Airtable is a database you design, and for a studio with a genuinely unusual process it is the best answer on this page: whatever your orders do, you can model it. The cost is not the $20 a seat. It is that every question you have not built yet — what is owed across every open order, what this run cost per piece, what the customer sees — is your build and then your maintenance, for as long as the business runs. Including the cases where the base should stay exactly where it is.
Airtable · checked 9 September 2026
We make Ordamo, so we are an interested party. What we can be is checkable: written by the people who built it for their own furniture studio in Buenos Aires, every price taken from the other side’s own page with the date we read it, and their wins listed above ours.
| Airtable | Ordamo | |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | Tables you design | Orders, deposits and production batches, already assembled |
| Deposit and balance on one order | Two fields and a formula, once you have built them | Both, with dates, on the order itself |
| What another person costs | $20 a month per user on Team, billed annually | Nothing — one plan, per business |
| Records | 1,000 per base free, 50,000 on Team, 125,000 on Business | Not metered |
| What a production run cost per piece | A rollup you write, and re-check whenever the model changes | A received batch writes what the run really cost onto its products |
| A page the customer can open | A shared view of your table, if you tidy one into shape | One link per order, no login, updates itself |
| Who maintains the model | You | Nobody |
| An order from a chat screenshot | No | Yes — the assistant reads the screenshot into an order you confirm before it saves |
| Unusual requirements | Yes — this is precisely what it is for | No, and it is not trying to be |
| Entry price | Free, then $20/user/mo billed annually | $29/mo, one plan |
Built for orders that take weeks to deliver, start in a message and get paid in parts.
Add a customer and their order
Deposit taken, balance still owed, and the date you promised.
Send your customer their order page
One link that updates itself, instead of twenty messages.
Record what the batch cost
What a run really cost, over the pieces it produced. One button puts that on the products it made.
See what you actually made
Revenue, cost and margin per order. Money in, money out, cash on hand.
A base that tracks orders is a small piece of software with one developer and no tests. It works until the first case it was not designed for — a refunded deposit, a piece split across two batches, a price agreed in another currency — and then it works incorrectly and silently, because a formula has no way of telling you it has stopped covering the situation. Purpose-built software is not smarter than your base; it has just already met those cases.
$20 a user a month is reasonable pricing for a database and awkward pricing for an order process, because the people who need to see an order are exactly the people you do not want to buy seats for: a partner, an assistant two days a week, the bookkeeper in January. Ordamo is priced per business precisely so that question never has to be asked.
You can compute what is owed. What you cannot easily build is the discipline around it: a deposit that carries the date it arrived, a balance with a date it is due, a list that sorts itself by what is unpaid and what is late. In a base those are conventions you remember to follow. Here they are the fields, so an order cannot quietly exist without them.
A shared view is your working surface with some columns hidden — and it stays that way, so tidying it is a chore you repeat rather than a thing you built once. What the customer wants is small and specific: what they ordered, what they have paid, what is left, and when it will be ready. That is one link per order here, and it updates itself when the order does.
$0, then $20/user/mo
The Free plan holds 1,000 records per base, 1GB of attachments per base and up to 5 collaborators who can edit, with two weeks of revision history. Team is $20 per user a month billed annually — 50,000 records per base, 20GB, a year of history — and Business $45 with 125,000 records. Airtable's pricing page publishes the annual per-seat figures only; Enterprise Scale is quoted by sales.
$29/mo
One plan, per business, everything included — however many of you there are. $0 today, first charge after 7 days, cancel in one click. 14-day money-back on the first month. Nothing is metered.
What is in the planWe are not the only answer, and pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon.
A workspace where the orders sit beside the notes. Free to start, then $10 a seat a month.
TrelloA card per order and the stages on a wall. Free, then $5 a user a month billed annually.
Google SheetsThe incumbent: free, endlessly flexible, and the arithmetic is yours to keep right.
The whole categorySix families of tool, what each one answers, and the three questions that pick between them.
For one process, yes: if your base exists to track orders, deposits, production and margin, this replaces it and already knows the awkward cases. As a general alternative to Airtable, no. Airtable is a database you can point at any problem, and nothing here does that.
The Free plan holds 1,000 records per base with up to 5 collaborators who can edit. Team is $20 per user a month billed annually and Business $45; the pricing page publishes the annual per-seat figures only, and Enterprise Scale is quoted by sales. Ordamo is $29 a month for the business, whoever needs to log in.
Yes, if you build it: a field for the deposit, a field for the total, a formula for the balance, and a view that shows what is outstanding. The work is not the building — that is an afternoon — it is the year after, when the model meets a case you did not plan for and the formula keeps returning a number anyway.
For a small studio the free plan is genuinely usable: a thousand records is several years of commissions. The limit that bites first is not records, it is the five collaborators who can edit and the fact that the base only works as well as the last hour you spent on it.
You can share a view, and with an interface you can make it presentable. What you cannot do cheaply is keep it presentable: it is your working table underneath, so every column you add is a decision about what a customer sees. Here it is one link per order that shows what is paid, what is owed and when the piece is due, and it needs no upkeep.
For made-to-order work with deposits, a purpose-built order tool is the honest answer, and this is one at $29 a month. For stocked products, Craftybase — now Stocksmith — starts at $49. For a production floor, Katana is $299 and MRPeasy $49 per user. If your process really is unusual, none of them beats the base you have already built.
Notion's free plan and a spreadsheet are the genuine no-cost options, and both work until deposits and per-order margin become weekly questions. Among purpose-built tools Inventora is the cheapest entry at $19 a month and refers to a free Hobby plan without publishing its limits; nothing else here has a free tier worth planning around. What Ordamo offers instead is a sample workspace you can open with no card.
Yes, and that is the usual outcome when the base does more than orders. Move the order process across, leave the rest where it is, and drop the tables that were only there to support the orders. The two do not need to talk to each other.
Not in the way a base does, and this is the honest limit of the trade. Products carry an attribute library for variants, and an order has the fields an order needs — what was agreed, what is paid, what is owed, when it is due, what it cost. If your process needs a field nobody else needs, Airtable is right and this is not.
Export orders and customers as CSV and import the files as they come — there is no template, the columns are read for you and you confirm what was found before anything saves. Then add the deposits with their dates and the batches currently in production. Start new orders here and let the open ones finish in the base, so there is no cutover day.
Per-seat prices read from airtable.com/pricing on 9 September 2026, which publishes the annual figures only; the record, attachment, collaborator and revision-history limits per plan from Airtable's own plans documentation the same day. Software pricing moves; confirm with the vendor before deciding on the strength of a figure here.
$0 today · first charge after 7 days · cancel in one click
Built for orders that take weeks to deliver