Every backup tool and export script reads Airtable through its Web API, and Airtable limits that API in two ways: a monthly number of calls per workspace on Free and Team plans, and a per-second rate on every plan. A daily backup of a small base fits easily on Team. On Free, it usually doesn't.
The limits
| Plan | Monthly API calls | When the allowance runs out |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 1,000 | A one-time 30-day grace period, then calls are blocked until the month resets |
| Team | 100,000 | Calls slow to 2 per second until the month resets |
| Business and Enterprise Scale | No monthly cap | Only the per-second limits apply |
On every plan, each base accepts 5 requests per second. Going over returns an error and Airtable asks for a 30-second pause. Traffic from one user's personal access tokens is also limited to 50 requests per second across all bases.
The monthly allowance belongs to the workspace and is shared by everything connected to it: backups, Zapier or Make scenarios, sync tools, scripts and your own integrations.
How many calls a backup uses
The API returns at most 100 records per call, so the count depends mostly on the number of records. A backup that reads the base's structure and then every table needs roughly:
2 calls + 1 per table + 1 per 100 records
Downloading attachment files doesn't count, because files come from separate download links, not API calls. This is how KeepMyBase's daily backup works; other tools use about the same, plus extra calls if they also read comments (one call per record).
| Base | Calls per daily backup | Calls per month (30 days) | Fits on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 tables, 300 records | 8 | 240 | Free |
| 10 tables, 5,000 records | 62 | 1,860 | Team |
| 20 tables, 50,000 records | 522 | 15,660 | Team |
| 30 tables, 250,000 records | 2,532 | 75,960 | Team, if little else uses the API |
Add the numbers up across every base in the workspace, and leave room for your other integrations.
If you're on the Free plan
A daily backup of anything larger than a few hundred records will use up the 1,000 calls. You can:
- back up weekly instead of daily (about a quarter of the calls);
- back up only the bases that matter;
- move the workspace to Team, which also gives you a year of snapshots instead of two weeks.
What happens when the allowance runs out
On Free, after the grace period, Airtable blocks API calls until the month resets, so a backup fails. On Team, calls slow to 2 per second, which makes large backups take much longer but doesn't stop them. A backup tool should tell you when it can't finish rather than skipping days silently.
KeepMyBase stops the run with a message naming the limit and runs again after Airtable resets the allowance.
Checking your usage
Workspace owners can open the workspace's … menu, choose Workspace settings, and find this month's "Public API calls" in the summary; the Usage tab breaks it down by base. Airtable says the detailed breakdown is available on Free workspaces. If a backup and an integration start failing at the same time near the end of the month, the monthly limit is the first thing to check.
Sources: Airtable's support article on API call limits and the Web API rate limits, checked October 17, 2026.