Airtable Free: 1,000 Records Per Base, Not Per Account
The cap is per base rather than per workspace, which changes the maths entirely - and the two-week history limit matters more than the record count.
On this page
Airtable's free plan is usually described as "1,000 records", said in the tone of someone explaining why it is not serious software.
Two words change that assessment entirely: per base.
Per base, not per workspace
The limit is 1,000 records in each base, with 1 GB of attachment storage per base alongside it.
So a free workspace containing six bases has six separate thousand-record allowances and six gigabytes of attachment space. That is a meaningfully different product from one capped at a thousand rows in total.
It also suggests an obvious strategy, and one worth being deliberate about rather than stumbling into: separate by base rather than by table. Clients in one base, inventory in another, content calendar in a third. Each gets its own ceiling.
The cost is real and you should price it in. Linked records work beautifully within a base and awkwardly across them. If your data genuinely needs to join — orders linked to customers linked to products — splitting it defeats the thing Airtable is actually good at, and you are better off paying.
If your data is a set of mostly independent lists, splitting is free and costs you nothing you were using.
The limit that actually hurts
Not the records. Two weeks of revision and snapshot history.
Record limits announce themselves: you hit a thousand, something stops, you deal with it. It is an inconvenience with a visible cause.
Revision history is the opposite. It is invisible until the exact moment you need it, and the moment you need it is always after someone has done something destructive — deleted a field, pasted over a column, wrecked a view that everyone depends on.
On a paid plan you have weeks of margin to notice. On free you have fourteen days, and the characteristic failure is finding the damage on day eighteen.
This is the same shape as Notion's seven-day history on its free tier, and it is the most consistently underrated free-plan restriction in this whole category.
Five editors, unlimited readers
A nicely judged distinction that is easy to miss.
Free workspaces are limited to five collaborators with Editor or Creator permissions. Read-only collaborators are unlimited, and commenters are capped at 50.
So a free base can be published to an entire company for viewing while five people maintain it. For the extremely common pattern of "one team keeps the data, everyone else looks at it", the free tier handles the whole organisation.
That is more generous than it first appears and worth knowing before you count heads and conclude you need to upgrade.
Automations are included
The free plan lists 75 unique automations per base, with no run limit stated.
Seventy-five distinct automations is far more than most bases ever need, and the absence of a documented run cap is unusual — compare Jira's free plan, which allows 150 automation steps per subscription, consumed every time a rule fires.
We could not establish whether an undocumented run limit exists, so treat this as generous rather than infinite.
What is not documented
- What happens when you exceed a free plan limit — whether creation stops, data is hidden, or something else.
- What happens when you downgrade from a paid plan to free with more than 1,000 records in a base.
- Whether the free plan has a base count limit. The FAQ mentions 1,500 bases per workspace without saying whether that applies to free workspaces.
- Whether automation runs are capped.
The downgrade question is the significant gap. Every other product in this series documents its downgrade behaviour, and this one points to a separate article we could not verify from the plans page. If you are on a paid Airtable plan with large bases and considering dropping to free, find that answer before you act rather than afterwards.
Who it suits
Small, separable datasets maintained by a handful of people and read by many — which describes a great many internal trackers, content calendars and lightweight operational databases.
The upgrade triggers, in the order people actually hit them: revision history when something breaks, then editor count as a team grows, then records.
For how Airtable's limits compare with Notion's block cap and Trello's board limit, see what each project tool does when you stop paying.
Questions people ask
Is the Airtable 1,000 record limit per base or per account?
Per base. Airtable documents "1000 records per base", which means a workspace with several bases has several allowances. Splitting a large dataset across bases is a legitimate way to stay on the free plan, at the cost of linking records across them becoming harder.
How many people can use an Airtable free workspace?
Five with Editor or Creator permissions. Read-only collaborators are unlimited and commenters are capped at 50, so a free base can be shared widely for viewing while only five people can actually change anything.
How far back does Airtable free revision history go?
Two weeks. That is the limit that causes real damage, because revision history is what rescues you when someone deletes a column or overwrites a view - and a fortnight does not survive a holiday or a quiet project.
What happens if I exceed the Airtable free limits?
The documentation we checked states the limits without describing what happens at the boundary, and does not cover downgrading from a paid plan. That is an unanswered question rather than a reassurance - test it on a base you do not depend on.
How much attachment storage does Airtable free include?
One gigabyte per base. Like the record cap this is per base rather than per workspace, so attachment-heavy work can be separated into its own base rather than consuming the allowance of your main one.
Where this information comes from
Product details change often. Each item below links to the primary source we checked, so you can confirm anything that matters to your decision.
Spotted something out of date or incorrect? Tell us and we will fix it.