Airtable Support Go Bye-Bye

The square peg that Airtable has been and continues to be, is misshapen for the round hole that is enterprise.

Note: This is the first article I’ve penned specifically about the hidden side of no/low-code economics. I’m an armchair economist and self-anointed No-Code Economist. I hope you like it and the many stories I’ve got queueing up for this new category in my Substack. If there are specific stories you’d like me to explore, drop a note in the comments or reach out anytime (bill.french@gmail.com).

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Square Peg, Round Hole

There’s no shortage of new messages on the Airtable Community pages like this one.

I've been trying to get an answer on the support email for almost 2 weeks now, all I get is an automated response, and that's about it.

Others are ready to jump ship.

This lack of support has not been made clear ANYWHERE in the documentation we've received. Since AirTable has foisted their support for non-1000+ user businesses off onto their "community," we'll be looking for something else.

Airtable has boldly stated that Enterprise matters most. Airtable has clarified that support for SMB¹, especially those in the small business category, matters less than least. They don’t want the annoyance of a soccer mom managing the pee-wee league playoff game data for Sitka, Alaska, even if that soccer mom is a regional Sales VP for Exxon Mobil.

Setting aside a class of users who do not represent your core target audience is not unusual. They may be free users and all they care about is their really small business data sheet for basic functionalities. But they offer a Teams version for a fee and it comes with no support at all. As Scott Rose, founder of TableForms suggests, this is a new economic behavior.

I also cannot recall a single product that charges for access and provides zero customer support. You apparently can’t even get an Airtable employee to help you with account matters. This Reddit appears to confirm zero support for [paid] Teams accounts the new norm, but I invite Airtable to set the record straight by leaving a comment.

The core constituent that made Airtable what it is today, is no longer interesting to them.

Airtable’s support policy is a bit off-putting for an enterprise platform. Even the largest platforms tend to listen to all customers concerning usability issues because, often, the smaller companies find some of the greatest opportunities, the biggest bugs, and the most egregious security shortcomings. And more often, this constituency of users discovers very important gaps that may lead to key innovations. With Airtable’s latest policy changes, it has fundamentally rejected customer relationships that tend to make companies great and keep them great.

This policy could have a serious economic impact on the future of Airtable.

History of Support at Airtable

To understand how we got here, we must reflect and rewind the clock to December 2022, a point in time when Airtable made a key decision to disband its only successful support resource.