Airtable's free plan: what you get and where it stops

Airtable's free plan is not a trial with a countdown on it. It runs indefinitely, it holds a working database, and a lot of people never need anything else. It has one number that decides almost everything, and it is usually read wrong — not because it is hidden, but because of the word next to it.

What $0 gets you

Every figure below is Airtable's own, from its plans page, read on 5 September 2026.

On the free plan	The number
Price	$0
Records	1,000 per base
Attachments	1 GB per base
Revision and snapshot history	2 weeks
API calls	1,000 per workspace per month
Automation runs	100 per workspace per month
Collaborators with Editor or Creator permissions	5
Collaborators with Commenter permissions	50
Read-only collaborators	unlimited
AI credits	500 per editor-and-above per month

That is a real database with a real API and real automations attached to it. Airtable's current pricing structure dates from August 2023, and the free plan's numbers have not changed since. The rest of this page is about where they stop.

The record limit is per base, not per table

This is the sentence worth slowing down for. The 1,000 is a base total, shared by every table inside it. Airtable says so directly on its plans page, in a parenthetical most people skim: 1,000 records in a single table will also hit the base record limit.

So a base holding Clients, Projects and Invoices does not get 1,000 each. It gets 1,000 between them. Four hundred clients, four hundred projects and two hundred invoices, and the base is full — with three tables that all look half-empty.

The practical consequence is that "how many records do I have?" is the wrong question. "Which base are they all in?" is the right one. A separate base starts again at zero, which is why the usual survival strategy on the free plan is to keep things in separate bases rather than gathering them into one. It works, and it costs exactly what you would expect: the things you separated stop sitting next to each other.

Attachments have the same shape. 1 GB is per base, not per account, so the same split moves the same way.

What happens when you hit 1,000

Less than people brace for. In Airtable's own words in its pricing FAQ: you keep your data and can still use your bases, you are notified of the overage, and you cannot add more records or attachments until you upgrade. Its help centre says the same thing from the records side — you can read the records that are there, you just cannot add new ones until you are back within the limit or on a paid plan.

Nothing is deleted. Nothing is locked. Views, filters, formulas and the API all keep working on what is already there. The only thing that stops is adding.

One trap inside that: archiving does not free up record limits. Archived records still count, so tidying will not buy you room. Records have to actually go.

The two monthly meters

Both are counted per workspace, per month, and both reset.

1,000 API calls. That is the whole workspace's month. A single sync script polling every fifteen minutes spends it in about ten days. Going over starts a 30-day grace period — and that grace period is available once, ever. There is no second one on the same workspace.

100 automation runs. Failed runs count against the allowance too, which is the part that catches people: an automation misconfigured on the 3rd spends the rest of the month failing, and spends the allowance while it does.

What the free plan leaves out

Airtable lists these as paid features:

• Forms keep Airtable's branding, and the header image can't be customised.
• Calendar view can't create date ranges or plot more than one date field.
• No record colouring.
• No extensions.
• Automations run, but the "run a script" action is not available, and the send-email action can only email collaborators on the base.

Your first two weeks are not the free plan

New accounts get their first workspace automatically upgraded to a 14-day complimentary trial of the Team plan. So the first fortnight is not what you are evaluating — the free plan is what you land on when the trial ends. Worth knowing before you build something on a feature that is about to leave.

When the free plan is genuinely enough

It fits one shape well: a single-purpose base, run by a few people, that grows slowly. A client list. A content calendar. A house inventory. Equipment, reading, recipes, applications. If the whole thing is one or two tables and it gains a few records a week, 1,000 is years away, 5 editors is more than you have, and none of the ceilings above are anywhere near the work.

If it isn't enough

Airtable's first paid tier is Team: $20 per collaborator per month billed annually, $24 monthly, and 50,000 records per base. The rate is the easy half of that bill. The half that decides it is who counts as a billable collaborator — that, the tiers above Team, and what a team of five actually pays are in Airtable pricing.

What we do instead

Tabla is a hosted no-code database in the same category, and our answer to this page is short, because the record ceiling is the same on every plan we publish.

• 1,000,000 records per database, counted across all its tables. It is identical on every plan, free included — a capacity ceiling, not a meter that prices you.
• 100 GB of attachments per account, counted across every database it owns. That is the enforced number today, for everyone; the published plans put 5 GB of files on Solo and 100 GB on Team.
• 600 API requests a minute per key, and no monthly call cap. Nothing counts your month.
• Every feature on every plan. The published plans differ by people and storage, never by capability: Solo is $0 a month, always; Team starts at $6 per editor per month billed annually. The first editor is free, viewers are free at any number, and the editor count stops at 25.

Right now Tabla is in open beta, which means all of that is free for everyone, and whatever rate you're on when the beta ends is the rate you keep.

Our own numbers, in full, are every limit in Tabla and what's free during the beta. If you're weighing an actual move, coming from Airtable is the vocabulary and the list of what carries across.