Database platform Airtable has been riding the recent wave of popularity experienced by low-code development tools, proving itself as a popular solution to assist businesses with product creation.
So, if you’re considering adding Airtable to your tech stack, you’re certainly not alone – more than 450,000 organizations are already using the platform, including household names such as Shopify, Spotify and Intuit. And with the company having recently embedded AI functionality into its tools, it’s a number we can expect to see rise further in the coming months and years.
As with any new software purchase, however, there are a few things you’ll want to know before entering into discussions with sales. The first being how much it actually costs.
As SaaS prices continue to climb, you’ll need to determine whether Airtable is within your budget, and if it will provide a worthy return on investment to your business.
You’ll also want to find out what your options are for securing a discount.
Ultimately, software prices are rarely set in stone, and if you can secure a competitive rate on a high-value contract, those savings can be a great asset to support your business growth.
Here’s everything you need to know about Airtable pricing.
How much does Airtable cost?
Before we explore your options for an Airtable discount, it’s worth understanding the different pricing editions on offer. This will help you determine which plan is the best fit for your needs, and what you should expect to pay for it.
Airtable publicly lists the costs of several of its plans on its pricing page. While the vendor does operate a freemium pricing option, meaning that a free, albeit limited iteration of the platform is available, the more advanced functionality is reserved for paid users.
So, what does each plan consist of?
Airtable pricing plans
Free
Free is recommended only for individuals or small teams just getting started with Airtable. The free plan supports up to five editors across an unlimited number of bases, each with 1,000 records per base. Users can enjoy access to Airtable’s basic features including interface designing capabilities and up to 100 automation runs.
Team
The Team plan costs $20 per seat per month on an annual billing schedule, or if you opt to be billed monthly, you’ll pay $24 per seat per month. Team supports more advanced functionality for teams building apps, with up to 50,000 records per base, an unlimited number of editors in the workspace, and more comprehensive customizations, permissions and support functionality than Free.
Business
Business costs $45 per seat per month on an annual basis, or $54 when billed monthly. This plan is recommended for teams requiring more advanced functionality and administrative capabilities. It supports everything from Team as well as 125,000 records per base, 100,000 automation runs and access to more advanced Airtable features like advanced sync integrations, admin controls and SSO.
Enterprise Scale
The highest tier of Airtable subscription is the Enterprise Scale plan, fit for organizations looking to build scalable, flexible apps with powerful governance tools. The plan supports every feature offered by Business, plus 500,000 records per base, 500,000 automation runs, and more comprehensive admin functionality. Airtable Enterprise pricing is not publicly listed on the pricing page, so users will need to contact the Airtable sales team for full pricing information.
But this isn’t the ideal scenario for securing the best possible pricing.
As a prospective Airtable Enterprise customer, obscured pricing information puts you on the back foot — how will you know whether this Airtable pricing edition is within your budget? And once you do contact the vendor for a quote, how will you know whether the price you’re offered is a good deal?
This is part of the pricing transparency problem in SaaS purchasing.
So, instead of entering straight into a sales conversation with the Airtable team, you’ll need to explore your other options for gaining pricing insights.
Searching the web
Your first option for finding out how much an Airtable subscription is likely to cost you is to look online for anecdotal information about what other companies are being charged. This will help you understand the material cost you could end up paying and any discount that might be available.
After running a quick search, we found one thread in an Airtable Subreddit from a user asking about enterprise-level pricing. The poster explained that they were quoted $8,000 per year for Airtable Enterprise as a small company.
In the same thread, another commenter writes that their business pays a similar fee of $9,000 for a user base of 20.
Elsewhere, RevPilots corroborates Airtable Enterprise costs in this region, writing in its pricing article that Enterprise starts at around $10,000 per annum. The article also states that Airtable asks for a minimum commitment of one year and 20 billable users.
So, these online sources tell us two things.
Firstly, we see that the ballpark cost for small enterprises signing on for an Airtable Enterprise subscription is about $10,000. Secondly, we know that there is some variance in the exact fee that a company is quoted according to their usage needs.
However, we don’t know if any of these organizations had a discounted fee they had negotiated or even how reliable these pricing insights are. After all, SaaS prices are increasing by an average of 12% year on year — and even recent quotes can quickly become outdated.
So, is there another option for finding out what you’ll pay for Airtable?
Yes — you can talk to Vertice. Our extensive vendor database contains the pricing and discounting data from over 16,000 global SaaS vendors, so you can see what companies with similar usage needs to your own pay for their subscriptions and any discounts they receive. But we’ll get onto that shortly.
Can you get a discount on Airtable pricing?
Even when a vendor publicly lists several of its paid plan costs, as is the case with Airtable, we find that these prices are rarely set in stone.
According to our data, Airtable has a pricing parity score of 62/100. This suggests that companies with similar profiles and contract terms may pay significantly different fees for their Airtable subscriptions. Plus, we’ve recorded that the vendor has a medium discount possibility, indicating that they’re amenable to discussions about a discounted rate under the right circumstances.
But just how much of a discount you could secure will come down to your negotiation strategy. So, how do you negotiate a software deal effectively?
Here are our top tips.
Software negotiation tips
Propose a multi-year subscription term
One common software negotiation strategy is to commit to a longer subscription period. While Airtable already offers a cheaper annual billing rate in comparison to the cost of a recurring monthly payment, there may be savings to be had if you offer to sign on for an even longer duration.
Not every vendor will offer a discount for a multi-year plan — but our data suggests that in general, SaaS sellers tend to offer a discount average of 5% off the asking price for each extra year a subscriber commits to. So, if you’re familiar enough with the Airtable platform to know that it will be a mainstay of your software stack for the years to come, it could be worth negotiating a longer contract with the vendor.
Research competitor comparisons
Another popular way to gain leverage is to research the terms offered by some of the competitors in your vendor’s field. Spreadsheet-focused platforms like ClickUp or Smartsheet are some of the main alternatives that Airtable customers consider, so it’s worth inquiring with these vendors to hear about their offering. This will help you select the right vendor for your business and gain intel to leverage in negotiations.
Remember, it’s not just the price of your software solution that can be negotiated. To put yourself in the best position to secure a tailored deal, you may also want to negotiate with terms such as:
- Price uplift protection
- Level of maintenance and support
- Auto-renewal clauses
Leverage Vertice’s pricing and discounting data
Each of these strategies will provide you with valuable leverage to secure a better deal on Airtable and any of the other contracts in your SaaS portfolio. However, the best, most effective kind of leverage is pricing benchmark data from companies with similar needs to your own. And that’s where we can help.
As mentioned, we have access to transactional data from over 16,000 worldwide SaaS vendors — Airtable included. Our specialist SaaS purchasers know the process of software negotiation from either side of the deal, and are well-qualified to negotiate on your behalf and secure the best contract terms. We’ll save you the time and burden of implementing an effective software negotiation strategy and ensure you receive the best possible Airtable price.
Try out our cost-savings analysis tool and see how much you could be saving on your annual software spend with Vertice. Alternatively, have a read of how we saved one company $170,000 on a single SaaS contract.
