I would like to hear your thoughts on the new airtable pricing and how it affects mini extension users with the new API limit on the lower plans.
One positive aspect is that we may witness an increase in new users in miniextension as small businesses seek cost-saving solutions by utilizing a layer over airtable.
However, I am concerned about Airtable’s ability to retroactively change pricing so drastically. Mini Extension has been kind enough to grandfather all legacy users into the new plans with old pricing, and I appreciate their efforts.
Should Mini Extensions team should explore alternative sources such as integration with nocodb, Retable, or Google Sheets? Feel free to share your thoughts !
I am very conflicted about how I feel about the whole update. I obviously hate that they are not letting any grandfathered Pro Plan continue and are forcing users to the new Team plan with lower limits all around. On the other hand, I have been wanting a higher records limit and automation run from Airtable since I am already deeply invested in external solutions (miniExtensions & Noloco), and do not want to put all my eggs in one basket (by relying on the same platform for both backend and frontend). So, other than the fact that it reinforces my approach of not wanting to be too reliant on Airtable, it is net-positive for me since I was going to upgrade to Business in any case. I just wished they would go higher on the records limit (wishful thinking, to be honest). As for looking for alternatives, I don’t think anything is comparable to Airtable right now, but the closest to me is Smartsuite; if miniExtensions diversify their data sources, I would hope it would be Smartsuite. Another under-the-radar option is Seatable; it is very robust, has an API with the ability to have essentially unlimited rows (with a few caveats), and still maintains the same linking, lookup, and roll-up functionality - which is amazing. However, if we are talking the most popular alternatives, then it would be Sheets, of course, which would be my last choice between the three.
My thoughts - reducing the limits of an existing plan while keeping the price the same is a very wrong decision to make which will likely piss some people off enough for them to want to move elsewhere.
@Abdul Given Airtable’s focus on the number of monthly API calls in the new tiers, I’m looking forward to them providing functionality that allows us to monitor our usage. In the meantime, will miniExtensions provide visibility into the number of API calls being made?
