I May Never Use Airtable Again

Chris Davis 0:10
And we’re back. Welcome to another episode of the All Systems Go podcast. Listen. This is crazy.

Chris Davis 0:17
Technology is crazy, everyone. I had this podcast outlined and ready to record, and then before you know it, the news breaks. Airtable gets acquired. I’m thinking to myself, oh, my goodness, there is.

Chris Davis 0:37
I feel, listen, everyone, there are times where you are ahead of the game, right? And those are rare times in technology. So right now, I feel so far ahead of the game. In a good way, everybody, in a good way, that I just kind of shake my head in awe at that reality.

Chris Davis 1:03
And this is going to make sense in a minute. Originally, I had this podcast outlined in my mind as me explaining to you all how I accidentally replaced Airtable, right? I did not. I was 100% satisfied with my usage of Airtable and what it was providing for me in return.

Chris Davis 1:27
I had no anticipation going out to replace it. However, as I began to understand more in technology. Listen, let me parenthetically insert. Building software with AI has taught me so much about how technology works.

Chris Davis 1:49
Things that I thought were impossible are a lot easier than I realized because my ignorance was not knowing how these things could be done. It has really served me well. It’s showed me how to interact and understand AI on a whole nother level. Okay, back to the topic at hand.

Chris Davis 2:10
What does this have to do with airtable? Well, one of the things that I learned is that every application that we interact with online consists of a ui, a user interface, and a database backend, right? And the code is the in between. The code is what translates a button click.

Chris Davis 2:31
Now does a thing and stores it in the database or retrieves it, or does both storage and retrieval. But it’s. It’s this constant processing of user input, stored and retrieved, right? At a very simple level.

Chris Davis 2:49
So once I understood that and I started building more, more apps for myself and then started helping teams, teaching doers and implementers on teams to do the same, and then managing teams of builders, you start to understand that, wow, wait a minute. Everything is a database. At the end of the day, a database is powering everything that you do. Your brain being the main database, right?

Chris Davis 3:16
Somewhere to store information and retrieve it. So that’s all database software does, is really emulating our brain. Which is hilarious because now in this AI age, how many times have you, you all heard building a brain? We just, as humans, we keep trying to emulate this masterful creation that God has done.

Chris Davis 3:36
In a way that we’ll never be able to emulate, right, or replicate. But we’ll continue to try and we’ll continue to fail. We’ll get closer, we’ll make great evolutions and all that. But that’s not even the topic.

Chris Davis 3:47
The topic is this. How did I get to this place? First, let’s talk about airtable. I think that Air Table had a air table.

Chris Davis 4:00
I don’t know if they knew their weak spot. I don’t know if their SWOT analysis had this on the radar. And what I mean by that is I’m going to mix in my journey with airtable and then somehow we’re going to figure out where we land. I’m going.

Chris Davis 4:17
I got an outline, but I’m going a little organic on this one. Airtable for me started out as a recommendation, I think. My buddy Greg Hickman had a post on Facebook and it was like, what software and in your business could you not live without? And you saw the regular like ActiveCampaign, Kajabi and Salesforce and all of this.

Chris Davis 4:41
And then a few times people said airtable. And the nosy person that I am, I’m like, what is airtable? So I look it up. Still have no clue.

Chris Davis 4:48
At this point, I don’t have any type of conscious and intention recollection or intelligence around what a database is. I’ll just be honest with you all. As an engineer, I just didn’t do any database stuff. I was programming FPGAs and using VHDL and what is it, binary coding and assembly line languages is the term for it.

Chris Davis 5:11
I don’t even know if they do that nowadays in engineering. But I didn’t have to interface with a database. I was a software engineer. I was a lecture engineer.

Chris Davis 5:18
The software engineer did that. And so airtable was my first introduction. I had used Microsoft Access back in the day with some nonprofit work and churches and stuff like that, but I didn’t put two and two together that it’s being stored in a database, database and everything else. It just was always too technical.

Chris Davis 5:35
I knew WordPress had MySQL and that was a database, but you know, I just didn’t. It was just another world. So airtable for many of us was our introduction into databases. And the first question was, what’s the difference between a spreadsheet and a database?

Chris Davis 5:49
They look the same. And I spent a long time trying to answer that question. And that was intentional. What airtable did was airtable was saying, hey, look, we understand the power of databases.

Chris Davis 5:59
If we can put A better UI on this old archaic technology that’s just so much so utilized, but so boring and so stiff and hard to interact with. What if we put a nice UI around it? That was the first step in airtable claiming a ton of market share. Because now you’re giving people the ability to use databases in a way that is actually more streamlined than a spreadsheet.

Chris Davis 6:29
Right. But you still have to answer the question for the majority of us who are ignorant, why do I use airtable? Why do I use a spreadsheet? I was actually at activecampaign when I started to deploy airtable in my life personally.

Chris Davis 6:40
And then I started to do it at activecampaign. And at that time we were using it for like project management, some storage of like keeping track of content, things of that nature. And as my, as my evolution with airtable began to continued, I should say not began, but the evolution continued, I started to see the differences. Like, wait a minute.

Chris Davis 7:06
Columns are like custom fields. You can’t mix data in a column like you can on a spreadsheet. On a spreadsheet you can say name in that column and nothing is preventing somebody from putting a number in there. But with airtable, you start to, you, you format a column.

Chris Davis 7:22
Everything in that column has to match that. That formatting. Well, that was different. That was like, well, that’s actually like a custom field.

Chris Davis 7:28
Then rows were records. So records have custom fields. It’s not rows and columns. That can just be anything in any, any values in sales.

Chris Davis 7:36
So I started to see the differentiation. Is that okay spreadsheets for like measuring analytics and graphs and all of that. Airtable is really good for holding data and actually organizing it. And then they added automation.

Chris Davis 7:51
So now you can start to trigger actions based on the data that you have. And then webhooks. I mean, airtable became a game changer because it allowed easy visualization into your data and, and then easy action on your data. But it was still for the technical folks.

Chris Davis 8:10
But the people that I started to put on the air table, they were like, oh my gosh, this is changing the game. My wife used it in her interior design business. Changed the game. I had a local networking company use it.

Chris Davis 8:21
They changed the game, right? Better for storing their, their Rolodex or directory of people. I mean, it was it. There was a point in time you couldn’t tell me anything.

Chris Davis 8:33
You could air table for everything. I’m paying $1,000 a year because I have multiple seats. Best money paid ever. Because you took old database structure that is Very prevalent today.

Chris Davis 8:46
Technology that was hard to use. You put an easy to use UI layer on it and then you started to infuse it with automation capabilities, not to mention formulas also served as a way of automating. So you. I started to have what I would call the first version of Apps Everyone, which is another reason why I think it’s so crazy that a lot of the people claiming that you, you can’t.

Chris Davis 9:08
I don’t build apps with AI. I don’t do that. Would go and build a spreadsheet or, or an airtable database that is literally the exact same thing. You’re, you’re building an app.

Chris Davis 9:20
It’s an app. You’re trying, you’re attempting to build an app, right? Anyways, let me get, let me stay on track, Let me stay on track because I, I’ll go off. I got a whole episode on that I just recorded.

Chris Davis 9:30
You guys listened to it, hopefully the previous episode, so I don’t need to repeat it. But at that point, air table became central control. I mean, I was using it to the point where I had make.com and N8N automations backing up my CRM software.

Chris Davis 9:49
The second something happened in my CRM, dumped it in airtable. Right? And it’s just like, oh my gosh, it’s easier to see my data. I’m not restricted by a segment builder.

Chris Davis 9:58
I can visualize it and modify it any way I want to, quickly. Then they launched a mobile app. I can do it on my phone. I’m stopped.

Chris Davis 10:08
My reliance on a lot of tools stopped. Right. In fact, I used to have my podcast pipeline in activecampaign in the Deal CRM. Well, it was only natural since all of my information was easier stored in airtable, I started using airtable for it.

Chris Davis 10:23
And before you know it, I wasn’t even using the deal CRM anymore. I was using airtable to manage my whole sales process. And again, that was accidental. I did not go out to replace my CRM software, my sales CRM software, my marketing CRM stayed in activecampaign.

Chris Davis 10:41
At the time, I’m no longer using that, but at the time that, that’s what it was. So there you see an accidental replacement based on evolution, right? So what airtable’s next step was is they, once they started getting market share, they then added interfaces. And interfaces were, was.

Chris Davis 11:02
Were ways to build an even easier ui because going into an airtable database grid is what they’re called. It’s still very technical. And my belief is that when I was building these out for clients, no client should ever go into the back end of airtable. You should always have a front end interface.

Chris Davis 11:19
And that was validated by platforms like Glide, softr and the likes that would that specialized in building interfaces, front end user interfaces, membership portals, I mean client portals, all of that to give you an easier way to access your data without going into the back end. So we went from very technical database structure to UI layer on top of that, but still technical to UI layer of non technical. Right. And Glide software and all these companies, their claim to fame was their easy integration with airtable.

Chris Davis 11:55
So again, airtable’s winning, winning. Their interfaces were so limited. And the reason why airtable’s interfaces were limited, one is because of the types of charts that you could build. But two, the access.

Chris Davis 12:09
For somebody to truly have access they had to be part of your workspace and now you’re paying for another seat. So financially it really didn’t make sense. I always struggled with airtable’s pricing model when it came to sharing the data, especially through an interface. But there were no alternatives on the market.

Chris Davis 12:25
So you just stuck with it until softer Glide and the likes came. Then you’re like, well wait a minute, I can now build an interface that is more customizable and then add users at a less expensive rate. Right. So what they did was validate the importance of having a better UI experience, a better dashboard experience.

Chris Davis 12:50
Airtable never caught up with that. So that was so valuable. What happened? The softers and the fill outs, now Zeit and the Glides, what did they do?

Chris Davis 13:02
They said, well wait a minute, what if we just built our own database? What if we remove people having to rely on airtable? Just in general, we’ll have our own databases. So now they start having native databases that they interact with.

Chris Davis 13:19
That should have been airtable’s first sign. Like wait a minute, hold on, we need to evolve our UI or our interface technology. And you saw it, they started implementing AI agents and they like could had this app building functionality. It never was really done well.

Chris Davis 13:41
So I don’t know anybody that actually used it. People probably used it. I’m just one person in my corner of the earth. But for the most part people were still trying to figure out what airtable was.

Chris Davis 13:52
Now you’ve got apps and all of this, it was just convoluted. The software got convoluted and you started to see its fractures. Okay, you’ve got your data in here, but for multiple people to access, everybody has to have a seat. Now you’re paying $25 a month seat, your bill is going up now.

Chris Davis 14:08
You went from maybe $200 a month to 1500 to 2000 because you need, your data is in here and you need to give access. And you have these other platforms that are building better user interfaces and dashboards and they used to rely on you, now they’re not relying on you because they have their own database. It started getting shaky fast, right? So then the alt fatality finish him came through way of AI.

Chris Davis 14:39
And this is where I start to. My story starts to intersect with how I left airtable forever, by the way, and how many will probably do the same. And the idea was this airtable’s sticky point was an easy way to interface with the database. That was airtable sticky point.

Chris Davis 15:04
I don’t care how you say it, you airtable, you did a great job making interacting with databases easy and fun. My times using airtable, they were fun. It was fun sitting down and ideating how to structure the database tables, the different views. That was fun.

Chris Davis 15:23
Work for a doer, for a builder at the time, right? So now you get to the point where AI comes in and AI is saying, hey, I can build an interface for you, I can build that app for you. Just tell me what back end database you want to use, right? So not only is AI threatening airtable, I’ll show you how it’s threatening airtable.

Chris Davis 15:49
But now the, even the softers and glides and all of those dashboard platforms, they’re now at risk too. So as I started to learn software building with AI, I started to initially use airtable as my backend. So I’ll have a front end app that did a thing and then the back end storage of the data and retrieval was all done via airtable and I was perfectly fine. You guys still, I’m still winning.

Chris Davis 16:19
I felt great because I just replaced airtable’s limited interfaces, but I could always go into the back end and modify data if I needed to. So that was my safe space is going back into the database and modifying it until my, my building skills evolved, until I realized it’s actually easier just to build the interface for me to modify the data than actually going to the database. And then I started to run into API limits, right? Airtable has API rate limits.

Chris Davis 16:51
And then I started to run into record count limits because I’m starting to use these apps that are using a lot more records. For instance, I got a basketball scoring app that I use when I was assistant coach for my son’s team. And every score, every action is a row Well, I would have. It blew up airtable within the first 10 games of the season, right.

Chris Davis 17:14
So when I started to see the, the record limitation and the API limitation, I started to look around and I found another solution that self hosted. If you’re in my community, you know what solution this is. And what did is it gave me unlimited rows and it removed the API rate limit and it ran off my local server that I have. I can’t remember if It’s Heisner or DigitalOcean.

Chris Davis 17:35
I’ve got two of them, I just can’t remember which one it’s running off of. And it gave me all of the performance that airtable lacked. But I had this attachment to airtable like, but wait a minute, I can’t leave airtable. That’s where all my data is.

Chris Davis 17:49
And then I realized, well wait a minute, I’m not even interfacing with my data anymore. My apps are and they’re providing me a very basic interface for me to click buttons and do stuff and then it’s updating the backend, wait a minute, I don’t need to go into the back end anymore. And that’s when the separation began. That’s when I put the papers on airtable’s desks, the divorce papers, and said, you know what?

Chris Davis 18:18
It’s not you, it’s me. I thought all of this time the value was in me actually being able to interact with the database directly. That’s a lie. Evolution has said otherwise.

Chris Davis 18:34
In fact, it’s told me it’s better if I don’t because a human can break stuff and make things inaccurate. If you build an interface to do it on your behalf, which can retrieve your data, display it however you want to and and then store it, you no longer need direct interaction with the database. And if that’s the case, the main value for airtable for me was gone because it made direct interaction with the database easy. Well, guess what makes it easier?

Chris Davis 19:06
Apps. Apps built on top of the same data set that relieve me from having to go into airtable. I now have customers interfaces, custom dashboards that I get to use that shows my, my data the way I want to see it and allows me to click buttons and enter data the the easiest way through web apps and mobile apps. I no longer needed airtable not just from the direct interaction, but also my apps were loading slower when they had a lot of data because airtable’s API rate limit.

Chris Davis 19:46
They never anticipated AI software. They never anticipated software using the platform the way that it was being used from smaller businesses. Those API rates and all of the things that I’m complaining about at an enterprise level were solved. But they didn’t realize that AI coming and allowing people to author their own code was going to now necessitate more flexibility to their API so that people could access their data quicker.

Chris Davis 20:20
Even now when I go into airtable, just loading a database takes time to load. It used to be instantaneous, those are seconds and I’m just like, come on airtable, come on. Right? And it’s rare when I have to do that, but that’s how I replaced it.

Chris Davis 20:36
I believe the market in general is seeing the same thing. They’re like, well wait a minute. Interfacing with the database was the value before, but it’s not the value now. If you look at the Zeit, if you, if you don’t know what Zeit is, that’s fill outs AI building platform, which is really nice.

Chris Davis 20:57
You look at the Zeitz, the Softers, the glide apps, all of they all have their own database now. So from interface builders, now they have their own database. Don’t need airtable to app builders now used to integrate with airtable. Don’t do it.

Chris Davis 21:13
They have their own databases. The lovables emergence and all those always had their own databases or integrated with Supabase. So airtable is left here saying, hey, don’t forget about me. And guess who’s using airtable?

Chris Davis 21:26
The people who have always used it that have never evolved into learning how to use AI and realize that there’s actually better databases once you learn how to code. Or people who are super slow still using spreadsheets and just learned about airtable, like oh wow, let me try that out. And the third, of course are the enterprise companies that have so much data in there that it’s very hard to move. But that wasn’t my case.

Chris Davis 21:51
I could get up and move and before you know it, what I ended up doing is this new database backend worked so well. I had AI write a migration script that goes into the air. It looks at the airtable schema and duplicates it in this new self hosted database software. And I build all my apps on that and they run fat.

Chris Davis 22:13
They run so much faster. It’s cleaner. If I ever need to go back into the database, I can, but I don’t, I can’t tell you guys the last time I went into a database and interacted with it personally, I can’t tell you the last time I went into a spreadsheet and interacted with it directly. Now spreadsheets are more time tested than airtable databases.

Chris Davis 22:36
And I think that’s why you see the evaluation of them so low when they got purchased is that the market demand is not what it once was. And I think airtable thought it would always have that advantage. The advantage that they thought they had was true. They ignored the first threat and they didn’t evolve on the interfaces.

Chris Davis 22:58
I would have definitely looked into either purchasing a company like Softr or something like that. Not saying they were purchasable or emulating making interfaces a lot more flexible. Because that to me would have been the move to make you a little more future proof from even the AI app builders. Because if you’ve got a comparable way to serve your users, a means of building easy to use interfaces and dashboards, they’ll just stick with you instead of learning a new skill or going to a new tool.

Chris Davis 23:31
But they didn’t do that. Their evolution on interfaces was so poorly done. Their extensions were weak. I mean they just, they missed it.

Chris Davis 23:40
And now we’re in a day and age where people can build their own software solutions. They don’t need to interface with the database like they once did. And platforms like Supabase are now becoming the standard because they do all of the things for these software builds that airtable cannot at, at. At scale.

Chris Davis 24:05
Right? Airtable has that record limit, that API. I mean there’s so many things in there that’s. They’re just not future, they’re not ready for the future of builders.

Chris Davis 24:15
And the future of builders is here. And hence you see why such a low valuation and disappointing. And for me to bring it full circle to the beginning, I had already moved all of my apps off airtable as the back end, everyone. Not intentionally.

Chris Davis 24:33
I was again, I wasn’t trying to replace airtable. It just didn’t make sense to keep it there. So with that transition, when the news drops that Air Table sold, there were people like, oh my gosh, they’re going to hike up the price. They’re wondering what they’re going to do.

Chris Davis 24:47
One me was not me. I was like, huh, dodge that bullet. Now listen, listen here. My hope is that Air Table continues to grow.

Chris Davis 24:59
Do not get me wrong, I am not rooting against airtable Company that’s done so much for me and my business. I’ll never root against them. But I’ve got to do for my business what’s best for my business and honestly, my clients. I’m not recommending airtable anymore because I’m using, I’m building teams that leverage AI.

Chris Davis 25:23
The back End would never need Airtable. So again, it’s not intentional. I’m not saying no. Airtable Evolution, y’.

Chris Davis 25:32
All have you. Do you see a theme for those of you that are consistent listeners to the podcast? Evolution creates more demand and more shifts in your business than anything else. And if you’re not paying attention to evolution, you’re not playing an active part in it.

Chris Davis 25:53
You’re gonna be left behind using old software and old, old ways. Right? So, so I, I hope maybe that adds some clarity for some of you who have, you know, maybe been wondering what my thoughts are with Airtable or even Chris. What are you gonna do?

Chris Davis 26:12
Are you still using it? Nope, I’m not. They could shut my account down today and nothing will happen. In fact, I haven’t paid Airtable in a while because I got so many credits and I’ve already, you know, taken my team off of it because we.

Chris Davis 26:23
We no longer need. Need it. Everybody on my team has their individual interface with whatever part of the business and whatever data they need. So my.

Chris Davis 26:35
IT has drastically improved the operations, the internal operations of my company by you creating internal software, internal apps, we call it personal software, but that run the. Not just the profitable processes, but all the processes in my business. And then people manage the software and have dashboards and interfaces. They don’t even have logins, y’.

Chris Davis 27:01
All. I don’t even have users in my apps. There’s no users. I just have you log into your dashboard and hit buttons and it does all the interfacing in the, in the app for you.

Chris Davis 27:13
You need to see something, let me know. Okay, code it now. It displays on your dashboard. Don’t go into the applications, never touch the data.

Chris Davis 27:21
People aren’t touching the data, therefore, they’re not touching Airtable the way that they once did. And you see it, you see it in the evaluation. There’s probably other factors, of course, beyond what I’m mentioning, but that’s my journey, that’s my experience, that’s my thought on it. But the day, the day that I would say I’m no longer using Air table, I never saw it, you guys, I never saw it.

Chris Davis 27:44
And I. And I hope that they, you know, evolve the platform and maybe bring me back in another capacity. But I’m so satisfied with my current stack and how I’m doing things right now, I just can’t see it. I can’t see it.

Chris Davis 27:56
I can’t see going back. Just like I can’t see going back to my marketing CRM software that I was once using based on what I know now and how to, you know, write code with AI to do things that these platforms never could do and just should have been able to do forever. So with that being said, if you’re an airtable user, I hope your usage continues to be highly effective. If you want to jump ahead and you want to jump off that potentially sinking ship, there is a path, and that path is through AI authored code to create dashboards and interfaces for your data that are more effective than airtable, even software and glide apps ever could be and are.

Chris Davis 28:43
Did I mention it’s affordable? Did I mention all of these dashboards that I have in my business I pay $0 for? I’m not exaggerating, I’m not exaggerating. Again, you just got to know.

Chris Davis 28:54
You just got to know how to set it up and how to build with that setup, which again, I do have such things, such access available for you if you want to just kind of baby step into it. Join the community. We have a complimentary membership that requires no credit card. You can join as soon as today and be added as soon as today.

Chris Davis 29:19
But you gotta get in the game, everyone. You’ve gotta get in the game because shifts like this are happening. Airtable is just one. Many more are coming.

Chris Davis 29:27
I feel like my business is bulletproof because we’re not really relying on any major SaaS software anymore. We’re relying on database storage and code that interfaces with it on our behalf, which is a real strong place to be. And my hope is for you to join me in such a position. So hopefully this podcast was illuminating, liberating and convicting where it needed to be.

Chris Davis 29:55
But more so, it was informative to help you continue to navigate technology and AI and automation in a way that’s responsible and beneficial to your business. So until next time I see you all online, automate responsibly, my friends.