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Airtable acquires Airplane

airplane.dev

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Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#131

Post by RyanHamilton »

HEGalloway wrote: post #107
encoderer wrote: post #100

we do a lot of cron-related seo and for years the airplane guys have been buying ads on tons of cron-related terms including our own brand, with the pitch “ditch your cron jobs for airplane”. Sigh. It truly sucks for the devs that took them up on that pitch. Meanwhile cron is still working fine. In their defense, dev tools businesses are hard. We’ve navigated it by staying lean with very efficient go to market, but t…

> dev tools businesses are hard I understand why dev tools business are hard, i'm just curious as to what makes them hard? I know one of the things that make it a difficult sell is that devs don't buy much but what else?

1. You are trying to sell software to someone that often loves writing software themselves. 2. You often can't convince them that they could NOT recreate your product easily. They will pick a tiny subset of functionality and say "oh I whipped up this demo that does 90% of what we need last week". 3. They don't care about the maintenance cost of self-written. In some cases that's their job security. 4. Even if it makes them 50% more productive, their hours or pay won't change.

This is why the "best" products are often in boring areas OR have a unique platform advantage. Think of paypal/stripe.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#132

Post by asanwal »

swyx wrote: post #77
thrwy_hyperbase wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway because I worked there: Re the 1-2b tweet, two important numbers (2023 ARR, and hence growth rate) are wildly off. The tweeter runs cbinsights, and then quotes cbinsights in the tweet. Super wried.

hmm thanks. anand should have gotten that feedback, and yet his correction ( https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703598605406265535 ) wasn't "hey i was super off"

The analysis largely holds tbh even if the ARR is higher. At some point, euphoric private market valuations don't hold when there are public comps (of which there are many for Airtable)

And the company if you compare to those public comps is still worth a fraction of its last valuation although to their credit is probably is worth more than its total equity funding.

I'm happy to update the analysis if someone has verifiable revenue figures - else I have to use the figures that have been leaked or given to the press historically.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#133

Post by antisthenes »

xyst wrote: post #91
antisthenes wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to bash on B-schools. There are plenty of grifters and unremarkable people at A-schools who got in there with money and a white-sounding name. The rest is accurate.

B-schools is “business schools”. I wasn’t referring to the “prestige” of certain colleges (ie, “Ivy League” vs public school)

Oh, my bad. It's the first time I see it written this way.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#134

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

rubenfiszel wrote: post #98

(Founder of windmill.dev, the closest alternative to Airplane and we are OSS) Congrats on the acquisition Airplane team. You were a strong inspiration for us, a precursor and set a high-quality bar for pro-code developer platforms. I have nothing but respect for the Airplane team and we probably wouldn't exist in our current form without your competition. We are ready to migrate all Airplane customers and the migrati…

Your self hosted pricing seems difficult to understand. Why limit SSO users? Secondly, prices include per vcpu ? Is it like microsft style per CPU pricing ?

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#135

Post by rubenfiszel »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #134
rubenfiszel wrote: post #98

(Founder of windmill.dev, the closest alternative to Airplane and we are OSS) Congrats on the acquisition Airplane team. You were a strong inspiration for us, a precursor and set a high-quality bar for pro-code developer platforms. I have nothing but respect for the Airplane team and we probably wouldn't exist in our current form without your competition. We are ready to migrate all Airplane customers and the migrati…

Your self hosted pricing seems difficult to understand. Why limit SSO users? Secondly, prices include per vcpu ? Is it like microsft style per CPU pricing ?

We limit SSO users in the pro versions vs enterprise because the pro version is only meant for small teams.

Prices include vCPU so that it is linear to your compute cost. Windmill is also used at scale for high-throughput and heavy jobs on enormous clusters but with very few users. We approximate that the compute part of the pricing will be approximately the same as your ec2 cost for your workers.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#136

Post by purec0de »

dvdhsu wrote: post #66

I have a lot of respect for the product and the folks at Airplane. And I (even as a "competitor") find it sad that such a great product is being shut down. My best guess is that they were running out of cash. This to me is pretty surprising... because it's actually not hard to make a SaaS business profitable. You just have to build a great product, and be disciplined at hiring. It's weird that they seem to have done…

Another competitor of Retool with around 150 employees is very far away from 1m in revenue as far as I know. They recently did a layoff as well. VC money that flowed in 2021 has created a bunch a money burning machines.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#137

Post by foxbee »

ctb9 wrote: post #2

Welp, this changes my 2024 outlook. I've been using Airplane.dev since their first post on HN, and I was repeatedly delighted with the way the product "just worked", I thought they made great choices about code vs. config vs. admin, and their feature development velocity was superb. I was ready to really jump in and move beyond simple internal tools to build complex, mission critical internal systems in airplane. Doe…

Give Budibase a whirl - it's open source and sits between Airtable and Airplane from a UX perspective.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#138

Post by bradmenezes »

(Cofounder of Superblocks, an Airplane alternative)

Congrats to the Airplane team for joining forces with Airtable, both teams and products are stellar and know people on both sides.

Airplane has been a thought-leader in the code-first approach to internal tools and brought to market a compelling DevX around infinitely extensible internal tools – this inspired our custom components [0]

For any customers looking to make a switch, the Superblocks team is ready to help, you can email us directly at help@superblocks.com or use live chat on our website and our Technical Support Engineering team would be happy to lend a hand.

Superblocks has the same concepts as Airplane: workflows, scheduled jobs and views, though our views are achieved through drag-and-drop. Similar to Airplane we have an option to deploy a hybrid on-prem agent [1] to ensure your data never leaves your VPC, though our agent uses bring-your-own-key (BYOK) to sign application definitions. Customers never have to run stateful services on-prem, schedule downtime or handle painful upgrades.

Some of the things developers love about Superblocks beyond the DevX and agent architecture are control flow [2] and streaming [3] via Kafka, Kinesis, OpenAI and LLMs.

For developers who want to take full ownership of what they build, we have a vision around “export to code”, enabling you to build in Superblocks and run on your servers. It’s on our roadmap and something developers are excited about.

[0] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-custom-componen...

[1] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/superblocks-on-prem-agent

[2] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-control-blocks-...

[3] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-real-time-strea...

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#139

Post by gorkemcetin »

Rapzid wrote: post #120
ttymck wrote: post #115

All the comments here seem to be interpreting "sunsetting the platform" to mean existing users will have no access to airplane features. Couldn't it just mean "airplane will be part of the Airtable platform moving forward"?

Almost certainly not.

It would otherwise be a part of the announcement.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#140

Post by temp_praneshp »

wolverine876 wrote: post #110
temp_praneshp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why are you reposting a comment that the author deleted?

Parent made a wildly inaccurate statement, and had a (quickly deleted) snarky follow-up to jeremyjh's reply. If I come back to this thread in a year, I don't want to be confused.

It seems like you flagged my comment because you didn't like it, consider it similar behavior.

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