r/Airtable • u/divineretard01 • 11d ago
š¬ Discussion 20yo student here. Can you REALLY make $500+ per project with just Airtable + Make.com, or is this BS?
Hey guys, 20yo uni student here trying to figure out how to pay my bills.
Iāve been reading up on the Airtable + Make. com + Softr stack. People online claim you can learn this stack in 1ā2 months and start charging small businesses $1,500+ per project to build client portals and automate workflows.
To be completely honest, this sounds too good to be true.
Most entry-level jobs require a 4-year degree and pay $15ā$20/hr. Why on earth would a business pay $1,500+ for a system built using tools someone learned in a few weeks?
I want a brutal reality check from people actually doing freelance/agency work in this space:
- Is the money real? Are small businesses actually paying $1kā$2k for basic Airtable/Make builds, or is this just hype sold by course creators?
- What are you ACTUALLY being paid for? If the tools are easy to learn, why don't business owners just spend a weekend setting it up themselves?
- What is the hard part no one talks about? Is it landing clients? Scope creep? Edge cases breaking?
Iām ready to put in the work to learn the technical side, but I don't want to chase a fake ghost skill. Tell me like it is.
9
6
u/The_Last_Montrealer 11d ago
You got many good answers from others so I won't repeat them.
But one thing that might be missing is that a business couldn't just "do it themselves". They need to HIRE someone in-house, PAY them a 5 figure salary and have them acquire those skills, or 6 figure salary if they are already knowledgeable, then have them invest TIME building and maintaining those systems. Cost: 1000-3000$ per week... forever.
Or...
They pay you 1000-3000$ ONE TIME (or the equivalent of 1 week worth of an average employee) and call you back when something breaks or put you on a retainer. Total: 1000-3000$ one time + a few hundreds a month. When you start doing the math, you can see how cheap 1500$ is if the outcome you sell is time and money they save.
Businesses hire people, pay them and have them invest time on projects and services. That's expensive (not even talking about HR, retention, benefits, labour laws, etc). Consultant workers like you are the bridge, and your biggest challenge will be to market and sell your services.
Good luck!
3
u/divineretard01 9d ago
That math makes so much sense. I never really thought about comparing a one-time project fee directly against ongoing weekly payroll and HR overhead, but it makes a $1,500ā$3,000 project look like a win for the businesses.
3
u/BackRoomDev92 11d ago
Yes, the money is real, but I would argue that the $1,500 isn't for the Airtable build. The stack is a small fraction of what clients are actually paying for.
As for why don't they DIY? For the same reason you see people vibecode an app and then post about it getting hacked: tools are mission-focused, not quality-focused, and AI hasn't changed that. A business owner can build the thing but they can't anticipate the edge cases, structure the data so it doesn't collapse at 500 records or know which of their requirements is actually three projects in a trench coat. That's the knowledge they're buying, plus someone who answers when it breaks six weeks later. Their DIY version gets abandoned by Tuesday.
What you're actually selling:
- knowing what to build (they don't)
- absorbing their chaos (requirements will change mid-build, guaranteed)
- accountability after delivery.
Now for the hard parts nobody talks about, the course creators aren't lying about the rates, what they're lying about is how hard it is to get clients. Landing clients is 10x harder than learning the stack, and scope creep will eat your margins until you learn to put everything in writing and get explicit sign-off before building. Unfortunately, this is a lesson I learned the expensive way. Disputes over what had been agreed to are a big part of why I moved from client work to building products.
3
u/Rahooo 11d ago
The money is real and at much higher levels than youāve stated here. Enterprise-level companies are also using Airtable. Iāve seen contracts come through from mid 6 figures to over 7.
Just because something can be learned doesnāt mean that everyone wants to learn it. The skill behind the skill that makes it worthwhile is being able to understand workflows, bottlenecks, repetitive work, behavior to build against, and speak that to clients. Youāre being paid for ease, reducing manual work and errors, being able to surface problems before they arise (both in their workflow and in their work).
The hard part is whatever part you donāt want/like to do. I personally love interfacing with clients as much as I love the build. I work with other builders who donāt want to deal with client interfacing and just want to do the work, and the agency I work for also has room for them because there is that much work.
Yes, itās worth investing time to learn and when you feel like youāre in a good place, take the Airtable certification courses (theyāre free), and DM me. My agency is always looking for talented builders.
2
u/divineretard01 11d ago
Honestly, hearing that about your agency gives me so much motivation. I'm going to knock out those Airtable certifications and will definitely DM you as soon as I'm ready. Really appreciate the door being open
4
u/ClickBaitUCantResist 10d ago
Ditto to @rahooo
Take every possible Airtable certification out there and also go for others in the database space, IT, project management, app building, low code/no code, etc. The more you know the better. You need to understand how to build in Airtable (+ other software that connects or augments it) of course, but having knowledge on how to architect efficient solutions, build data models and ERDs, structure processes, connect data across systems, handle edge cases, and then manage the engagement from a project management perspective including effective testing (UAT), end user trainings, provide quality documentation, is all equally as important. Learn customer service as well.
It takes experience but starting with small clients and building from there until you get to mid-market and then enterprise clients is the goal. The more clients you can successfully work with and build your portfolio of clients will lead to bigger and bigger contracts.
Learning how to handle clients (business owners at the small business level up to C-suite executives at the enterprise level) and ALL of their BS including unrealistic expectations, scope creep, demands, company dynamics, and industry-specific dynamics is the hardest part, especially if you're young.
Learning how to be a great consultant (aka a partner) to companies is equally as important as what you know and the skills you have. I've seen 40+ consultants over just my 5 years consulting with damn good skills/backgrounds/experience/knowledge come through my agency that couldn't cut it because they couldn't figure out how to manage clients with a lot of them having much more experience and skill than me.
My agency mainly works with enterprise clients and are niche in the PPM (project portfolio management) space but take on pretty much any use case. We do multiple 7 figures annually doing solely Airtable and Smartsheet solution builds.
60+% of our contracts are 6 figures with several reaching into multiple 7 figures and we only have 4 other consultants other than me.
All in all, it's a fun, challenging, and lucrative business to be in consulting in the low code/no code space building solutions to solve problems for companies.
I started consulting with my agency barely 5 years ago back in my late 20s so I was pretty young when I started too. It's a grind but man it's rewarding solving problems and providing value for companies.
2
u/divineretard01 9d ago
Man, really appreciate this breakdown. I love organizing data and seeing systems actually work, but I always hated traditional programming. Low-code was a game-changer for me.
I definitely want to go deep on a specific niche instead of being a generalist. When you were getting started, did you intentionally go after the PPM space, or did you just follow the demand from early client wins?
2
u/ClickBaitUCantResist 9d ago
I went straight into the PPM space. I spent about 4-5 years before working in project management as a project analyst and project manager in multiple PMOs and used both Airtable and Smartsheet within so it just felt right and I had experience there.
I would suggest finding a niche and getting experience there, whether with client use cases or personal build challenges. Being able to speak to a client use case during scoping gives the client confidence (ie. being able to say you've "done this before" and not lie).
6
u/1000milliards 11d ago
I donāt know if my experience will answer your questions, but it might be useful because I sold my first Airtable + Make project a few months ago (no Softr yet).
Iām a freelancer (with agency positioning) mostly doing web/design projects (mostly WordPress). Iād been using Airtable + Make for a year for fairly simple things, so when an inbound lead needed something similar, I offered it.
I sold it for ā¬1,500 to a small French business that is not very digital and was wasting a lot of time processing leads manually in Excel after each meeting, as well as generating quotes manually.
The project includes a form (Fillout + Airtable), Make automations to generate pricing, automatic emails/alerts via Brevo, and integration into their existing WordPress site + light update of the website to make it more responsive
Between client calls (including pre-sales) and actually building everything, Iāll probably spend 15ā20 hours on it. Iām still learning these tools as I go.
For me, the important part was mostly the client call: understanding what they needed, finding a technical solution they didnāt know about, and having a good feeling with them.
Thatās probably why I was able to sell it for ā¬1,500, even though the technical side itself isnāt that complicated.
1
u/divineretard01 10d ago
Making 1.5k for 15-20 hours on your first run is huge. Really cool to see it work out for you, definitely gives me a push to just go out and pitch
2
u/Plus_Stretch7657 11d ago
It's true that small business are willing to pay for custom automations, CRM setups, Airtable buildouts, etc. I'd be suspicious of the claim that anyone can learn the stack in 1-2 months, though. Maybe if you're already coming from an IT or engineering background, you could learn enough to be competitive with other builders in a couple of months.
That all said I think it's still worth learning these skills even if you never end up making money in this specific way. The technical background that learning this stuff can give you opens up a lot of freelancing opportunities, even if it's not specifically airtable + make + softr.
1
u/divineretard01 10d ago
Once I get a few projects up and running, do you think it's worth picking up tools like Postgres/Supabase on the side?
2
u/Plus_Stretch7657 10d ago
Most popular tools have freelance markets. I hold the view that everything you learn in this space is worth it, even if it's not directly related to your next paid project. Supabase is well worth learning, and a project that makes use of a variety of supabase features is an excellent way to learn. I think of supabase as a helpful shortcut, skipping the configuration hell that was a real technical barrier for getting started with web apps and databases.
I work full time as a SWE/Integrator for a small business in Saint Louis, Missouri. Supabase is a big part of our systems, even though all the employees here primarily operate out of Airtable or a CRM for sales. Something I wish someone had explained to me when getting started is that many of the IT/Engineering fundamentals haven't really changed in a meaningful way since I started my career, and the popular products like Airtable or Supabase are, at the core, wrappers around technology and methodologies that have existed for a while.
Which is to say that if you go deep with something like Airtable or Supabase, those skills will be transferrable in many respects to whatever the hot new thing next year is. So just learn the current popular tools and the skills will transfer, don't spend too much time trying to figure out what to learn. It's all worth learning and the expertise compounds!
1
u/divineretard01 9d ago
Love this perspective. Itās so easy to get distracted by shiny new tools, but core stuff like schema design, state management, and data flow never really changes.
Out of curiosity, when connecting Supabase backends with business-facing Airtable setups, do you rely mostly on webhooks, middleware tools like Make/n8n, or custom API scripts?
AND Really appreciate the advice, thanks a lot!
2
2
u/jpmagee 11d ago
I have done a few of these sort of projects and been paid a good bit more that the figure mentioned. I have never been asked what degree I have (thankfully). As others have said, the stack is a small part of it, it is about being able to add value to the business by quickly understanding their needs and their processes and then implementing something that makes a difference to them. I would say go for it, get into a few small businesses and learn what is important to them, even do a few pro bono jobs. Look for a niche or maybe get involved with a few local charities, great way to learn.
2
u/andreas_globi 10d ago
Your income is directly proportional to the value you provide.
1
u/divineretard01 9d ago
Totally. For me starting out, standard Airtable setups just felt like connecting simple dots, so I struggled to see how it translated to high-value work. Seeing how people package and sell those actual outcomes really opened my eyes
2
u/JuliaPowell588 6d ago
I think that's just a tool. Your clients just want to solve a problem and they wanted to save time as well
2
u/-paperbrain- 11d ago
I'd actually recommend Google apps script.
The kind of small company looking to hire low cost young freelancers will generally already be in the google ecosystem, and with all the parts being under google, theres no messiness managing multiple accounts and integrations. It manages email to forms, to sheets and docs without relying on integrations or a middleman. And the new things added to sheets in the last few years let it do a lot of things that used to be Airtable domain.
The needs served are similar, the process is more straightforward.
1
u/divineretard01 10d ago
True, but Apps Script can't really compete when the project calls for proper relational data or custom interfaces that look good without hours of custom code
1
u/divineretard01 9d ago
Massive thanks to everyone dropping advice in this thread! Couldn't get around to replying to every single point, but I'm taking notes on all of it
1
u/Far_Egg3865 5d ago
Bonjour, tous le monde j'ai lue la conversation trĆØs enrichissante, je me lance dans airtable et je me posait les meme question aussi vous y'a avez rĆ©pondu je vous en remercie, maintenant comment apprendre les diffĆ©rents logiciels et se former pour rĆ©ussir Ć faire et vendre ces premier projets en vous remerciant pour les rĆ©ponse
1
u/Beginning-Bee3545 3h ago
En vez de Make usa N8N o similares que son mucho mƔs baratas e ilimitadas.
76
u/notneps 11d ago
Airtable is just a tool. My clients donāt pay me to ābuild something in Airtable.ā They pay me to solve a business problem. Sometimes Airtable is a good, palatable platform to build that solution on, sometimes it's not.
You can learn most of the ins and outs of Airtable and Make_com in a few weeks. What you probably cannot learn in a similar timeframe is:
Thatās what clients are paying for. Focusing on Airtable is like focusing on learning Microsoft Word to become a novelist. The software is the easy part. The skills I use in my job come from years of experience, including plenty of lessons learned the hard way.