Airtable pricing in 2026, and cheaper alternatives

Airtable is easy to start on and easy to outgrow. A team builds one base on the free plan, hits the record limit, upgrades, and a year later half the company has edit access to something. Airtable bills per editor, so that sprawl turns straight into seats. Here's what each plan costs today, how billing actually works, and where cheaper tools fit.

All prices below were checked on the vendors' own pricing pages and help docs on 18 October 2026. Prices change, so confirm them before you negotiate.

Airtable's plans

From Airtable's pricing page and its plans help article:

Other limits from the help article:

Free is also limited to 5 collaborators with Editor or Creator permissions. Enterprise Scale removes the caps on org units, workspaces and bases.

How Airtable counts seats

This is the most useful thing to know before a renewal. On Team and Business, you pay for every user with edit permissions on at least one base in the workspace. Read-only collaborators, form submissions and share links are free.

So the biggest savings are usually in permissions, not in switching tools:

• Find editors who only read. Many people get edit access by default when a base is shared with them. If they only look at data, change them to read-only and they stop costing a seat.
• Use forms for input. People who only add records, like requests, leads or bug reports, can submit through a form instead of editing the base.
• Use share links for reporting. A read-only share link or interface can replace an editor seat for someone who just checks a dashboard.

On the Team plan at annual prices, every editor you move to read-only saves $240 a year. On Business, it's $540.

Check which limit pushed you up a tier

Teams usually upgrade from Team to Business because of record limits (50,000 per base against 125,000) or storage. Before paying $45 a seat for everyone, check whether one large base is the reason. Splitting or archiving that base can sometimes keep the whole workspace on Team, at less than half the per-seat price.

Cheaper alternatives

Baserow

Baserow is a database tool with a spreadsheet-style interface similar to Airtable's. Its cloud plans:

Note that Baserow's limits are per workspace, while Airtable's are per base, so compare against your total record count, not your largest base. Premium includes all views and AI features. Advanced adds role-based permissions and audit logs. Baserow also offers a self-hosted option.

Grist

Grist is a spreadsheet-database hybrid with a free, open-source self-hosted Community edition. Its hosted plans:

Business has a 5-user minimum and is where automations start. Grist also offers a free activation key for its self-hosted product to individuals and organizations with less than $1 million in total annual income.

Side by side

Prices are per user per month on annual billing, from each vendor's pricing page. Record limits are counted differently (per base, per workspace or per document), so check against your own data.

What to do with this

Start with permissions. Moving read-only people off editor seats is the fastest saving, and it needs no migration. Then check which limit put you on your current tier. If you're still paying more than you'd like, these alternatives give you a real number to bring to the renewal. For the step-by-step version, see how to negotiate a SaaS renewal.

You can see what companies post for Airtable on the Airtable vendor page. To get bids from sellers, post an RFP with what you pay for Airtable and the features your team uses. It's free, and you can post anonymously.