Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Airtable gets $52M in funding

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 199 posts

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#141

Post by siddharthdeswal »

ProAm wrote: post #55
abhiyerra wrote: post #36

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.

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.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#142

Post by fudged71 »

snomad wrote: post #90
ProAm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#143

Post by joss82 »

digitalbase wrote: post #81

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 inte…

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

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#144

Post by chenster »

1123581321 wrote: post #66
mjw1007 wrote: post #20

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 repla…

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?

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#145

Post by chenster »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #39
mjw1007 wrote: post #20

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 repla…

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 t…

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.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#146

Post by artpar »

lphnull wrote: post #115

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 ?

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#147

Post by chenster »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #39
mjw1007 wrote: post #20

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 repla…

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 t…

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.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#148

Post by chenster »

ikeboy wrote: post #60
mjw1007 wrote: post #20

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 repla…

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.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#149

Post by joshuakarjala »

fiatjaf wrote: post #136
mjw1007 wrote: post #20

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 repla…

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.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#150

Post by thirdsun »

fiatjaf wrote: post #136
mjw1007 wrote: post #20

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 repla…

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.

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