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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?

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

I have lately seen steady improvements in Evernote.

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...

>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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Baserow