Platform Choice
Part of No-code costs and vendor risk: Bubble and Airtable
Estimating the cost of customer-facing portal access
Forecast invited and active customer users, compare portal licensing models, and account for permissions that change the bill.
Estimate access cost by forecasting the external population and applying each platform’s billable unit and rate. Airtable Portals lists a rate per guest; AppSheet requires a licence for every app user, including external and unauthenticated users; Power Pages prices authenticated and anonymous users in capacity packs per website.
Power Pages’ Australian list prices are AU$299.30 per 100 authenticated users per website per month and AU$112.20 per 500 anonymous users per website per month, paid yearly. The prices exclude GST; the payment page shows amounts payable including GST, if applicable, before purchase.
Forecast the people and their access
Forecast a normal month and a busy month for each external population. For Power Pages, keep authenticated users and anonymous visitors separate, and forecast them per website. For AppSheet, forecast signed-in users and guest users, because guests are usually counted by device.
| Population or measure | Count to prepare | Access-billing context |
|---|---|---|
| Airtable Portals external collaborators | External collaborators who need portal access | Billed per guest through the Portals add-on. |
| AppSheet external users | Signed-in and guest users who need app access | One licence per user, or a Publisher Pro subscription per public app. |
| Authenticated Power Pages use | Authenticated sign-ins per website for the selected report period | Authenticated user monthly capacity add-on. |
| Anonymous Power Pages use | Anonymous user site accesses per website for the selected report period | Anonymous user monthly capacity add-on. |
Apply the relevant model
Airtable Portals is a paid add-on for Team, Business and Enterprise Scale plans, and a full seat is not required for each guest. Its listed billable unit is the guest: $8 per guest per month, or $120 per month for 15 guests. Business and Enterprise Scale add custom sign-in branding, admin activity logs and control over which email domains can access the portal.
For an Airtable Portals estimate, multiply the guest count by $8 per month; the listed 15-guest option costs $120 per month.
AppSheet counts every app user, signed-in or guest, and you need as many licences as total users. Listed prices are USD $5 (Starter), USD $10 (Core) and USD $20 (Enterprise Plus) per user per month. External users of an organisation’s app use the same licence as the app owner, or an AppSheet User Pass where purchased.
For a public AppSheet app without sign-in or sensitive data, Publisher Pro costs $50 per month per app for an unlimited number of users. Such apps have Core features but no user sign-in or security filters, so they suit open information portals rather than customer records.
Power Pages uses monthly capacity add-ons for authenticated and anonymous users. Each capacity pack covers 100 authenticated users or 500 anonymous users per website per month, and an administrator must allocate the capacity to a Microsoft Power Platform environment.
Power Pages reports show authenticated sign-ins and anonymous site accesses across a tenant’s websites and environments. A user who accesses a website for the first time in a month is not counted again that month, and the reports can be filtered by website ID, environment ID or date range.
Use the Power Pages capacity management experience in the Power Platform admin centre to monitor authenticated and anonymous consumption. To see total monthly consumption, add up the Billed Quantity values for the month.
Price the normal and busy months
For each Power Pages website, round each forecast up to a whole pack: authenticated packs are the forecast divided by 100, rounded up; anonymous packs are the forecast divided by 500, rounded up. The monthly estimate before GST is (authenticated packs × AU$299.30) + (anonymous packs × AU$112.20).
Worked example: a normal month forecast at no more than 100 authenticated users and 500 anonymous users for one website needs one pack of each, so the estimate is AU$299.30 plus AU$112.20 before GST. If the busy month goes just over 100 authenticated users, that part becomes 2 × AU$299.30, while the anonymous part stays one pack up to 500 users.
The listed Power Pages monthly prices are paid yearly. The payment page shows the amount payable including GST, if applicable, before purchase.
Use the normal-month and busy-month forecasts to calculate separate estimates. For Airtable Portals, apply the guest count to the listed per-guest rate for each forecast; for AppSheet, multiply total signed-in and guest users by the plan's per-user price.
