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Airtable acquires Airplane

airplane.dev

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Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#31

Post by ralmidani »

morgante wrote: post #19
loeber wrote: post #15

I don't get it. According to the blogpost, 450,000 organizations use Airplane, and over 50% of Fortune 500s are paying customers? Okay, that suggests a viable business. And then they're shutting down? Normally you'd expect to see some layoffs and a paring down to profitability: it is SAAS, after all, so you'd expect high gross margins that could be operated by a skeleton crew if necessary. I'm wondering what happened…

> Over 450,000 organizations use Airtable and over 50% of the Fortune 500 are paying customers That’s Airtable (the acquirer) not Airplane. I’d be astonished if Airplane had anywhere near that much traction.

Airplanes don’t need traction, they need lift.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#33

Post by grpt »

For an alternative to airplane.dev, you can checkout Windmill.

https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

"Open-source developer infrastructure for internal tools (APIs, background jobs, workflows and UIs). Self-hostable alternative to Airplane, Pipedream, Superblocks and a simplified Temporal with autogenerated UIsm and custom UIs to trigger workflows and scripts as internal apps.

Scripts are turned into sharable UIs automatically, and can be composed together into flows or used into richer apps built with low-code. Supported script languages supported are: Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash, SQL, and GraphQL. "

If you search HN, you'll find the creator of Windmill comment on comparisons to airplane.dev:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#35

Post by swyx »

> As part of this transition, we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1. We’ve closed new signups, and existing users will be receiving an email with further details.

> To all our users and customers: we are sincerely grateful for your interest, support, and feedback over the years. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to learn about, collaborate with, and assist your organizations.

i was/am a fan of the airplane founders but this is so disappointing. what went wrong? no transparency here to the users and customers they are grateful for. no lessons to pass on to others. no reassurances to the rest of the b2b software community, so people default to "startups bad" mentality seen in other hn comments here. to be clear we are not owed any of that, there's always a story that we don't know about. just disappointing but we'll live :)

Also didnt Airtable just layoff 230 people 4 months ago. now they're acquihiring?

Edit: Airtable also speculated to be worth 1-2b now: https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703492397739516068?lang=...

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#37

Post by greatgib »

veeti wrote: post #3

"Thousands of engineers use Airplane to rapidly build UIs and workload automation for engineering, support, and operations teams." "As part of this transition, we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1." So these "thousands of engineers" will only have two months to redo all of their work?

Probably a right punition for people thinking that they can be lazy and build their business critical apps on a random startup proprietary and closed source SaaS.

Not to forget again that the cloud is just someone else's computer...

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#39

Post by swyx »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8
veeti wrote: post #3

"Thousands of engineers use Airplane to rapidly build UIs and workload automation for engineering, support, and operations teams." "As part of this transition, we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1." So these "thousands of engineers" will only have two months to redo all of their work?

Potentially an acquihire due to exhausting runway? Would align with the idea of a startup funding crunch in the current macro, but only someone with transaction details and willing to violate an NDA (if one exists) would be able to share (if details aren’t going to be made public). Depending on comp, benefits, and infra, it is not outside of the realm of possibility to burn through $32M (Sep 2022 Series B raise) in ~…

usual caveat that fundraise announcements can happen anywhere from 1-18 months after the actual round was raised so dont read too much into the timing

but also linkedin says that had up to 50 employees. highly doubt they were each making like 500k/yr cash on average

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#40

Post by toomuchtodo »

swyx wrote: post #39
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially an acquihire due to exhausting runway? Would align with the idea of a startup funding crunch in the current macro, but only someone with transaction details and willing to violate an NDA (if one exists) would be able to share (if details aren’t going to be made public). Depending on comp, benefits, and infra, it is not outside of the realm of possibility to burn through $32M (Sep 2022 Series B raise) in ~…

usual caveat that fundraise announcements can happen anywhere from 1-18 months after the actual round was raised so dont read too much into the timing but also linkedin says that had up to 50 employees. highly doubt they were each making like 500k/yr cash on average

> but also linkedin says that had up to 50 employees. highly doubt they were each making like 500k/yr cash on average

Cloud/servers/infra/where the bits live and move + people + misc biz expenses were assumed in my estimate.

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