Record 1,001: when your Airtable base stops taking tasks

In February 2026, Airtable trimmed the free plan's record allowance from 1,200 per base to 1,000. Two hundred rows sounds like nothing written down. For a team filing tasks it is about three weeks.

You never find out by reading a changelog. You find out mid-week, when someone pastes a bug report into the grid and the row will not save. The base is full. Now you are doing archaeology on your own backlog at 4pm, deciding which finished work from March you are allowed to delete, because deleting is the only free way to make room.

Tasks are the fastest-growing thing any team produces. Every bug, every subtask, every "follow up with the client on Thursday" is a row, and rows do not stop arriving. That is the real shape of the problem: a fixed ceiling under a number that only goes up.

Airtable's 1,000 record limit counts the whole base, not each table

This is the detail people get wrong, and getting it wrong changes your planning by a factor of four.

The 1,000 records are counted across every table in the base together. A base holding Tasks, Sprints, Clients, and Notes does not get 1,000 each. All four share one pool. Splitting your task grid into tidier tables buys you no headroom at all; it spends the same headroom in more places.

Bases are unlimited, so the escape hatch everyone finds is to split: one base per project, or per quarter. That works until you want to see across them. Linked records do not reach across bases, so the moment you split you give up the cross-project rollup that was half of why you were in Airtable.

The rest of the free tier lives in the same neighbourhood: 5 editors, 1 GB of attachments per base, 100 automation runs a month, 1,000 API calls a month. When you hit any of them the options are the same two, delete or upgrade. Team is $20 per user per month billed annually, which for a group of eight is roughly $1,900 a year.

Two different products share one name

Here is the fork that matters more than any feature table, and I will be straight about which side we are on.

If you use Airtable as a database, stay. Linked records, formula fields, rollups, interfaces built over structured data, a CRM, an inventory, a content calendar with real typed fields: that is what Airtable is, and it is good at it. We build a project tracker. We do not have formula fields or an interface designer, and we are not planning to. Swapping a database for a tracker would be a downgrade for that job.

If you use Airtable as a task tracker, the record cap is a tax on the exact activity you are doing. The tell is easy to check: open your base and look at what most records are. If most of them are things somebody has to do, you have built a tracker out of a database, and the ceiling will keep finding you.

flowchart TD
    A["Base is full at 1,000 records"] --> B{"What are most records?"}
    B -->|"Structured data, CRM, inventory"| C["Stay on Airtable and upgrade"]
    B -->|"Things somebody has to do"| D["Move tasks to a tracker"]
    D --> E["Keep the database rows in Airtable Free"]

That last branch is worth naming. Moving tasks out is not the same as leaving. Plenty of teams pull the task table into a tracker and keep the genuinely relational tables where they were, back under 1,000 and comfortably free again.

What a tracker gives you that a full base cannot

Taskfolk is a project tracker: typed issues, a kanban board, backlog, sprints with burndown, docs, and reports. Issues are unlimited on every plan including Free, because a tracker that stops accepting work has stopped tracking.

We have caps too. They are just different ones, and here they are next to Airtable's:

	Airtable Free	Taskfolk Free
Tasks or records	1,000 per base, all tables shared	Unlimited
People	5 editors	Unlimited members
Containers	Unlimited bases	Up to 5 projects
Files	1 GB per base	128 MB per workspace
Automation	100 runs a month	starts on Pro
API calls	1,000 a month	not capped by plan

Free also includes 25 AI credits a month, which is enough to try the agent side without putting in a card.

Read the table honestly, though. If you need a sixth project or you attach a lot of design files, our free plan will run out on you the way Airtable's does, just along a different axis. 128 MB is small and I am not going to dress it up. What we do not do is stop you filing work.

Paid is $3 per builder per month, and people who only read are free with no cap on any plan. The full breakdown is on pricing, and the comparison pages under Taskfolk vs Airtable cover the rivals we have written up so far.

Getting your tasks out, one CSV at a time

The path is CSV and it is not dramatic.

In Airtable, open the view holding your tasks and use Download CSV from the view menu. You get a file with your fields as columns. Before importing, trim it to what a tracker needs: title, description, status, assignee email, priority, due date. Formula and rollup columns export as their computed values, so they arrive as flat text; drop them or park them in a custom field.

Then import. Map columns to fields, pick the project, run it. One honest note: free workspaces import up to 1,000 rows per run, so a base sitting at the cap fits in a single pass with nothing to spare. If you split across several bases, do one run per file. Pro raises that to 10,000 rows.

Do not move everything on day one. Take one active project across, work in it for two weeks with the old base still open, and decide after that. If it does not stick, you have lost a CSV export and some evenings, not your history.

Agents are members here, not seats

If AI agents already do work for you, they get named accounts. Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor connect over the API or MCP, get assigned issues like anyone else, and every change they make is attributed to them in the activity log. Agent members are never billed as seats.

This is a difference in model rather than a knock on Airtable, where you can certainly script against a base. The point of a named agent is that its runs show up as sessions on the ticket, so a human can review what it did without reading a log file.

The two-minute version

Count the records in your base and work out what share of them are tasks.

Under half, and you have a database with a to-do list in the corner. Archive the completed rows, stay free, and get on with it. Most of them, and the cap will keep interrupting you every few weeks until you either pay $20 a seat or move the tasks somewhere without a ceiling.

Taskfolk's free plan takes unlimited issues and unlimited people, capped at 5 projects and 128 MB. Import your CSV and see whether the second week feels better than the first.