Hi everyone,

I understand that you've all been waiting for this request to be fulfilled for a long time so thank you for your patience with us.

With the release of the new Airtable APIs at the end of 2022 we've changed our approach to how we will achieve real-time data, different to that for the beta.

However, to use these APIs we need to create a path for customers to upgrade their Airtable data connections to use the new authentication APIs. The work for this is in progress (as you can see on on our roadmap) and following that we'll be able to start working on bringing real-time Airtable data to all of you.

For those paying for the 5 minute Fast Sync plan at the moment, we'll be reaching out shortly to explain how this plan will be deprecated.

Thanks,

Sze Wing (PM @ Stacker)

Hi all,

I wanted to provide a quick update on some of the work we have been doing recently relating to 'real-time data retrieval`.

We understand how important it is to get data to sync faster between Airtable and Stacker — and we know we should do a better job of updating you on our progress. We’re aware that it is frustrating that Stacker’s sync time is between 5 mins and 15 mins, and this seems unreasonably long compared to some alternative solutions that read data from Airtable completely live. Our technical architecture for ensuring we can serve customers’ apps fast even when they have tens of thousands of records is to cache the data from Airtable within Stacker. This is necessary to achieve high performance with high data volume apps with the current limitations of the Airtable APIs.

We've been experimenting continuously in the background for the past few quarters. Most of these experiments didn't yield the performance we'd expect, so we've not released them publicly.

However, there are still solutions! And we’ve been working on a few different options one of which we’re now actively testing with a small group of customers. The solution is to allow for push updates from Airtable to directly update Stacker and works by adding a script to each table in Airtable. This gives live data sync between Stacker and Airtable and conserves Airtable API requests — which are rate limited.

At present this requires some manual setup, so we’ve been onboarding customers gradually to make sure we identify all the issues before widening the rollout. We’ll post an update to this thread when we’re ready to onboard additional customers.

Stacker team, can you provide an update on the status of this feature? Based on comments, it sounds like this has been in Planned stage for a while now. I would love to get a sense of the current timing here. Thank you.

100% agree with this. We need instant sync. I'm 99% certain another service I've tested, Softr, has an instant sync. To charge more money for 5 minutes sync (not even instant sync), seems unreasonable. I mean let's just upgrade everyone to instant sync. The technology is there.

I think the delay on this thread and lack of attention from Stacker reflects very, very poorly on their product/development team. At the very least, they could have marked this request as planned in 2020 and stuck with it, or after marking it planned once again in 2022, they could at least reply to these comments...

I love Stacker but I can't imagine these limitations and slow responses as doing anything but pushing away their current customers to other solutions like GlideApps or others where the syncing is immediate .

Why is this "Planned" if this is not actually "Planned"? This is by far the biggest limitation to Stacker. MiniExtensions doesn't have this issue, GlideApps doesn't have this issue, Pory doesn't have this issue. It seems like Stacker is the only one that continues to have this issues, years later with funding and a good revenue base. I'm a huge proponent of Stacker but this is becoming indefensible. The least you could do is be transparent in this thread.

Perhaps with Postgre integration will it be faster ? (Airtable possibly being the lagging wheel)

Very excited about this! We're struggling with the balance of separating data into different Airtable bases and waiting 15-20 minutes for synced data to show up in other apps.