u/blizzardstorm91

I’ve been working through a workflow that was getting close to Airtable’s 50-automation limit, and the surprising part wasn’t the limit itself. It was realizing how much duplicate logic had accumulated over time.

In a sample setup with about a dozen tables and roughly 18,000 records, the biggest improvements came from:

• Removing old disabled automations.
• Combining status-based workflows that shared the same trigger.
• Adding explicit “Needs Processing” flags instead of triggering on every edit.
• Moving non-urgent batch updates to n8n.
• Logging failures instead of letting them disappear silently.

The first version didn’t work well because every small record update triggered another run. After adding clearer state fields, daily runs dropped from roughly 1,400 to 520.

At some point, adding another automation stops being the solution. How are you handling automation sprawl in larger bases?