> Is Airtable being closed-source a problem anyone has ever had?

Yes

> "I was going to use this hosted, no-code spreadsheet/database platform, but then I realized it's closed source!" is not something anyone who ever would have paid for Airtable has ever said.

No, but “I would like, and pay for, something like that no-code database solution, but Airtable doesn’t meet our data compliance requirements and I can’t host it on ones I control to resolve that” its something I've heard.

The product is great but their free tier row limitation is really low (500 rows per database). And then paid plans are expensive.

I was building a Jamstack site for my dad[0] using Airtable-as-a-backend, and we almost ran out for rows for his Soviet camera collection. We had to work the model around this limitation. It's not the kind of thing that made sense to pay for monthly even if the plans were cheap, and they're not.

[0] https://alex.minkovsky.online

The free limit is 1200 rows per DB now. The paid plans are expensive though. Cheapest is $120/year, and that's more than I'm personally willing to pay for any single piece of software. It's clear they're maximizing their revenue from team / enterprise sales.

That is good to hear! If you're going to have a free tier, 1,200 seems a lot more reasonable. Can't imagine that upping the count to 1,200 makes a negative difference in their conversions, given that as you said, it looks like their bread and butter is team/enterprise.

I recently came across sanity.io as a jamstack backend. Generous free offering. Rather than the spreadsheet model, you define your schema and get a nice CMS interface generated that you host as a static page

Thank you for sharing. Looks really nice. I'm always on the lookout for Jamstack backends. The spreadsheet model is great, though, because it's that much more immediately familiar for non-tech people who are otherwise acquainted with spreadsheets. Though I was surprised how much work it was to get convey the whole relational modeling thing. In that sense, a CMS interface might have been better.

It seems like it would make sense for teams that would prefer an on-prem or privately hosted solution without paying enterprise rates. It’s also probably cheaper for teams in general depending on how much work it takes to install and administer.

According to their support site, Airtable doesn’t even support on-prem. [0]

[0]: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/202576389-Can...

Unless the company shutdown or sold and suddenly you can't access your data easily or the new company changes the features drastically. I think that many companies can't afford to have their data at the mercy of an outside company with no alternatives.

I guess this can be implemented as an admin layer on your own application, and also handle sensitive data that may not be copied to a third party for various reasons including regulatory.

I’ve used a lot of pluggable admin interfaces for opening up tables to interrogation and manipulation by non tech people, and this seems better than those, and airtable was usually never on the table.

I want to run this on a raspberry pi/desktop computer and have access to all the features i want for free, and you don't get that with Airtable - but you do foor a FOSS solution. Hobby users like me probably don't want lots of SaaS platforms when they can self host. Airtable is the SaaS i like the most, and desperately wanted it to self host.

Also, while the data isn't critical for me, a self-hosted solution ensures the data is private.

Fair enough, having it as open source and work with existing databases opens up entirely new usecase & opportunities.

Well it was the case for me, I'm tired of getting locked into proprietary systems so a FOSS alternative is perfect.

Because nobody who has a problem with closed source Airtable even considers pay for it. Ask how many avoided Airtable because it's a closed source hosted platform.

So why are they going to pay for hosting for the open-source version?

Nothing wrong with building open-source versions of stuff, but I don't see open-source being a viable business model in this case.

well, there's some ironic sort of logic at least in my head which says that I can afford to get locked into a proprietary solution only when I know there is a good (preferably open source) fallback option if it all goes to hell. So in a rather bizarre kind of way, this is what might enable me to consider Airtable where I had previously not.

How is your worst case scenario still not better than doing nothing?

Status quo for my situation isn't nothing, it's "do a bit more work to implement using more generic tools". For example we use Gitlab and its boards and ticketing system to approximate a lot of what Airflow does.

So losing all my production data / getting it hacked and ransomed / having unacceptable downtime and instability are much worse than simply implementing AirTable features bespoke using our existing systems.