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Airtable acquires Airplane

airplane.dev

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Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#51

Post by jeremyjh »

jhatemyjob wrote: post #42
swyx wrote: post #35

> 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…

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They don’t really do the same thing. Airplane is a developer focused tool to quickly productionize scripts. Its closest competitor is windmill.dev. All these may be converging in the same direction but Airtable offers nothing for me to migrate to.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#53

Post by ajayvk »

swyx wrote: post #35

> 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…

Yes, this is sad to hear. This blog post from Airplane https://www.airplane.dev/blog/no-code-has-no-future-in-a-wor... had resonated with me. I think platforms which help teams securely deploy and manage low-code solutions generated with AI assistance are going to become popular. The challenge for Airplane might have been that SaaS (as against open source) in the developer tools space is difficult to sell.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#55

Post by Johnny555 »

swyx wrote: post #29
hipadev23 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't integrate early-stage SaaS as critical to your business is the main lesson here. You get laid-off just like their employees when they rush toward a shitty acquisition.

if everyone was as blanket-critical of early stage SaaS as you we would get a lot less innovation (or at least challengers to keep incumbents honest). someone needs to be discerning of team/product quality, someone needs to take risks to solve pain for their stakeholders. there are good startups that are good partners, there are startups that give a good try and dont make it, and there are plain bad startups. don't t…

My company had a significant product based on an early stage startup's product -- before we signed a license with them, we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. And it was good that we did because about a year later they got acquired by a company that didn't want to continue selling the product we used, but we got the source code so were able to maintain the product. We picked up a couple of the developers that were working on that product too.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#56

Post by jonnycoder »

kamikaz1k wrote: post #10
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…

Retool?

“Retooling, that’s a good excuse.

I’LL RETOOL YOU!”

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#57

Post by [deleted] »

jeremyjh wrote: post #51
jhatemyjob wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-

They don’t really do the same thing. Airplane is a developer focused tool to quickly productionize scripts. Its closest competitor is windmill.dev. All these may be converging in the same direction but Airtable offers nothing for me to migrate to.

[deleted]

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#58

Post by jeremyjh »

swyx wrote: post #43
toomuchtodo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

if they were spending that much on cloud/servers/infra they wouldnt have a revenue problem... typically

They offered a nearly free runtime and free network ingress/egress. You’d only have to buy one $10 seat and use it for ETL to cost them a lot of money a month. No idea if anyone did that though.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#59

Post by xyst »

Buy out competition. Phase them out. Migrate customers to your product. Bump prices across all tiers. Pump your P&L. Sell stats to vulture capitalists for Z funding round. Rinse and repeat. Eventually IPO. Founders cash out equity. Retail investors left holding the bag and leadership handed off to B-school flunkies. Product eventually circles the drain. Gets picked up by some private equity and guts it for pieces and eventually selling off to bloodmoor.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#60

Post by Redoubts »

Johnny555 wrote: post #55
swyx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if everyone was as blanket-critical of early stage SaaS as you we would get a lot less innovation (or at least challengers to keep incumbents honest). someone needs to be discerning of team/product quality, someone needs to take risks to solve pain for their stakeholders. there are good startups that are good partners, there are startups that give a good try and dont make it, and there are plain bad startups. don't t…

My company had a significant product based on an early stage startup's product -- before we signed a license with them, we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. And it was good that we did because about a year later they got acquired by a company that didn't want to continue selling the product we used, but we got the source code so were able to maintain the product. We picked up a couple of the develo…

> we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company.

really curious of the terms of that

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