Airtable counts failed runs too: a 100-item Sume batch on Free

Airtable counts an automation run each time a trigger is invoked, whether or not its actions succeed, and its support page lists 100 runs a month per workspace on Free. So if each Sume delivery from a 100-item bulk queue triggers one automation run, a single queue uses the whole Free month, including any deliveries that fail on your side. Plan for the count before you wire a holiday batch to an Airtable automation.

The plan limits

The table gives the Airtable monthly run limits per workspace from the support page, next to what a queue of 100 items means for each one. The Sume side is one webhook delivery per item that carries a webhook_url, with retries on top if your endpoint refuses.

Steps to keep the count down

The goal is fewer trigger invocations, not fewer videos.

• Give only the items you need a communication.webhook_url, and poll the queue for the rest.
• Poll the queue with GET /v1/format-run-queues/{id} and write the results to Airtable in one batch from a single scheduled automation.
• Fix the receiving side first. Sume retries a refused delivery up to 10 times, and each retry that reaches your trigger may count as a run.
• Check the run counter in your workspace after the first ten items before you release the other ninety.

What Sume does not do

Sume does not know your Airtable plan or your monthly count, and it will not stop delivering when you run out. Whether a retried Sume delivery is counted as a separate Airtable run depends on how you wire the trigger, so test it with a handful of items and read the counter. The numbers above come from Airtable's page as read today; check your own plan page before you commit a campaign to them.

If the batch must go through Airtable and the limit is tight, use the queue's own polling endpoint from a scheduled script on your side and write one summary update per queue.

A budgeting example

Suppose you run three queues of 100 items in a campaign week and every item has a webhook into an automation. That is 300 trigger invocations before any retry. On Team, with 25,000 monthly runs, that is about 1.2 percent of the allowance and nobody notices; on Free it is three times the entire month. The difference is not the Sume side at all, which is why the plan limit belongs in the same planning sheet as the spend cap.

Cheaper wiring

A common cheaper design is to let the bulk queue finish, then run one scheduled automation that reads the whole queue and updates every record in a loop inside that single run. That is one counted run for a hundred videos, at the cost of waiting for the slowest item and writing the polling code yourself.