Market Pain Points

Frustrations with Airtable

Airtable is loved for its flexibility, but power users report hitting painful limitations as their usage grows. Performance can degrade when bases become large or complex – even Airtable insiders acknowledge that the platform struggles at scale in similar ways to other no-code toolslinkedin.com. For example, one user described Airtable “getting slow as hell,” especially when loading infrequently used or very large bases (slow first-load times are a common complaint)linkedin.com. Record limits are another headache: Airtable’s 50,000-row cap on most plans is restrictive for data-heavy projects, forcing workarounds or costly plan upgradesreddit.com. One user had to temporarily switch to an Airtable alternative (Baserow) to handle a larger dataset, and even after upgrading to Airtable’s business plan, they found the cost ($75/user/month) hard to justifyreddit.comreddit.com. (Ultimately they returned to Airtable, begrudgingly, because no other tool matched its ease-of-use and features – highlighting both the pain and the lack of better options so farreddit.com.) Permission and collaboration pain points also surface: while Airtable allows some field-level and table-level permissions, it’s tedious to manage granular access in practice (setting per-field rules for dozens of fields is “a pain in the neck” as one expert put itreddit.com). Sharing data with external collaborators in a limited way (e.g. letting a contractor see or edit only their own tasks) often requires awkward workarounds like separate bases or synced views, since Airtable lacks truly robust partial access controls out-of-the-box. In summary, as teams push Airtable beyond small projects, they commonly run into sluggish performance, record cap limitations, high costs at scale, and insufficient fine-grained access controls – all sources of frustration that an AI-driven alternative could aim to address.