Tool Comparison
An honest comparison. Airtable is the right answer sometimes. A custom database and app is the right answer other times. This page helps you figure out which situation you're in — without an agenda.
Airtable looks cheap on day one. Custom looks expensive. Once your team grows, the maths often flips.
Team plan (~$20/user/mo): $10,800
Business plan (~$45/user/mo, needed for higher limits): $24,300
Plus: time spent working around record limits and rebuilding views as needs change.
Initial build: $3,000–$12,000 one-off
Ongoing changes (optional, only when needed): $0–$400/mo
3-year total: $3,000–$26,400 — and you own it at the end
No per-seat pricing. No record limits. No dependency on Airtable's roadmap.
Airtable is worth it while your data model is simple, your team is small, and you need to move fast without engineering resources. It stops being worth it once you're hitting record limits on the Team plan, per-seat costs are adding up across a growing team, or your workflows need logic Airtable's automations can't cleanly handle.
Move when: you're bumping into record or attachment storage limits, per-seat licensing is expensive at your headcount, you need a proper user-facing app rather than a spreadsheet-style interface, or your data and workflows are core enough to the business that you don't want to depend on a third-party platform's uptime and roadmap.
Airtable's Team plan is around $20/user/month, and Business is around $45/user/month for higher record limits and advanced permissions. A team of 15 on Business runs about $8,100/year. At that rate, a one-time custom build often pays for itself within 18–24 months and removes the per-seat cost entirely.