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?
If these numbers are remotely true, there's either a crucial number missing or investors are utter idiots who forced this sale. Won't be surprised if it's the latter.
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.
I guess in the sense that if your goal is to sell, you'd optimize on revenues. That being said, when I look at an income statement I am usually more suspect of costs than revenues.
Maybe going against the grain but I think their product philosophy is actually really interesting. They basically just buy the database. Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly, with a small team, low overheads, and ruthlessly optimise for efficiency, and amortise shared in-house resources across the product portfolio.
In other words, the private equity sales pitch. You left out the bit about jacking up the price and milking customers for every penny until their contracts expire.
I used it this we and I found it's really worst than one year ago.
In detail:
- It was blocking my phone, and one time I had to restart it
- It's VERY hard now to find my planned trips
But maybe this is because I do a very basic usage. Uninstalled, though.
I don't think this is quite accurate. The main question is how much revenue does Sortable bring in each year and after all expenses, how much cash flow does Airtable generate for its owners every year? I am positive it is nowhere near a billion dollars a year. If we roughly say it is annual recurring revenue of USD 0.5B a year, now the question is how much can bending spoon choke airtable neck forcing it to reduce expenses without meaningfully reducing revenue.
I've been researching the alternatives as I've been really.annoyed by the Meetup.com enshittification.
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.
Cool that there is something else. There was also EventBrite but I guess that got enshittified as well.
Anyway my question was more in the realm of: if people stays, their play works. Not justifying the modus operandi, just stating that there is indeed space for Bending Spoons' MO.
Not all the cool hipster SV tech startups end up being a planetary success, some of them end up in this zombie state.
Bending Spoons strategy can be summarized in the following plan:
- 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.
Airtable has got too expensive for all the weird limitations you end up either writing tons of weird hacks around or paying another sass product to fix for you because airtable don't want to engineer a solution.
Can't say it'll be hugely missed whatever they do at this point.
>This goes for almost all software. 'entshittification' in software
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 at the office 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. Only pay 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.
Private equity firms are buying profitable local businesses all over the US, including HVAC, plumbing, auto techs, storage, etc. So it’s possible that this case of enshittification actually WAS caused private equity in your example.
It's also a byproduct of the most successful user acquisition model to be honest.
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.
People are reacting like Bending Spoons is going to make Airtable worse, whereas in fact being acquired by bending spoons is already the indicated of things being worse than ever. Which may be a little premature for Airtable but definitely not unexpected.
As to what will bending spoons do with it - does anyone know (or care) what did they do with Evernote, or AOL?
Airtable felt stuck for a long before that, now is just the moment to remind ourselves not to be stuck with it.
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)..
Super silly of me to ask but how does Bending Spoons make money in all of this?
Is it the "fire all American devs and save costs with cheaper Italians" schtick or is there something else?
Having read their IPO prospectus, my reading - They buy a company which they feel has a sticky product for its loyal userbase and then integrate as many of its common services into its in-house platform e.g. data
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.
That goes a long way yes. Most of these products have built up to hundreds or maybe thousands of engineers over the years, and if you can keep it going with just a handful in Italy, that is a serious cost optimisation.
On top of that, isn't Bending Spoons famous for enshittify anything they buy to squeeze every single cent they can? Meaning that their fame would push even more companies/people to do a vibecoded replacement with just the features they need.
Their MO is switching to maintenance mode and running services with skeleton crew. I am not sure if it will work in area exposed to AI, where everyone is by now used to monthly updates and quarterly product releases.
I had some thoughts but for context.
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?
Eyeing Wikipedia it seems like it sold for about raised capital. Probably very little product value but some b2b contracts to milk?
Probably they are getting eaten by new AI integrations and the numbers don’t look good.
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?
It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition.
Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?
> It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition.
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
If these numbers are remotely true, there's either a crucial number missing or investors are utter idiots who forced this sale. Won't be surprised if it's the latter.
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.
that cant be right if so they got an excellent deal ...$1BN cash (!)
Deals of this type are usually cash free and debt free. The cash went to the shareholders. Hence the implied valuation of $2.5B.
ARR has always been a bullshit number but it is an especially bullshit number nowadays because AI has destroyed software margins.
I guess in the sense that if your goal is to sell, you'd optimize on revenues. That being said, when I look at an income statement I am usually more suspect of costs than revenues.
> AI has destroyed software margins.
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.
$725M@11B Series F 2021 Dec
$270M@5.8B Series E 2021 Mar
$185M@2.6B Series D 2020 Sep
$100M@1.1B Series C 2018 Nov
$52M@152M Series B 2018 Mar
Bending Spoons is where products go to die.
I'd rather Bending Spoons than Broadcom. I can still use Komoot but I can't even access my license codes from VMWare.
Maybe going against the grain but I think their product philosophy is actually really interesting. They basically just buy the database. Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly, with a small team, low overheads, and ruthlessly optimise for efficiency, and amortise shared in-house resources across the product portfolio.
There's a strong logic to that.
In other words, the private equity sales pitch. You left out the bit about jacking up the price and milking customers for every penny until their contracts expire.
Ive been happy with all the improvements they are making to Komoot do far.
I used it this we and I found it's really worst than one year ago. In detail: - It was blocking my phone, and one time I had to restart it - It's VERY hard now to find my planned trips
But maybe this is because I do a very basic usage. Uninstalled, though.
>Bending Spoons said Airtable's current net cash position implies an equity value of about $2.25 billion.
Bending Spoons must have amazing negotiaters to strike such a bargain.
We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.
I don't think this is quite accurate. The main question is how much revenue does Sortable bring in each year and after all expenses, how much cash flow does Airtable generate for its owners every year? I am positive it is nowhere near a billion dollars a year. If we roughly say it is annual recurring revenue of USD 0.5B a year, now the question is how much can bending spoon choke airtable neck forcing it to reduce expenses without meaningfully reducing revenue.
After they acquired Meetup.com, subscription prices skyrocketed while nothing useful was added to the product.
29€ a month just to host a meetup page with RSVPs.
Did users leave for other products/solutions?
Luma is the current version of that idea so yes.
yes, _every_ event I go uses Luma or something else nowadays.
I've been researching the alternatives as I've been really.annoyed by the Meetup.com enshittification.
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.
Cool that there is something else. There was also EventBrite but I guess that got enshittified as well. Anyway my question was more in the realm of: if people stays, their play works. Not justifying the modus operandi, just stating that there is indeed space for Bending Spoons' MO.
Not all the cool hipster SV tech startups end up being a planetary success, some of them end up in this zombie state.
And yet, with all the promise of vibecoding and AI, nobody has created a clone that undercuts it in price.
Bending Spoons IPO raised $1.68bn so taking away IPO fees and they have in effect spent all of it on 1 acquisition
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/01/bending-spoons-ipo-pricing
Bending Spoons strategy can be summarized in the following plan:
- 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
>Make offers so low...
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.
Expect entshittification of Airtable after the acquisition.
Airtable has got too expensive for all the weird limitations you end up either writing tons of weird hacks around or paying another sass product to fix for you because airtable don't want to engineer a solution.
Can't say it'll be hugely missed whatever they do at this point.
This goes for almost all software.
'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.
>This goes for almost all software. 'entshittification' in software
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 at the office 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. Only pay 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.
Private equity firms are buying profitable local businesses all over the US, including HVAC, plumbing, auto techs, storage, etc. So it’s possible that this case of enshittification actually WAS caused private equity in your example.
Enshitification is a problem when the power structures are not in the user's favour.
It's also a byproduct of the most successful user acquisition model to be honest.
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.
What is the best open source alternatives of Airtable?
Look at Grist.
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
I am using Baserow (https://baserow.io/) happily.
Thanks for the suggestions
Fibery is free for small team (but not an open source).
People are reacting like Bending Spoons is going to make Airtable worse, whereas in fact being acquired by bending spoons is already the indicated of things being worse than ever. Which may be a little premature for Airtable but definitely not unexpected. As to what will bending spoons do with it - does anyone know (or care) what did they do with Evernote, or AOL?
Airtable felt stuck for a long before that, now is just the moment to remind ourselves not to be stuck with it.
Stripe about to acquire OpenRouter for $10B, and Airtable is only ~1/10th of OpenRouter???
Airtable is worth "just" $1.3B? I see (or used to see) it almost everywhere; why such a low valuation?
I’ve always felt like their money went into marketing, not actual capabilities. It still feels like a Fisher-Price tier platform imo.
That's an interesting perspective..
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.
Well, you all know what this means... RIP Airtable
I was sad when Airtable bought Airplane.dev because that was a dirty move they pulled. Now let’s see if that’s how they get treated.
Super silly of me to ask but how does Bending Spoons make money in all of this? Is it the "fire all American devs and save costs with cheaper Italians" schtick or is there something else?
I don't see how Airtable makes money on its own.
Having read their IPO prospectus, my reading - They buy a company which they feel has a sticky product for its loyal userbase and then integrate as many of its common services into its in-house platform e.g. data
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.
That goes a long way yes. Most of these products have built up to hundreds or maybe thousands of engineers over the years, and if you can keep it going with just a handful in Italy, that is a serious cost optimisation.
They also hike the price so significantly most people stop using it. See meetup.com for example.
That’s a bold move in a vibe coding world.
Kind of amazing Airtable couldn’t turn vibe coding in Airtable itself into something worth charging for.
But they have had a distinct lack of imagination for a very long time.
On top of that, isn't Bending Spoons famous for enshittify anything they buy to squeeze every single cent they can? Meaning that their fame would push even more companies/people to do a vibecoded replacement with just the features they need.
Their MO is switching to maintenance mode and running services with skeleton crew. I am not sure if it will work in area exposed to AI, where everyone is by now used to monthly updates and quarterly product releases.
There is a lot of inertia to overcome to migrate away from a product like this. My guess is they will be able to milk this for a long time.
Doesn't matter, has to last and pump the bending stock for the next years, products and money don't matter.
Bending Spoons list of taking over companies is huge:
2026: Airtable
2025: Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Brightcove, Komoot
2024: WeTransfer, Issuu, Hopin, Meetup, Mosaic Group
2023: Evernote
2022: Filmic Pro
2021: Remini
2018: Splice