To all users of Airtable’s Free plan, an important change regarding API usage has been announced. This may affect how you use APIs, so I’d like to introduce the details of the changes.

• Managing API Call Limits in Airtable

Changes to Airtable Free Plan

Starting December 2, 2024, requests that exceed API usage limits on Airtable’s Free plan will be blocked. Due to this change, API requests that exceed the limit will not be executable until the end of the month.

Background of the Change

According to Airtable, a small portion of Free plan users are sending far more API requests than the vast majority of other users, which has increased Airtable’s operational costs. Instead of raising prices, Airtable has chosen to strengthen API request usage limits. The purpose of this limitation is to maintain service stability and efficiency while keeping costs down for all users of the Free plan.

Details of Airtable API Usage Limits

Airtable web API has the following usage limits:

• Rate Limit: The upper limit is 5 requests per second for all plans. If exceeded, a 30-second wait is required.
• Monthly Request Limit: Free plan and Team plan have monthly API request limits. When exceeded, Free plan users are given a 30-day grace period, after which API requests are stopped until the end of the month.

Response When Airtable API Usage Limits Are Exceeded

If you exceed Airtable web API usage limits, the following approaches are recommended:

• Batch Processing: Reduce the number of requests by processing multiple records in a single request. Airtable allows updating up to 10 records at once.
• Use Caching: When reading data frequently, you can also use caching to distribute API requests.

Conclusion

The strengthening of Airtable web API usage limits is a measure to improve overall service quality. While this adds certain constraints to Free plan users’ API usage, efficient API request management enables continuous and stable data integration.

Reference: Email subject “Important Update: Changes to API Limits at Airtable”

Email body

You’re receiving this email because you are on the Free plan and use the Airtable web API. We have an important update to share with you regarding changes to our API usage limits on the Free plan.

What changes we’re making

• We will begin to block calls over our API limits on our Free plan beginning December 2nd.
• We are making this change because we’ve learned that a relatively small number of customers on our Free plan are the heaviest users of our API, far exceeding the number of calls that the vast majority of customers make on a monthly basis. Instead of raising prices to accommodate this usage, we are limiting API calls to manage costs both for customers and for Airtable.

That’s all from the Gemba, where I witnessed one page of history as Airtable API usage limits begin.