Airtable Free: 1,000 Records Per Base, Five Editors
Unlimited bases sounds like unlimited capacity. The 1,000-record ceiling per base is what stops most real databases in the first three months.
Airtable free costs $0 and gives unlimited bases with 1,000 records each, up to five editors per workspace, 50 commenters, 1GB of attachments per base, 100 automation runs a month and 500 AI credits per editor. Team at $20 a seat annually raises records to 50,000 per base and automations to 25,000 a month.1
The word unlimited does a lot of work here, and it applies only to the number of bases. Every base carries the same 1,000-record cap.
For a personal tracker that is plenty. For anything accumulating records over time it is a countdown, and the ceiling arrives without warning.
What the free plan actually includes
| Free | Team | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $20/seat/mo annually |
| Bases | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Records per base | 1,000 | 50,000 |
| Editors per workspace | 5 | Unlimited |
| Commenters | 50 | Unlimited |
| Attachments per base | 1GB | 20GB |
| Automation runs | 100/mo | 25,000/mo |
| AI credits per editor | 500/mo | 15,000/mo |
| Revision history | 2 weeks | 1 year |
Interface Designer is included on free, which is unusual: the tool for building a front-end on top of your base is not gated. Grid, kanban, calendar, gallery and form views are all available too.
The 1,000-record ceiling
A thousand records is roughly two years of weekly entries, or one season of a content calendar, or a few months of a sales pipeline.
When you hit it, Airtable does not delete anything. It stops accepting new records in that base, which means the workaround is to archive old rows into a second base and report across both.
That workaround costs you linked records and rollups across the boundary, which is most of what makes Airtable useful in the first place. The limit is not a wall you climb, it is a wall you design around badly.
100 automation runs a month
Automations are what turn a base into a workflow: send an email when a status changes, create a record when a form is submitted, update a field on a schedule.
At 100 runs, that is about three a day. A single automation that fires on every new form submission will exhaust the month in a busy week.
Team raises it to 25,000, which is a 250-fold difference. Between the two lies the entire gap between a database and an application.
AI credits are per editor
500 AI credits per editor per month on free, against 15,000 on Team. The credits cover Airtable's AI field agents and the Omni assistant.
Per-editor rather than per-workspace means five free editors collectively hold 2,500 credits, which is more than the headline suggests.
Credit packs are available as an add-on at 10,000 credits from $20 a month, so AI capacity can be bought without a full plan upgrade. For a free user that is the cheapest way to extend the tier.
What the five-editor limit actually means
Five editors is generous for a small team and restrictive for a club, a class or a community project. Commenters are separate and capped at 50, so stakeholders can read and comment without consuming an editor seat.
Workspaces are limited to one on free. Multiple workspaces, which people use to separate personal and work bases, require Business.
For a lighter-weight structured database, Notion includes databases on its free plan with different limits, and for pure task tracking Todoist has no record ceiling at all.
When the free plan is enough
A personal CRM, a job application tracker, a reading list, a small inventory, a content calendar for one person.
Prototyping an interface with Interface Designer before committing to a paid plan, which is a genuinely good use of free given the feature is fully included.
Anyone whose base will stay under a thousand rows, or who can archive cleanly each year, never needs to pay.
When it stops being enough
The first base that crosses 1,000 records, or the first automation that needs to run more than three times a day.
Team at $20 a seat annually is the jump, and it is a steep one: there is no intermediate tier between free and twenty dollars. For a three-person team that is $720 a year to escape the record cap.
If the automation need is the binding one rather than the database, Make or Zapier can run the workflow against Airtable's API for less than the Team tier.
Frequently asked questions
Is Airtable free?
Yes, permanently, with unlimited bases and no card required.
How many records does Airtable Free allow?
1,000 per base, across unlimited bases.
How many editors can a free Airtable workspace have?
Five, plus up to 50 commenters.
How many automations run on Airtable Free?
100 runs per month, against 25,000 on the Team plan.
What happens when I hit 1,000 records?
The base stops accepting new records. Archiving to a second base works but breaks linked records across the boundary.
How much does Airtable Team cost?
$20 per seat per month billed annually, or $24 billed monthly.
Record caps, editor limits, automation runs, AI credits and pricing verified against Airtable's pricing page and plan comparison on 20 October 2026.
Sources
- Airtable pricing: airtable.com/pricing. Used for: 1,000 records per base, 5 editors, 100 automation runs, 500 AI credits.
All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.
