Airtable Team, 5 seats → NocoDB, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, NocoDB saves you $2,034 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$134.74/hrBelow that rate, moving to NocoDB pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Airtable Team.
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 Team $20.00/month × 5 seats, billed annual | $100.00 |
| Every month | $100.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-1c-2gb 1 vCPU · 2 GB RAM · 55 GB disk · 2 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $10.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 25 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.17 |
| Your time 0.5 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $25.00 |
| Every month | $35.17 |
| Migration, once 6 hours of your time, our estimate | $300.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $10.00 vc2-1c-2gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $12.00 Linode 2GB
- DigitalOcean $12.00 1 vCPU · 2 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $64.83 |
| After one year | $478 |
| After 3 years | $2,034 |
Or don't run it yourself
PikaPods runs NocoDB from $3.10/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 NocoDB their published minimum for this app | $3.10 |
| Your time nothing per month; they patch it and back it up | $0.00 |
| Every month | $3.10 |
| Migration, once 3 hours — half our estimate for the self-hosted route, since there is no server to build | $150.00 |
| After 3 years, against Airtable Team | $3,338 |
At $50 an hour that saves $3,338 over 3 years, against $2,034 for running it yourself.
That figure is PikaPods's own minimum for NocoDB 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 and scripting block — NocoDB's equivalents are thinner
- The interface designer and published interfaces
- A large marketplace of extensions and templates
You gain
- A real Postgres database underneath, queryable with SQL by anything you own
- No record limits per base
- Free seats, which is the entire argument for teams above about four people
Read this before you decide
- NocoDB has a direct Airtable import, which is why the migration estimate is low. Verify formula fields after import — they are the part that most often does not survive.
- Attachment-heavy bases need more disk and more backup volume than the defaults here.
Is the project alive?
nocodb/nocodb has 65,293 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (2026.09.1) 20 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: “our Team plan is available for $20/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 |
| nocodb/nocodb activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 25 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.