Airtable Free has no Run a script action: start Sume runs elsewhere

Airtable's automations page says the Run a script action is not available on the Free plan. If you planned to call Sume from a script inside an Airtable automation, that route is closed on Free. The documented alternative is to start the Sume run from a service you control, with a normal API key, and write only the results back as records.

Where each step can live

Airtable's page also gives monthly run limits and history retention per plan, which shape what a Free base can do. The Sume calls themselves are plain HTTPS requests: POST /v1/formats/{handle}/{slug}/runs for one run or .../bulk-runs for up to 100.

Steps

Keep Airtable as the planning sheet and the ledger, not the engine.

• Export the rows that are ready, with their record ids, to the service that will call Sume.
• Create one run or one bulk queue per batch, and use the record id in the Idempotency-Key.
• Poll GET /v1/format-run-queues/{id} or the run receipt until terminal.
• Write the output URL, status and run id back to each record through Airtable's own API or an import.

What Sume does not do

Sume does not connect to Airtable itself; we found no Airtable integration in Sume's docs. This post also does not say that a paid Airtable plan can call Sume from a script without limits, since the page we read lists only availability and we did not test script network access. Check the script action's own documentation before you design around it.

If you do move to a paid plan, the monthly run counts still apply to every trigger, so the cheaper pattern of one scheduled automation that updates many records is worth keeping.

A small outside service

The outside service can be tiny: a scheduled job that reads the ready rows through Airtable's own API, creates one bulk queue, stores the queue id, and polls it. It does not need a webhook receiver at all if you poll, which also means Airtable counts no trigger runs for the deliveries. Keep the Sume API key in that service's secret store and never in a base field.

Idempotency by record

Naming the idempotency key after the Airtable record id gives you a free guard: if your scheduler fires twice, the second request with the same key and body returns the first run, and a changed body returns a conflict instead of a second paid run.