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Airtable gets $52M in funding

businessinsider.com

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Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#191

Post by chenster »

PeOe wrote: post #151

It's great to see, that people see real value in the market for project management SaaS solutions. We started developing Zenkit ( https://zenkit.com ) 1 1/2 years ago and have since then seen an explosion of new and amazing solutions coming to the market. I take that as a sign, that we're in the right market. I'm very excited about our future, and Airtable's. Congrats to Airtable for closing a new funding round!

Airtable is more than just project management as Howie put it that the goal of Airtable was to go after all potential business cases right away by creating a one size fits all platform, a horizontal approach. Project management market is already too crowded IMO.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#192

Post by gmankelow »

I looked at air table, I just wasn't sure it would give me (or my clients) what I wanted. Having looked around I opted for Zoho Creator, one of its tag lines used to be MS Access for the Web :-), and back then it pretty much was but its moved on leaps and bounds now, unlimited records, customer portal, mobile, its own script style programming language. Integration isn't bad either with its own API, and a number of Inbuilt integrations to Apps like Onedrive, GDrive, Quick Books etc.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#193

Post by jversiz »

Zoho Creator is also an incredible rapid development platform, with webhooks other features for business process automation, as well as integration with other apps. It also has mobile capabilities that include an offline mode. There's a freemium version, but it can scale over a thousand users, if needed. Awesome platform at an unbeatable price.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#194

Post by sargshep »

I think Zoho Creator is everything that is being asked for in the threads below for airtable. Cheap Pricing, Tonnes of drag and drop field types, powerful webhooks and api for integration (in fact there are a lot of integrations out of the box) , good partner network with hundreds of developers already running multi million businesses from the platform, able to scale to over 3 million users per app, big plans at reasonable prices, drag and drop approach PLUS developer IDE for coding if you want to get into detail. Dashboards, HTML combined with CSS and javascript type language. I have met the CEO of Zoho Creator and he is NOT going to sell out to the VC's or a large company any time soon. It has been bootstrapped for over ten years. One of the major problem I have had with platforms is them being BOUGHT OUT by large companies (ie Podio and Citrix, Foxpro and Microsoft) and then they KILL them or don't keep upgrading them like the orig founders had envisioned.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#195

Post by sargshep »

gmankelow wrote: post #192

I looked at air table, I just wasn't sure it would give me (or my clients) what I wanted. Having looked around I opted for Zoho Creator, one of its tag lines used to be MS Access for the Web :-), and back then it pretty much was but its moved on leaps and bounds now, unlimited records, customer portal, mobile, its own script style programming language. Integration isn't bad either with its own API, and a number of In…

Completely agree, I make hundreds of apps and actually generate a large monthly recurring revenue from building and selling SaaS apps based on Zoho Creator. I have scoured the globe for something as good. Air table looks flash but is WAY behind zoho creator. Airtable do not have any language so you can't develop workflow, automation or validations of any reasonable complexity...

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#196

Post by mediaman »

agent86 wrote: post #113
toomuchtodo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I glanced very briefly after a Google search, and will reply later when I have time to my own comment with a legitimate list of alternatives.

I would suggest taking look at Quick Base [1]. We've been using it for years and I've found it hits the sweet spot for us in the complex spreadsheet/light database space. I've been following Airtable for a while and I have high hopes they continue their upward trajectory. I like where they are going, and they seem like the most likely alternative if we were to move, but Quick Base still seems to have a leg up in a lo…

I agree. I think Airtable's interface (ease of use, responsiveness) is leagues ahead of Quickbase, but Quickbase still offers a more complete feature set, and in many cases one missing feature can cripple a use case (e.g., QB offers predecessor/successor dependencies for project tracking by linking to other records in the same table, Airtable does not).

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#197

Post by prepend »

mlloyd wrote: post #116
prepend wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it was a Web 2.0 FoxPro. It’s maybe the closest, but the price model is too much. You could buy foxpro for $1200 and create 100 databases with all sorts of janky workflows used within your small business. Paying $20/user/infinity for lower amounts of records doesn’t quite fit that niche. And so the hacked processes with Google Docs and now Excel365 continue. Hopefully with this new funding, Airtable can fix th…

What's the price sweet spot here assuming unlimited (or near unlimited) records allowed?

For me, it’s a one time fee that I can self host or run against AWS or something of my choosing.

But I’m pretty weird. I suspect one that has really simple and easily measureable prices. Like $500/year for a terabyte of storage in as many bases as you want. This should let most small businesses not worry about cost. Kind of like how FoxPro let people build so many solutions.

The model now is not very predictable so it’s hard for small businesses to use.

I think 365 charges $100/user/year for 1TB. That’s for write/edit permissions. Maybe double that or something. So 5 users would give 5TB total for $1000/year.

Raw storage may not be the right measure, but it is better than cells since it is easier to report on. Just constantly showing raw or logical space.

Imagine if gmail charges by number of email messages in inbox and number of recipients rather than storage. That would be hard to predict.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#198

Post by parthac »

gmankelow wrote: post #192

I looked at air table, I just wasn't sure it would give me (or my clients) what I wanted. Having looked around I opted for Zoho Creator, one of its tag lines used to be MS Access for the Web :-), and back then it pretty much was but its moved on leaps and bounds now, unlimited records, customer portal, mobile, its own script style programming language. Integration isn't bad either with its own API, and a number of In…

Very True. We are solution partners of Zoho, and have used Zoho Creator to develop really complex workflows for our customers involving inbuilt/custom integrations. I would say Deluge (Creator's scripting language) is its strength on top of being a flexible low code platform, which I haven't come across elsewhere yet.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#199

Post by 1123581321 »

chenster wrote: post #144
1123581321 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t know. They have some features that use authorship, but if enough people use a custom select column to handle assignments, etc, I could see them making login share more difficult. In a large enough organization, login share is impossible to maintain because of the need for access control.
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