First Look at Airtable's Portal Feature

[@GarethPronovost]

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[@Chrishall12]

Love this. So excitied for this feature. Saves having another app to do this job.

[@AmeerHamza-xm5ro]

Thanks, appreciate your work!

[@businessinthetrades]

I cant wait.. Just signed up. I've been trying to find workarounds for this for a while! I have installers who access just their daily jobs and fill out a completion doc and upload photos. Paying $54 a month for them seems wild.

[@benjaminbachman]

Thanks for the intro to portals!

[@ninebirdsrising]

Mny tks Gareth. What advantages does this offer compared to Softr or Stacker?

[@GarethPronovost]

It simplifies your tech stack if you can use fewer tools and gives you less to manage. However I'm not sure if the price makes sense to actually *move* existing systems off Softr or Stacker

[@HelloAssign-AI]

This addition is 🔥

[@peter1112211]

It's a good idea, and I'm glad (as a paying customer) they are investing in improvements! I would say15 users seems like a lot to buy for many use cases. And not allowing free email services (like gmail) to login to the portal would also rule out a lot of people. Why not be more inclusive ?

[@fredkelly4365]

That's why I've moved to Smartsuite. Airtable has become unaffordable for entrepreneurs and smaller businesses.

[@legendaryone696]

Airtable doesn't seem to like small business types. They're really pushing us out

[@legendaryone696]

@@fredkelly4365 It might be time for me to do the same. Learning a new tool just seems too much for me right now.

[@patrickdesroches3296]

So if you take the example of customer service If I use Airtable to log cases and have 250 customers, I have to pay 250 x 8$ ?

[@GarethPronovost]

Probably not the best fit for 250+ external users unless it's contributing to your revenue

[@cerl981]

I feel like this feature is extremely limited to users of Airtable. Hard to see the use case and benefits over other options. We technically can't have other company members use it that don't require full access. Ok, thats out (unless you create external emails, but not Gmail 😆) I feel like most companies would have a lot more external users/customers than a handful. So alternatives like Stacker or Softr are going to be cheaper. Or just use Airtables other own features like share views, interfaces and forms to view and change/update data. If this was aimed at companies for employees access/use, I believe this would be awesome. Nice and simple views, buttons, layouts, that would be effective. Guess we'll see. Or I could be wrong and this would benefit many users and their external guests 😅

[@GarethPronovost]

I agree, I still see a huge upside in using Softr, Stacker, Noloco, etc.

[@augustincloutier508]

Nice addition to Airtable. Still expensive though, and why no gmails for user login🤔

[@GarethPronovost]

They don't want free email accounts (internal people to use personal email)

[@Ckwk888]

This is great but the pricing is not. I would sign up if it was cheaper

[@tommycoe2333]

Still pretty expensive. 15 customers is not a lot.

[@GarethPronovost]

True. It seems like a lot to manage such a small number of external users. I hope it's just the first step for Airtable

[@davidadams421]

Damn! I was really hoping it would be free for external users to use solutions developed by licenced users, in the same way Microsoft 365 developed apps are, in the main, free to be used by guest users. I have a simple membership database of about 1,000 contacts and wanted those contacts to be able to update their own data. $8 x 1,000 'Portal Users' is not even close to being a viable proposition! Great video, btw! I'm just disappointed with AirTable's direction on this.

[@GarethPronovost]

Have you explored front end options for Airtable? Softr, Stacker, Noloco are the most prominent and you can publish apps to thousands of users, layers atop your Airtable data.

[@legendaryone696]

$1200 a year at the lowest (15 portal users) is just wow. They obviously have an agenda here...

[@GarethPronovost]

I mean, they have a board to report to with many who expect a return on investment. I think the fact that they are finding alternative revenue streams is intriguing, although it may be too costly for many SMBs still.