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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/
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.
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…
Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914 [alternatives link removed]
Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914 [alternatives link removed]
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/
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 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 betw…
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.