I strongly suspect a big chunk of their revenue was enterprise where it was probably used as a CRUD app / Access replacement with proper controls. That's low hanging fruit for Claude and friends, so their renewals/ARR must have started dropping off and they sold while the selling was good.

Eyeing Wikipedia it seems like it sold for about raised capital. Probably very little product value but some b2b contracts to milk?

My (semi-educated) guess: it's about the quality, not quantity, of that revenue. If I opened their books, I expect to see lots of SMB customers with low deal sizes and non-trivial churn, non-sticky product usage, not many large enterprises signing up, and low NRR. Add a high customer acquisition cost in an undifferentiated space to complete the picture.

I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.

(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)

Probably they are getting eaten by new AI integrations and the numbers don’t look good.

It’s strange, I thought they were in pole position to integrate into vibe coded apps with bolt and co. Maybe be a strategy issue?

that cant be right if so they got an excellent deal ...$1BN cash (!)

ARR has always been a bullshit number but it is an especially bullshit number nowadays because AI has destroyed software margins.

If these numbers are remotely true, there's either a crucial number missing or investors are utter idiots who forced this sale. Won't be surprised if it's the latter.

Assuming M&A deals take at least a few months to close, this acquisition was probably set in motion around April, when SaaS sentiment was near rock bottom and cash-flow machines like Cloudflare, Adobe, and Snowflake were getting crushed simply because Anthropic announced something.

Was anything else needed to be added to the product?

I was fine with meetup.com in its original form: it had the community of people wanting to go to events, it let you share your events to these people. People showed up to events.

And the price you pay is for you to access their users. If you think it's just an RSVP page, vibe code one in 5 minutes and try and see how many people will show up to your events.

It's a modern product development failure to think that you must be adding new features all the time. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Did users leave for other products/solutions?

And yet, with all the promise of vibecoding and AI, nobody has created a clone that undercuts it in price.

I don't think this is quite accurate. The main question is how much revenue does Sortable bring in each year and after all expenses, how much cash flow does Airtable generate for its owners every year? I am positive it is nowhere near a billion dollars a year. If we roughly say it is annual recurring revenue of USD 0.5B a year, now the question is how much can bending spoon choke airtable neck forcing it to reduce expenses without meaningfully reducing revenue.

> We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.

I laughed so hard. But I mean seriously...

Maybe going against the grain but I think their product philosophy is actually really interesting. They basically just buy the database. Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly, with a small team, low overheads, and ruthlessly optimise for efficiency, and amortise shared in-house resources across the product portfolio.

There's a strong logic to that.

I'd rather Bending Spoons than Broadcom. I can still use Komoot but I can't even access my license codes from VMWare.

You could also phrase it as "Bending Spoons is where dying products go".

Ive been happy with all the improvements they are making to Komoot do far.

I have lately seen steady improvements in Evernote.

Airtable has got too expensive for all the weird limitations you end up either writing tons of weird hacks around or paying another sass product to fix for you because airtable don't want to engineer a solution.

Can't say it'll be hugely missed whatever they do at this point.

This goes for almost all software.

'entshittification' in software is pretty much almost a standard.

Software and businesses that goes through these stages:

Venture Capital, Private Equity, Acquisitions, Ads / Sponsors, Raising Prices due to competition, etc.

Always get enshittified.

Coda got acquired by Grammarly who then installed Shishir Mehrotra (Coda CEO) as CEO of Grammarly. They then acquired Superhuman Mail and renamed the whole thing Superhuman. They also acquired Rows to bring a formal spreadsheet into the mix to add to their Coda tables and productivity suite. (Well played.)

I was very surprised to see Airtable sold for reportedly less than what they raised and had assumed AI tailwinds (easy database GUI) would benefit them well. Presumably, this was insufficient to overcome enterprise revenue headwinds and a chilly SaaS financing market.

I do wonder how this might have played differently had their product and API been better engineered as a database for developers through faster read/write and data scale... unnecessary in PLG-focused pre-AI world, but an interesting avenue for agentic growth nonetheless.

Tough break for the Airtable team. It was a great product and I have recommended it often to small business owners over the years.

You may want to start looking at alternatives. I work at Grist https://getgrist.com, AMA.

> Omni, their AI agent was terrible

What was terrible about it?

>Make offers so low...

Yes, all the company execs at Airtable and the VCs and their lawyers and finance guys and advisors are stupid and were incapable of fielding rival offers...

Businesses tend to sell for their market value at that point in time.

I’ve always felt like their money went into marketing, not actual capabilities. It still feels like a Fisher-Price tier platform imo.

i gotta say, there were some bumps post-acquistion, but evernote is still going strong. not too AI-sloppy, a few new features here and there, reliability still aok. they were worse pre-acquisition imx.

The difference is an aggressively growing and profitable business vs. stagnant-at-best-degrowth-at-worst business.

Why not simply rebuild what you need with Claude? Airtable seems to me as a prototyping product. Once you know what you want, formulate it as product objectives and ask Claude how it could be implemented from scratch. Dont even give it any ideas about Django. Just ask it what technologies are sensible for what you need, read and verify its answers, lock in a stack, plan your features and implement them.

You will be surprised how many things you could not fix in Airtable or where awkward workarounds can be solved much more elegantly if you (or Claude) consider them straight in the design phase. Just make sure to start with your objectives and _maaaybe_ desired workflows to avoid biasing Claude too much and that you end up rebuilding Airtable.

Look at Grist.

You maybe justly concerned for it being an open source project that is backed by one small company that sells hosted plans.

The difference is that Grist is a core part of the French Government’s open source web applications La Suite

https://www.getgrist.com/

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/grist

I am using Baserow (https://baserow.io/) happily.

As others said, baserow is a good one. Pretty easy to self-host with something like https://malmo.network/store/baserow (founder here)

Definitely try Baserow https://baserow.io/

I've heard good things about https://teable.ai/ for airtable-like flexibility. With more standardized CRM scenarios I'm going to try https://twenty.com/ with the next opportunity

Not open source, but free for small teams: https://visualdb.com/

Fibery is free for small team (but not an open source).

Kind of amazing Airtable couldn’t turn vibe coding in Airtable itself into something worth charging for.

But they have had a distinct lack of imagination for a very long time.

On top of that, isn't Bending Spoons famous for enshittify anything they buy to squeeze every single cent they can? Meaning that their fame would push even more companies/people to do a vibecoded replacement with just the features they need.

Airplane was an awesome product, but I think that was basically just an aquihire. I don't think Airplane had built a sustainable business.

Having read their IPO prospectus, my reading - They buy a company which they feel has a sticky product for its loyal userbase and then integrate as many of its common services into its in-house platform e.g. data

They then fire nearly all of the existing new companies staff and think of all the ways they can maximally monetise the existing userbase. Growing the product via investing in it isn't a priority, revenue stream is.

They get a lot of stick, but in fairness they are up front about their business model; they don't hide the fact that they are going to fire most people, unlike traditional private equity firms who make false promises.

That goes a long way yes. Most of these products have built up to hundreds or maybe thousands of engineers over the years, and if you can keep it going with just a handful in Italy, that is a serious cost optimisation.

Find product that users like and can be difficult to switch away from, cut operating costs to the bone, and jack up prices. Ideally the money you extract from the remaining customers pays for the acquisition plus generates a profit. Someone in a previous thread compared it to a perpetual bond with fluctuating payouts or a royalty stream, the discounted future earnings eventually converge to 0.

The same thing Broadcom is doing with VMware.

They look for companies which got fat on free money with impossible valuations which are dead ducks. The free money period ended so they can't raise more money and if they do it will be a substantial down valuation so investors won't approve it as it would cristalise a loss on their portfolio.

These companies all pay insanely high silicon valley wages and deliver very little actual product development velocity for the wage costs involved.

The founders don't have the b**s to do the necessary haircuts themselves so they sell. Bending spoons takes the reputation hit that the founder should have taken and makes severe cuts.

BS then rationalises the roadmap, and either keeps it alive or invests into it depending on expected return.

Nothing particularly revolutionary other than they are an execution machine.

They also hike the price so significantly most people stop using it. See meetup.com for example.

Possibly grist https://www.getgrist.com/blog/grist-v-airtable/ ?

Check out Bluetivity. Tons of functionality and easy to use.

Baserow

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It depends what you need, there are many options these days. https://chatgpt.com/?hints=search&q=Any%20suggestion%20to%20...?