Airtable Business, 10 seats → Baserow, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, Baserow saves you $13,517 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$396.60/hrBelow that rate, moving to Baserow pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Airtable Business.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Airtable Business $45.00/month × 10 seats, billed annual | $450.00 |
| Every month | $450.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-2c-4gb 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 80 GB disk · 3 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $20.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 50 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.35 |
| Your time 0.75 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $37.50 |
| Every month | $57.85 |
| Migration, once 12 hours of your time, our estimate | $600.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $20.00 vc2-2c-4gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $24.00 Linode 4GB
- DigitalOcean $24.00 2 vCPU · 4 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $392.15 |
| After one year | $4,106 |
| After 3 years | $13,517 |
Or don't run it yourself
PikaPods runs Baserow from $6.70/month. Runs the same open-source software, applies updates, and takes daily encrypted backups to storage you own. The maintenance hours drop to zero, because not spending them is the entire product.
| PikaPods Baserow their published minimum for this app | $6.70 |
| Your time nothing per month; they patch it and back it up | $0.00 |
| Every month | $6.70 |
| Migration, once 6 hours — half our estimate for the self-hosted route, since there is no server to build | $300.00 |
| After 3 years, against Airtable Business | $15,659 |
At $50 an hour that saves $15,659 over 3 years, against $13,517 for running it yourself.
That figure is PikaPods's own minimum for Baserow and rises with the CPU, memory and storage you give it — it is not the same allocation as the Vultr box priced above, and a busy install will cost more. Verified 19 Oct 2026 from their catalogue.
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Airtable's automations, scripting and the extension marketplace
- Interface Designer and published interfaces
- Enterprise controls that Baserow gates behind its own paid tier
You gain
- Postgres underneath, queryable by anything you own
- Free seats at a tier where Airtable charges $45 each
- A documented Airtable importer
If you decide to do it
There is a deployment kit for this one: a pinned Docker Compose stack with no default passwords, an install script, a backup that encrypts before it leaves the machine, and — the part almost nobody ships — a restore drill that nightly restores the newest backup into a throwaway database and checks your data is actually in it. It has been deployed and run, not just written.
The kits live in the repository, generated from a spec so the pinned image tags are checked against the registry on every build.
Read this before you decide
- Baserow's advanced and enterprise features are separately licensed. The comparison here is against the free core; check the feature matrix if you need row colouring, audit logs or SSO.
- Twelve hours assumes a handful of bases. A decade of accumulated Airtable across a company is a much bigger job.
Is the project alive?
baserow/baserow has 6,175 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (2.4.1) 6 days ago. Its licence is not one GitHub recognises automatically, so check the repository before you rely on it. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Airtable figure is the site's own wording: “Business is available at $45/user/month when billed annually”.
| Airtable pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| baserow/baserow activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.