Basically, widely reported Airtable's 2026 reported ARR was close to $500M. they sold at a ~3x multiple assuming it went flat/down~~. They had raised $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)??

Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?

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?

Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?

I mean yes but most of them are vibe coding apps now

> Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?

Most probably, but their market share must have free fall for such valuation

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.

But if the revenues were hit this might be a home run, given AI could replace all of airtable in about a weekend e2e, but then again a competent team of 2-3 devs could have done it over a few weeks, it wasn't ever really about the product quality.

My condolences to all the Airtable users, who are about to get fleeced now, they should consider moving to anything else, even vibe coded slop might be ok.

Nobody wants to talk about or reveal the AI or software margins.

Will cause everyone to panic once they see how low the margins are getting year over year.

By the way, Grist is Airtable-like and has RBAC down to every row and cell, enforced live. And you can self-host it. Check it out: https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/

(FYI, I work at Grist.)

I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.

(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)

[email protected] Series E 2021 Mar

[email protected] Series D 2020 Sep

[email protected] Series C 2018 Nov

$52M@152M Series B 2018 Mar

There's a strong logic to that.

Which products have they rebuilt? I mostly hear about them selling the existing product at a higher price while reducing the size of the development team.

But maybe this is because I do a very basic usage. Uninstalled, though.

I'm a heavy user; I use it to plan 3-week-long trips and another month-long trip every year. It has improved, and they do a ton of user interviews to improve it. So far I've been happy.

I'm not happy they fired the old team, but I put that on the sellers and I don't know what was going on there or the company's finances.

Bending Spoons must have amazing negotiaters to strike such a bargain.

We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.

I laughed so hard. But I mean seriously...

29€ a month just to host a meetup page with RSVPs.

Any other platforms besides Luma you hear about? I know some lean on WhatsApp, some tried to use FB or even LinkedIn events but these are really made for different use cases.

Not all the cool hipster SV tech startups end up being a planetary success, some of them end up in this zombie state.

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."

- Make offers so low that - if anyone were to accept the deal, they're desperate/greedy enough to take it - hike price and limit features - people who do not have the capacity to switch will bear the cost - bleed out remaining customers

If it works, it works. They're basically betting against the amount of business depth that exists in the world

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.

Can't say it'll be hugely missed whatever they do at this point.

'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.

It's really every category of commercial activity. Restaurants food quality, cable tv channels, movie sequels, home appliances, airline travel, theme parks, etc.

For years, I had a particular local HVAC company do my twice-a-year maintenance on my air conditioner and furnace. I liked the owner and he had a crew of older experienced guys that knew what they were doing. He then sold the business to another owner and he completely changed out the crew to kids that barely look 18 years old. The young inexperienced techs didn't have the skills to diagnose anything on their own. They always had to phone the home office and use their smartphones to send video/photos of what they're looking at to the more knowledgeable technician at the office. That way, the senior guy sitting at the desk can walk them through what to do next. That's when I realized the financial game the new owner was playing: hire new kids that just completed their 3-month HVAC tech certificate for cheap wages but still charge the same high prices that the old owner was charging for experienced techs. And only pay for one expensive senior tech back at the office to be a "shared resource" for all the clueless techs out in the field. That type of "enshittification" didn't require venture capital, or private equity, or ads. The common pattern of degrading a product or service has the same thing in common ... humans.

The vast majority of enshittification is not caused by private equity or ads.

I'm not going to defend capital's ability to ruin things, but this is framing is not helpful. Enshittification as it was described by Cory Doctorow, who invented the term, requires two additional things:

1. A platform that tries to attract both producers and consumers. Amazon is the canonical example. The platform does what it can to attract enough consumers that producers have to use the platform to reach them. Then it squeezes out the value to the producers (e.g., hiking acquisition fees, etc.; competing with them and underselling them with cheaper alternatives). The final step is to destroy the value to the consumer, by degrading quality and increasing price. By this time, neither producers nor consumers have many levers to fight back.

2. Non-physical pricing levers. Enshittification requires the ability to observe consumer behavior and jigger pricing at great speed. We see this in Amazon again; ridesharing apps introduced surge pricing; ads are priced according to what platforms know about you. In a physical store, the logistical cost of changing the price of goods is nontrivial, so we don't see the same sort of gaming there.

Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into some vague "things got worse" meaning.

Cory Docotor didn't invent the term. He just made it more popular. Others used it at least 9 years before he did to describe "web design", and 3 years prior to describe the U.K. : https://www.oed.com/dictionary/enshittification_n?tab=meanin...

>Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into

The gp I replied to already used "enshittification" in a more general way to describe "almost all software". Most software out there is not the platforms that have the 2 factors you listed. I was just going going along with the conversation.

As far as policing the usage of "enshittification", you've got an uphill battle because people like the way it sounds and tend to use it as a spicy word to talk about things getting worse. They're not going to research what Cory Doctorow was talking about and doublecheck to see if matches exactly what he was trying to describe. E.g. See it used to complain about "public libraries", "policing", "tech jobs", etc: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshittification

Getting users is hard, especially on the Internet where your audience is global, and competition is fierce. Word of mouth or user advocacy has always been the best cost-to-value marketing tool.

So starting out by offering things for free or at a loss has been the go-to strategy forever.

But (as we all know) that's not sustainable, so there's pretty much nowhere to go but down, from a value-to-user perspective.

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/01/bending-spoons-ipo-pricing

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

They are on Grist by my recommendation after searching for tools. I just checked in on it after 6 months and they have built their entire manufacturing process management on it... Good stuff.

Or speak at our virtual GristCon in October? It's a community event where most speakers are Grist users, all on Discord stages. Very fun.

I'd love to connect with them. If they're open, they can reach me at: success [at] getgrist [dot] com

Disclosure: I'm CEO at Grist.

It brings over column types, references, attachments, and simple formulas intact. Even brings over choice/select colors!

I feel like everyone I know/knew who was really into Airtable was pretty sophisticated and used it for complex data wrangling that was beyond the typical tools they had access to.

But they were often solo operators for that data because whatever they were wrangling wasn't worth putting into a database or investing in more robust tools (from a company perspective)..

So perhaps you are correct.

Airtable felt stuck for a long before that, now is just the moment to remind ourselves not to be stuck with it.

But they have had a distinct lack of imagination for a very long time.

I don't see how Airtable makes money on its own.

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.

These companies all pay insanely high silicon valley wages and deliver very little actual product development velocity for the wage costs involved.

The founders don't have the b**s to do the necessary haircuts themselves so they sell. Bending spoons takes the reputation hit that the founder should have taken and makes severe cuts.

BS then rationalises the roadmap, and either keeps it alive or invests into it depending on expected return.

Nothing particularly revolutionary other than they are an execution machine.

The same thing Broadcom is doing with VMware.

Anyone been bit by it?

2026: Airtable

2025: Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Brightcove, Komoot

2024: WeTransfer, Issuu, Hopin, Meetup, Mosaic Group

2023: Evernote

2022: Filmic Pro

2021: Remini

2018: Splice

I'm sure Notion DBs ate their lunch, but Coda had the best document database integration I've seen, but they got bought by Superhuman.

This entire market space is going to be messy for a while.

I was very surprised to see Airtable sold for reportedly less than what they raised and had assumed AI tailwinds (easy database GUI) would benefit them well. Presumably, this was insufficient to overcome enterprise revenue headwinds and a chilly SaaS financing market.

I do wonder how this might have played differently had their product and API been better engineered as a database for developers through faster read/write and data scale... unnecessary in PLG-focused pre-AI world, but an interesting avenue for agentic growth nonetheless.

Tough break for the Airtable team. It was a great product and I have recommended it often to small business owners over the years.

What was terrible about it?

Best case scenario it keeps working without totally jacking up the prices. But also starting to think about long-term alternatives. BaseRow seems reasonable, as does spinning all of my many bases into a single big Django monolith (something I've had in the back of my head for while anyway). But it's been nice not having to micro manage this service. Pretty good mobile app, too. Enjoyed it while it lasted, I guess!

You will be surprised how many things you could not fix in Airtable or where awkward workarounds can be solved much more elegantly if you (or Claude) consider them straight in the design phase. Just make sure to start with your objectives and _maaaybe_ desired workflows to avoid biasing Claude too much and that you end up rebuilding Airtable.

Claude isn't some magic genie that can give you whatever you ask for. If you need a spreadsheet, it is much easier at this point to start Excel than to ask Claude to write you an Excel.

Wikipedia:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons)

>"Based in Milan, the company acquires products with existing product‑market fit[4][5] (such as AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, komoot, Meetup, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer) and manages them for long-term ownership, often increasing revenue and lowering expenses (including by reducing headcount).[6][7] The company employs full-stack developers to rewrite acquired codebases using artificial intelligence, proprietary platform tools, and open-source software (often Python, FastAPI, and TypeScript).[8][9]"

Ah!

So they're kind of the equivalent of a

special kind of Private Equity firm

that specifically purchases/manages/improves: Commerical websites, Apps, SaaS'es and other Digital/Software products that already have many users/customers (aka "Product-Market Fit" in business parlance...)

Although, arguably, Microsoft, while never called a "Private Equity" firm, sort of did all of that first, with other tech companies, in earlier decades!

Well, wait a second now...

If memory serves me, then actually Computer Associates did all of that (for software mostly for the Mainframe / Minicomputer markets and related!) even earlier than Microsoft, probably about a decade or so earlier than Microsoft!

Anyway, interesting article!