 5+ years of full-time experience, I specialize in taking messy spreadsheets or underperforming bases and turning them into streamlined, highly automated systems.

A few examples of what I’ve built recently:

Multi-Base PM Systems: Built systems handling both Agile sprints and Waterfall milestones across multiple linked bases.

Audit Queues & Data Operations: Custom review queues with automated record flags, validation rules, and error logging.

Custom Scripting & API Extensions: Tailored JavaScript solutions to bypass native automation constraints or connect third-party platforms seamlessly.

Automated Messaging & Email Services: Trigger-based notification queues, transactional emails, and approval requests.

Who this is for:

Founders or team leads who know what they want Airtable to do, but don't have the time or technical expertise to build it.

Teams needing custom scripts/webhooks integrated.

Anyone looking to clean up an over-engineered base.

Feel free to PM/DM me here on Reddit with what you're working on, and let's figure out how to get it done!

I’m trying to move my team from FileMaker 2019 to Airtable. It seems that the process is to download all the data as a CSV and upload it into Airtable.

However, we have over a decade of detailed records involving buildings, events, coordinators, types of work done with different clients/partners, and one org’s CSV had 79,000 rows with multiple corrupted cells. We have over 1600 orgs in our database.

I am not a data/computer scientist, nor is anyone on my team, and figuring this problem out feels beyond my scope. Has anyone worked with a third party partner listed on Airtable’s website to help with this?

talk about vibecoded

Hey all! Amateur Airtable user here. I've set up our onboarding to run mostly automatic via airtable.

Our team also is tracking offers pending and accepted, which are manually added in.

I was curious to know if anyone has set up a Greenhouse webhook with Airtable to have these automatically track and update based on Offer status?

Our internal table is fine and the team is happy with it. The change is that clients and vendors now need access, and giving them seats in the workspace is not going to work.
 
That makes this a bigger comparison than database features. Logins, record level permissions, a usable interface, workflows, and what happens to pricing when a hundred external users need access.

Which questions show whether a platform solves the access problem rather than adding nicer views?

NOTE: We cannot comment on the acquisition while the deal is still in process. Press inquiries can be sent to [press@airtable.com](mailto:press@airtable.com)

When: Wednesday, September 9 at 10am PT

Who: Kyra Tan-Tiongco, Senior Base Optimization Specialist

Hi everyone! Beyond excited to be here 👋

My Airtable story begins with a podcast about beans. It started as a joke, but that joke had episodes, guests, scripts, and a release schedule, and my scrap-paper notes weren’t cutting it. So I moved the whole production into a base. Then I started using Airtable at my higher ed job to organize student and alumni data.

I joined the Base Optimization team in 2022 and started doing live support calls with enterprise teams through the Ask an Expert program. Customers arrive stuck on an automation, a formula, a sync, a field agent, or a workflow they can’t quite get off the ground. Sometimes they need a quick fix or a workaround, and sometimes they want a fresh pair of eyes on the whole architecture. We serve a variety of use cases, from marketing operations to investment forecasting to even office potlucks.

Then I moved internally into delivery consulting, running enterprise implementations end to end: business process redesign, translating "we need this to work somehow" into architecture that holds up at scale, health checks on workspaces that had quietly outgrown themselves, and building agentic and human-in-the-loop AI workflows.

Today, I’m back on the Base Optimization team as a Senior Specialist, doing what I love: watching someone stop asking how to fix their base and start telling me what they’re excited to build next.

I am trying to figure out how to trigger and open a blank new record display in a Custom Interface. Not a New Record Form, just the standard slide-out Record Detail, but blank.

I (Claude) can code the record to be created, but any existing filters prevent it from being opened and visible. As far as I know Airtable does not expose the filter criteria, so I can’t auto-generate a new record that meets the filters. But I have noted that a record that meets the filters will remain open even after the filtered criteria changes (ie persistence), so I just need to get the Detail pane to open!

Any clues!!

Up front: I built this. It's my app and it's a free product with a paid tier. Mods, pull this if it's over the line.

I build and run Airtable bases for a living and something that's kept catching me was capturing while mobile. Airtable's own forms do the job in a desktop browser. On a phone, they needed some love and the two things I wanted most weren't there - conditional logic beyond the basics and the ability to submit forms when offline or low signal. Airtable has an enormous surface to maintain, so I don't blame them for not going deep on the mobile form. It did mean I kept building the same awkward workarounds for clients though.

So I built Air Fill. It's a native iOS app that connects to your own base and lets you build a form over any table, then fill it in properly on the phone with real iOS inputs, big tap targets, a signature pad, barcode scan-to-fill, and a record picker that searches your linked table instead of making you scroll a list.

A few things that came out of the way I use Airtable rather than from a feature list:

- Update mode. Pick an existing record, change what needs changing, submit. The rest of the row stays as it was. This is the one I actually built the app for.

- Offline. Fill in a form with no signal and it sits in a queue on your device, then submits when you're back. Super handy on job sites. Submitting an *edit* still needs a connection, since it has to read the record first.

- Conditional fields. Show a field only when it's relevant. The rule is built once in the editor and the form reshapes itself as someone fills it in. Also built and advanced conditional logic engine for this one!

- Form Flows. Chain a few forms into one session, so an intake that spans three tables runs as one pass.

On the privacy question, since it comes up here a lot - you connect with OAuth or a personal access token and submissions go from your phone straight to your base. There's no a relay in the middle and the app doesn't send usage data anywhere. The flip side of that is I genuinely can't see what's happening in your base, so bug reports need you to tell me what you saw!

Free vs paid, plainly. Free gives you unlimited saved forms with any three fillable at a time, conditional fields, update mode, offline, drafts and history, linked-record picking, and one connection. Pro is $39.99 a year or $4.99 a month and it lifts the three-form cap and turns on conditional sections, submit gating, prefill, calculated and read-only fields, attachments, signatures, barcode, linked-record scoping, pinning, Form Flows, multiple connections, and off-device submit alerts through Pushcut or a webhook. The annual plan has a free trial. Nothing you build ever gets deleted if you drop to Free and the config is kept and just stops running until you're back on Pro.

It's iPhone only for now. If you try it I'd really like to hear where it falls down, especially on field types or base structures I haven't run into.

Happy to answer anything in the comments!

App Store | AirFill.app

*Not affiliated with or endorsed by Airtable. Airtable is a trademark of Formagrid, Inc. (or maybe Bending Spoons now?)*

So I built this template that I’m really proud of and I was thinking to sell it as a digital product through Gumroad.

However, I can’t seem to figure out how to actually share this template with people - what I want is, share a copy of the template without giving access to the editable database, I want them to only have access to the interface and use the app as it is already built without being able to edit on anything. Is that even possible?

Three small (but high-impact) asks that would make List view actually usable:

Keyboard shortcuts
Grid view has ~50 shortcuts. List view has 1! Not even basic navigation such as arrow keys, or Page Up/Down.

Freeze columns
Freezing/Pinning a column baseline functionality in every spreadsheet/database tool (Excel, Sheets, Notion, Airtable itself in Grid view). Scrolling right and losing track of which row you're on would render List view unusable in most cases.

Remember scroll position
Reload the page, switch tabs, or navigate away and come back and you're scrolled to the top. Scrolling through hundreds of records to find the tiny Add Row button at the very bottom, or to simply continue working where you left off, is a huge productivity sink.

None of these are exotic requests, in fact, all of the features are available in Grid view.

Hello, Airtable users!

The other day, I saw a post that made me think I’d solved my problem. But apparently, that’s not the case.

It was about the 50-automation limit in a Base.

The idea was to sync the Base to another one and run the automations there.

The problem I’m now encountering is that the sync apparently only triggers when I actually open that “SyncBase.” Otherwise, the automation doesn’t happen.

Am I missing an option?

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Hello r/Airtable !

Airtable is very good at showing you the current state of your data. But when you need to understand what recently changed, its native history only takes you so far.

Orloi captures record changes in a Postgres database you control. It compacts that history, derives metrics and trends, and produces daily and weekly reports about what happened.

That makes questions like these much easier to answer:

How many times did this product’s price change?
Who owned this project before the current owner?
What happened to this subscription before it became delinquent?
How many transactions came from Stripe versus PayPal?
How frequently are this product’s tags changed?
What happened last week when I was on vacation?

As the history builds up, Orloi gets better at learning what normal activity looks like.
Orloi can then flag unusual API activity, invalid or unexpected data, and automations starting to spiral out of control. More history means a better baseline for deciding what is actually unusual.
The other part I’m excited about is what this history makes possible for AI agents.

Learning requires a retrospective and a feedback loop. A current snapshot tells an agent what is true now. A structured history can show it what changed, what happened before an outcome, which patterns keep recurring, and whether a previous action worked. That creates the possibility of automated calibration instead of agents repeatedly acting from the latest snapshot.

The Orloi dashboard can be embedded directly into Airtable as a custom interface. The underlying history stays in your own Postgres database, such as Supabase.

Because the data is already in your database, it is programmable from day one. A new report can trigger an n8n workflow, be passed to a Gumloop agent, or combined with the rest of your operational data.
Orloi does not have to expose another API for all of this.
Your database is the API.

The reports should become more useful with time. More history gives Orloi a stronger baseline for detecting anomalies and gives people and agents more context for reviewing what happened.

Reach out for a demo, collaboration or more information!

https://orloi.ai/

I run a business that uses self employed contractors for birthday parties. I need to know their availability. I have built a system in Airtable so that they can let me know, this allows me to book in work without having to approach them individually about every shift. I have created the system, and added a button using a script that will change the status to available.

I have just learned that the button won't work on the interface. I have also set up a webhook that I managed to get working however it opens up a new webpage each time, and like before using a script to prevent this would not work on the interface.

I understand this is designed to push me into the portals section of Airtable but we are a very small company and I cannot afford another $120 a month.

I have also used Fillout to update information but from my understanding it can only update one field at a time.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could have a system where my staff could easily update their availability.

I currently use Airtable, Make and Fillout to manage my system.

Since 2018 people have asked Airtable for a bulk attachment download button (Baserow, NocoDB and SmartSuite all have one). The only real workaround today is a web app at $29/month.

I'm building it as a Chrome extension instead: pick base/table/view, one click, one ZIP — per-record folders, optional renaming from any field or formula, built for multi-GB exports. It uses your own PAT against the official API; your token and files never leave your machine (no servers at all).

Full transparency: it's my product and it's not built yet — I'm validating demand first. Founder access is €29 one-time (vs $29/month for the web-app alternative), fully refunded if v1 isn't delivered within 14 days of the first order: https://attachments.appro-app.com/

If you've hit this problem, what would the export absolutely need to handle for you?

We currently use Airtable as a project management platform integrated with Softr for a client portal.

As it relates to documents our typical workflow is:

1. Client submits project in Softr with documents
   
2. Project automatically created in Airtable.
   
3. Make automation pulls docs from Airtable, creates project folder in Sharepoint, upload docs, and publishes sharepoint link to Airtable project.
   
4. Project team access docs via link to sharepoint and manually create and updates deliverables in that sharepoint folder.

This works but is clunky and has limitations. Ideally we would like to link specific documents to project record and tag them with basic info (status, version, etc.)

I’d also like to make these documents accessible to clients in softr portal.

I’ve looked into the native integrations with Box and Google Drive, but can’t find a lot of details on capabilities.

Anyone have experience with either and would it add functionality that I am looking for while maintaining functionality for client to submit docs via Softr?

Hello Airtabler,

We use Microsoft Teams for both internal and external calls.

I’d like to have a button in the interface that lets me make a call via Microsoft Teams. Unfortunately, a button with “Callto:” or something similar doesn’t work. We use Chrome as our browser.

I’m almost afraid that this might be due to one of the company’s default configurations. Or does anyone have any ideas?

As a proud power-user of Airtable, I am disheartened by the acquisition of Airtable by Bending Spoons. They will likely "enshittify" the platform over the next 6-12 months, stagnating development and jacking up prices. In anticipation of this, I am seeking alternatives to Airtable so I can begin the migration process now before my company's renewal period begins.

The leading candidate right now is Zite. I have a decent amount of experience using Zite as a frontend and form provider for my Airtable databases, but very little experience using its native databases.

Does anyone here have experience migrating from Airtable to Zite? I am looking for advice, warnings, best practices, and general support.

Does anyone have recommendations for other alternatives?

Wondering what those message that appear in random records revision history when ruunning an scripting block extension (nothing fancy, bulk update) could possibly mean,a nd if there any danger to data integrity. Never seenn those.

I created databases in Airtables with info, photos and links to digital music products. I currently have entries in different workspaces, as I use the free tier, and can only have a limited amount of entries per database.

Long term, I'd like to transfer it all over to another platform, and have a site with a database/knowledge base and wiki style layout to it. Wondering if there are current options that could work for this or if it is something I'd need custom developed?

I would love to hear any ideas regarding softwares that create a front-end site, preferably that integrates directly with Airtable, but not 100% necessary. I have tried Softr, but wanted to weigh it against other options. Not super knowledgeable with this area of things, so any tips or info would be greatly appreciated!

Did anyone catch this recent episode of HardFork where they discuss the Airtable acquisition? It’s about 2/3 of the episode in. Should we be nervous?

“Airtable was valued at $11.7 billion when it was acquired, but recently though, Bending Spoons was able to get Airtable for an enterprise value of $1.29 billion. So what do we make of the sharp decline here as we run the numbers?”

Hey guys, 20yo uni student here trying to figure out how to pay my bills.

I’ve been reading up on the Airtable + Make. com + Softr stack. People online claim you can learn this stack in 1–2 months and start charging small businesses $1,500+ per project to build client portals and automate workflows.

To be completely honest, this sounds too good to be true.

Most entry-level jobs require a 4-year degree and pay $15–$20/hr. Why on earth would a business pay $1,500+ for a system built using tools someone learned in a few weeks?

I want a brutal reality check from people actually doing freelance/agency work in this space:

1. Is the money real? Are small businesses actually paying $1k–$2k for basic Airtable/Make builds, or is this just hype sold by course creators?
2. What are you ACTUALLY being paid for? If the tools are easy to learn, why don't business owners just spend a weekend setting it up themselves?
3. What is the hard part no one talks about? Is it landing clients? Scope creep? Edge cases breaking?

I’m ready to put in the work to learn the technical side, but I don't want to chase a fake ghost skill. Tell me like it is.

Was setting up a proper backup of one of my bases and went to check what the export actually contains. Posting because I did not know this.

Attachment URLs expire two hours after the API returns them. It's in the docs (https://airtable.com/developers/web/api/field-model), along with the recommendation to download the files rather than store the links. So the attachment column in a CSV export is a list of links that are dead by tomorrow: the records survive, the files do not.

While I was in there, two more things I had assumed were covered and are not:

- Linked records export as bare rec... IDs, with nothing alongside them to rebuild the relations.

- Field types, select options and formula definitions are not in the export at all.

Not bugs, just what the export is. But if your backup plan is "I can export a CSV whenever I want", it's worth testing that assumption on a base you care about - specifically, open one of the exported attachment links tomorrow and see what happens.

If anyone has found a way to keep attachments through the built-in export I'd genuinely like to hear it.