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 their pricing model and become successful as Access was.
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.
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 their pricing model and become successful as Access was.