Airtable vs Softr DB - Roadmap

Data Sources
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Hi Softr and the Community.

There is a lot of chatter on LinkedIn, much of which is being promoted and commented on by Softr’s own team and Softr’s many fans, that has to do with the recent acquisition of Airtable by Bending Spoons. Particularly, this event is being used to drump up Softr’s DB’s advantages and Airtable disadvantages, such as:

Airtable pricing that doesn’t scale well for users

performance of Softr’s blocks hooked up to Airtable, API limits, etc…

long term stability of the Airtable product and its support

All valid reasons to be concerned, without a doubt. But having said that, I have a very intricate Softr app that’s been around for a while and performs fairly well at this time and moving off of Airtable, although possible, wouldn’t be my first priority… unless Softr would suggest it should be…

Hence my question to Softr - is this increase in chatter bashing Airtable and drumming up Softr DB more of a marketing effort, taking advantage of the acquisition as an opportunity to point out Airtable’s weak and Softr’s strong points, or should I read it as a sign that Softr is going “sour” on Airtable, which may affect its support of this data source and I should be thinking about migrating for that reason?

Thanks

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The point about Softr’s DB is that they need an alternative to Airtable asap otherwise Bending Spoons will be able to hold Softr hostage.

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The moment that Softr DB can import from AT a 1-to-1 “copy” of the whole architecture (Fields, formulas, automations and scripts), then I will probably make the move. As of now, just thinkg of having to manually replicate almost all of it makes me want to stay where I am.

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Totally agree, @Mygrate My Users table in Airtable is nearly 300 columns - with about 4/5 of all fields being formula-driven and cross-table references - thanks to Softr’s inability to maintain business logic / formulas / functions at the blocks’ fields level inside the app front-end. This sort of migration would be very hard to do manually.

Even then, I would have almost a hundred Airtable modules in my Make.com backend to reset to Softr’s modules or go to Softr workflows. Either way, that’s not a push-button migratable task.

I don’t want to do a migration out of fear. But I would consider it out of long-term strategic necessity, if there truly was one.

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