Yes bending spoon will stop growing these companies and stop add features. These role will be just replaced by engineers and employee in Italy, where bending spoon is form, and where people cost many times less than in the US.
Italy is like a higher quality India in a sense.
Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
161–170 of 522 posts
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to do this and have a quite marketable resume, but it is extremely, extremely, unclear to me how you build a clientele or where you'd even start. Only road I can imagine is highly specialized industry, with money, that often has time-sensitive needs, and smart management that knows how to recognize value or trusts their tech management. And even then I think you'd have to start in the coal-mines version of i…
The hard part is to get the client on the phone. Once you have them on the phone, you can not only better understand their problem but also demonstrate your skill and credibility in a way no resume or branding could. At that point it's just a sales game - generally you'd avoid hourly rates and sell them a solution (see my other comment) which will maximize your effective hourly rate while being structured in a way th…
That last part is exactly why I charge $999/hour.
I'll offer a specific solution that takes me a week of full time work (14 hours each day -- I'm focused) for about $10k, which is roughly $150/hour if you want to calculate it that way, or another specific solution that takes me 3 weeks of 10 hour days for $15k which amounts to $100/hour. And like any good consultant, I'll eat the cost if I'm wrong. Other times I'll charge $40k when I know it will take a few months of dedicated work and I have to really lock in.
In practice, I never actually charge hourly. So the $999/hour is really Schrodinger's rate.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#163From "Vimeo to be acquired by Bending Spoons in $1.38B all-cash deal" ( https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/vimeo-to-be-acquired-by-be... ): > Bending Spoons has a pattern of acquiring companies, then laying off staff and cutting features. For example, Bending Spoons acquired note-taking and task management app Evernote in 2022, after which the company laid off most of its U.S. and Chile staff and moved operations to E…
Elon Musk acquired Twitter and fired %80 of the employees and it was just fine. I bet there's so many more people that can be let go from all tech industry. It's mature and product discovery is mostly locked behind advertisement so what's left is exploitation. If you think about it, as long as you don't mingle much with the product that works it keeps working indefinitely. It's no different than running Excel or What…
Losing tens of billions of dollars on a company now ruined down to single digit billions of revenue is a weird thing to describe as "just fine". That looks like abject failure as a business.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#164I have no hope for Vimeo. BS took over Evernote and I cancelled the subscription after a year. Their idea of value for the customer vs the price is not realistic.
Just realized the acronym for Bending Spoons is BS. Seemingly appropriate.
In my youth -- the mid-90s -- one of the most scathing slurs our circle of friends could bestow on a person was that they were 'a spoon-bender'.
Uri Geller being a … well, this is a family site. Finish that yourself.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
My best guess is that a part of it is replacing US (or in this case Israeli) devs with much cheaper Italian/European ones, earning ~a quarter of their US counterparts and working longer hours, as Bending Spoons has an extremely competitive hiring process, and is probably the highest paying tech company in Italy
Actually they're paying very competitive salaries. For example: https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/positions/67c6dc18c70c531d6db... .
> Typically, we offer individuals at the start of their career an annual salary of £85,797 in London and €66,065 elsewhere in Europe.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you get clients on that rate? Genuinely curious
Hourly rates are inherently risky for clients - you're asking them to part with money with no guaranteed outcome, so there's a natural ceiling where the financial risk becomes untenable regardless of your expertise and reputation. Clients don't buy hours though, they buy solutions. They have problems costing them money or preventing revenue and they'll pay a percentage of that value to solve it. When you price based…
OK so in this case how do you set the price? Based on the final solution to be delivered? Can you give one (or a few) concrete examples by any chance?
I am not sure if I fully understood what you meant exactly with your (detailed) reply.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#167I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…
It’s a mystery to me, almost every product on market has serious user-facing issues that never get fixed. As if every company indeed have no development team, while all of them retain teams of developers.
It is simple. A productive developer can either:
* Fix things
* Build new things
Add to this that things naturally break. Try a git reset to 1 year ago and deploy that to prod, for example.
Add to that new features tend to add new bugs.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#168From "Vimeo to be acquired by Bending Spoons in $1.38B all-cash deal" ( https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/vimeo-to-be-acquired-by-be... ): > Bending Spoons has a pattern of acquiring companies, then laying off staff and cutting features. For example, Bending Spoons acquired note-taking and task management app Evernote in 2022, after which the company laid off most of its U.S. and Chile staff and moved operations to E…
It's interesting to think about which current companies will be acquired by BS in the future. Evernote and WeTransfer were huge ten years ago.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vimeo you manage your brand and presentation. YouTube you have little control over where or how your video is presented. Vimeo also provides VOD for some large brands and media companies.
Yeah, it's this. It's a hosting platform, not a social media platform. You see a ton of people who have short films, art projects, commercial portfolios and stuff like that hosted at Vimeo. They don't need/want comments, discoverability, or to deal with things like automated DRM takedowns. Clean, simple, video hosting.
I built my own course presentation platform (for my own courses, not as a thing I resell), but I wasn't going to host my own videos. I use Vimeo. It's great: I upload to them, embed an iframe, job done. I don't care about maintaining a video player or bandwidth or subtitles or…
Literally the week after I launched my thing, they got bought. I have no idea what I'll do if they go to shit.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can always be added to software. If those new features create new product lines and attract new revenue, then the software engineers' salaries are more than paying for themselves. But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as mu…
> Software is never "finished" Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.
Potential revenue growth is only as finite as your ideas (and ability to execute on them).
Just look at Google. They could have stopped writing new software at any point and been just fine. But in the long run they'd have missed out on trillions of dollars.
As with everything in business, it comes down to risk/reward. Not every risk pays off, but some do.