Seeking recommendations for low-code platforms to extend Airtable for multiple users

Hello Airtable community,

I'm the CTO of a pre-seed investment and education provider. Over the past two years, we've grown from a small team to a 25-person company, and we're facing some challenges with our data management using Airtable.

Current Setup:

  • Airtable: Serving as our central database.
  • ActiveCampaign: Used by our sales and marketing teams for contact management, email campaigns, and deal tracking.
  • Google Workspace, mostly Google Sheets: Utilized company-wide for general operations.

Challenges:

  • User Access & Cost: We have about 20 internal team members who need CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) access to specific data sets in Airtable. Additionally, we want to enable over 100 founders from our portfolio companies to CRUD on data—such as submitting reports, giving feedback and comments on service providers etc. The per-user cost of Airtable becomes prohibitively expensive at this scale.
  • Complex Data Needs: Our operations involve more than just standard objects. For example, managing events requires tracking dates, locations (with attributes like contacts, pricing, contracts), team members, speakers, and more. We need customizable data structures and relationships that Airtable handles well, but we need a cost-effective way to provide access.

What We've Tried:

  • Airtable Interfaces: While helpful, providing edit access through Airtable requires paid licenses for each user, which isn't cost-effective for us.
  • External Frontend Tools: We've experimented with platforms like Softr and Glide to build interfaces on top of Airtable. These tools allow us to provide user-friendly access without the high per-user costs, but we're still evaluating which platform best fits our needs.

What We're Looking For:

  • A Low-Code Platform that can:
    • Integrate seamlessly with Airtable as the backend, handling complex data models with multiple interconnected tables.
    • Provide customizable, user-friendly interfaces for both internal team members and external users (our portfolio founders), ideally without high per-user costs.

Questions:

  1. Platform Recommendations: Between tools like Softr, Glide, Retool, Bubble, etc., which would you recommend for our use case, and why?
  2. Experience with User Management: Has anyone managed a large number of users (both internal and external) using these platforms while keeping costs reasonable?

Any insights or experiences would be greatly appreciated!