Maybe so but it’s incredible as a rapid prototyping tool to solve actual business problems at reasonable scale and it’s one of the few platforms that is constantly improving in intuitive ways.

Emulating AirTable usability with a CRM focus would be a category killer if successful.

Nothing pisses me off more than non-devs saying how AirTable is for devs when all the devs I know hate interfacing with it or having to work with it.

If you want pretty spreadsheets, cool. If you want to use this as a CMS or CRM, and it has to interface with an external tool, god rest your soul.

edit: a candid example, we were using it to track some payables for advertising campaigns. Marketing team (that likes airtable) was adding the invoice as a file field to the table. That file attachment is not added to any "email" or "external" sync features of airtable, making it impossible to add it programmatically to an accounting software or to a shared accounting drive. Using zapier doesn't fix it since it's just not the file or a link to it in any of the api calls, only a reference field. It also doesn't export when you do an export of the table. You have to manually go in and download the file from each record (in the ui) which makes putting it there vs dropping it into a shared drive pretty useless as far as time savings is concerned.

I’m a developer and have run development teams. I fucking love Airtable for solving business problems.

I love it for the same reason I love XL, which is that you can turn it on and it just works and normal people can use it. You can create a sheet that tracks something important to the business in 20 minutes, and you have built in slack notifications and cron-type job capability and the ability to call or be called via REST API and so on, plus easy to follow user management and row level commenting and so on all built in.

In the first 20 minutes.

Yeah there’s stuff it can’t do or is bad for. When you get to that stuff use another tool, and guess what you usually can use whatever you did in Airtable as a spec instead of trying to sort out what the business process actually needs in terms of fields and so on.

I absolutely love it. It’s been an incredibly helpful addition to what had been our previous stack of salesforce for CRM and our own rails app/site, and is just so much faster for creating internal business tools than either.

Are you interfacing with external apps or systems? If you can keep everything INSIDE airtable, it gives a lot of value out of the gate. If you need to tie into it externally, it's a pain in the ass and some things are simply not possible.

I'm the founder of a startup (www.getsubsystem.com) that builds solutions on top of Airtable, so I'm familiar with their systems. While it's true that their REST API has some sharp-edges, particularly around linked fields (columns), rate-limiting, and filtering records, I think it’s mostly solid and user-friendly.

Getting records from a table is as straightforward as making an API call to: `/{baseId}/{tableId}`. For getting the actual ids, there's a metadata API. The docs are also quite comprehensive. I’m curious as to where you have run into issues?

As a user of airtable and not a developer of an airtable app/plugin, the api calls are burdensome (dereferencing lookup fields, data types) and if you want to do any serious work on large bases, you hit rate limits/call limits very quickly.

They make it trivial to import/push data in but accessing it or pulling it out looks like an intentionally hindered dark design pattern (like egress on aws). I have resorted to writing extension scripts in their godforsaken nonstandard javascript framework to access and aggregate data before pushing it out. Accessing google sheets programmatically is a walk in the park, comparatively.