Airtable Creator Plan, are you one of the lucky few?

Sometime in the middle of 2020, Airtable made available to select new users the Creator Plan. It was not available to everybody. No announcements were made about it. No documentation whatsoever.

The Creator Plan is a totally different workspace account than Free, Pro Trial, Plus, and Pro.

Brief Description

So how to describe this plan? One user emailed the dev team, and this is what she got in response:

The Creator plan is a current experiment that gives a new solo user almost all of including blocks, without the usual time constraints of a Pro trial.

Once the person adds collaborators to the Creator workspace, it morphs into a 30-day Pro trial, to experience the power of Airtable Pro with others. Once users are added to a workspace, all users will have 30 days of premium use before payment is required.

*If no collaborators above read-only are added, the Creator-plan (Pro features) will remain in effect indefinitely.*

If I were to describe the plan briefly: it would be closest to the Pro Trial plan without the time constraints. Yet, let me breakdown the features and compare the Airtable Creator Plan to the other plans the best I could. I’ll update this post as more info come my way.

Fundamentals

I haven’t tried and tested these limits (records, attachments, and automation runs limits) but this is what I see from my Workspace Billing page:

Creator Plan usage limits: 50,000 automation runs, 50,000 records per base, and 20GB attachment space per base.

I also noted 1 year of available snapshot history, in case I need them:

You have 1 year of snapshot history.

Views

Just like in a Pro plan, bases in the Creator Plan workspace have the ability to lock and create personal views.

Locked view and Personal view are available for selection.

Gantt view and Sections are also available.

Gantt view and Create a Section are available when I need them.

Apps

I haven’t tried all the apps, but I could create the Page Designer and Scripting apps just fine:

Apps, Charts, Page Designer, Scripting, and Pivot Tables are available for Creator Plan workspaces.

Sync

Sync functions available to Free, Plus, Pro and Enterprise accounts.

Haven’t tried these sync functions yet. Will update this post once I have further experience.

Customization

Customization options include expanded color and style options for select, multiple select, checkbox, and rating fields.

Customization options for select, checkbox, and rating fields.

Multi-day date ranges and multiple date fields are also available in the calendar view for Creator Plan workspaces.

Multiple date fields and multi-day date ranges in Calendar view for Creator Plan.

Just like with the Pro Trial plan, unlike in the Pro plan, custom branding for forms is not available in the Creator plan.

Premium form customization upgrade prompt for Creator Plan users.

Thus, if you’re on a Creator plan, you cannot do the following customizations to your forms:

  • Add a cover image to the top
  • Add custom logo or image
  • Change submit button label
  • Remove Airtable branding
  • Redirect to a custom URL after form submission

Editing and Permissions

With the Creator Plan, you may restrict access to your shared view with passwords or to a preset email domain name.

Creator Plan: Restrict access with a password or to an email domain.

You can also set table permissions and limit who can create and delete records. Of course, if you plan to keep your workspace under Creator Plan, your options for these permissions will really only be Editors and up and Nobody. Otherwise, you need to upgrade your and your other users accounts to Pro.

Creator Plan: with Table Permissions, you can limit record creation and deletion to nobody, so you won’t accidentally mess up your table. You can still create records via forms though.

Same thing with field permissions, with a Creator Plan you can limit fields editing to Nobody, so you don’t accidentally mess up your table as you click around while browsing.

Creator Plan field permissions

Limitations

So what are the things you can’t do with a Creator plan?

  • As discussed in the Customization, you cannot customize your forms
  • Collaboration — your workspace will lose the status of a Creator plan as soon as you add collaborators that have permissions higher than read-only. That means your workspace will morph into a Free Plan, or if you pay up, into a Pro plan.
  • You cannot run a script as part of your automation action if you’re on Creator Plan.
  • Creator Plan cannot run script as action in automation

Conclusion

You’re lucky if you’re one of the select few to get the Creator plan upon sign up, especially if you’re using Airtable essentially by yourself — no collaborators. You don’t have to pay a penny to get almost all the Pro features of Airtable. If you really need to customize forms, you can use third party apps like Google Forms instead.

1 Comment

  1. Yah, I snatched 2 accounts but I should nave snatched more of them and sell them 😉

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