> 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=...
The airplane founders/owners got a big payday. What makes you think that, from their perspective, something went wrong?
> no lessons to pass on to others.
Someone just paid them for all their lessons, why would they give them away for free?
I would not assume anyone got a major payout in an acquihire.
Re the 1-2b tweet, two important numbers (2023 ARR, and hence growth rate) are wildly off.
The tweeter runs cbinsights, and then quotes cbinsights in the tweet. Super wried.
"They have to re-create their own (usually subpar) versions of IDEs, version control, code review, integration testing, and more." - Our solution to this will be to allow users to use actual git as the input method. i.e. Coder sets code in git, gets reviewed in github or similar, merged and released. Now the edits will need done in the UI initially but where possible code will be exposed sensibly. e.g. SQL queries written will be visible. Many other tools are beginning to do similar.
An interesting conundrum to this. If AI can be used with no-code OR with low-code does it matter.
What was the reason for the layoff? Layoffs often just mean something like "we overhired/overinvested in this area, and it turns out that area is less important to our strategy than we thought."
This to me is pretty surprising... because it's actually not hard to make a SaaS business profitable. You just have to build a great product, and be disciplined at hiring. It's weird that they seem to have done well on #1, but failed at #2 (which I'd deem the "easier" problem).
RE #2, I've heard they have less than $1M in ARR, but somehow (according to LinkedIn), have 61 employees. We had 4 employees when we were at $1M in ARR (and growing around 700% YoY). Even when we were growing quickly, we hired slowly: IIRC we were at around 30 employees at around $10M ARR. (That's less than half the employees Airplane had... even though we were 10x their revenue.)
When we started Retool, average headcount costs were around $300k / year. So if you have 60 heads burning $300 / year, that's $18M / year. If you only have $1M in ARR, you're burning $17M a year. Ouch! (If you're burning $17M a year, it's not hard to see why a fundraise of $32M would only last you 18 months.)
To me, it's tragic that a great product like Airplane has to shut down. Tragic both for the team, but also for its customers (who have three months to rebuild everything). Building a great product is the hardest part of starting a startup, not "not hiring". I'm hoping that a more challenging fundraising environment will make ~profitable startups more common going forward. (Especially because it shouldn't be that hard to make a SaaS company profitable!)
My sense is that many other startups are going to be going through something similar over the next few years. For example, last I heard, another one of our competitors (with the initials SB) has less than $1M in ARR and has 40+ employees. I feel that the 2020 - 2022 fundraising environment has spawned a bunch of fairly unsustainable businesses — and many of them will shut down in the next year or two. As consumers, it would be wise for all of us to be conservative when it comes to which platforms we choose to build our infrastructure on.
as an investor in an "SB" that is tangentially related, i panicked a bit. found https://www.trustradius.com/products/retool/competitors and went "ah."
yeaa many such cases
One of the companies we sold earlier was around leadership learning content and I was attending one shoot where the CEO of india unilever business was recollecting lessons from professor Ram Charan. one of them broadly equated inverse relationship between aspiration and resource as a determinant of entrepreneurial mindset. And they at unilever used to artificially starve resources to create such an environment for out of the box thinking. Net net there mostly exists a way to achieve things with minimum resources. And tough markets calls for such measures even more.
Hope the acquisition works out. I used to work for FileMaker, and from the business perspective, their products are complementary to each other.
sarcasm or is there a missing reference somewhere?
(So yes, I suppose the comment was tongue in cheek, haha.)
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...
Congrats on the acquisition Airplane team. You were a strong inspiration for us, a precursor and set a high-quality bar for pro-code developer platforms. I have nothing but respect for the Airplane team and we probably wouldn't exist in our current form without your competition.
We are ready to migrate all Airplane customers and the migration would be very smooth as many of Airplane concepts map 1:1 to our own concepts. If you need urgent migration, ruben@windmill.dev
One customer, nocd, migrated hundreds of scheduled scripts and workflows in just a few weeks and with only minor changes.
Our platform being fully open-source, you will never be at the risk of us sunsetting anything since you can fully self-host it (it is not an hybrid deployment model like Airplane where the Control plane are in the cloud). We are used by thousands of businesses including a few F500 at scale and can send reference over emails.
We are a smaller team, have raised reasonably and are close to break-even. As an open-source product, I keep in mind to resist the urge of raising too aggressively so we can keep control of our destiny and never betray our open-source principles of transparency and fair pricing.
(note: we have an example repo of the folder layout one can use to be backed by git: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-sync-example, it's not all that different from airplane. See our CLI guide here: https://www.windmill.dev/docs/advanced/cli)
Prices include vCPU so that it is linear to your compute cost. Windmill is also used at scale for high-throughput and heavy jobs on enormous clusters but with very few users. We approximate that the compute part of the pricing will be approximately the same as your ec2 cost for your workers.
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.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I would love to leverage the powerful Airtable UI, but their scripting vs. custom extension offerings have always felt underpowered and needlessly complex, respectively.
I know a lot of people using it so i doubt it is going away.
I’LL RETOOL YOU!”
"The update is we're cancelling it"
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 here -- was Airplane gross-margins negative? Was there some fundamental issue that was unsurmountable? In my mind, it's just kind of strange for a popular and widely used, evidently saleable product to wind up burning through all their runway and then ending in what looks like an acquihire. Odd.
Congrats to the Airplane team for joining forces with Airtable, both teams and products are stellar and know people on both sides.
Airplane has been a thought-leader in the code-first approach to internal tools and brought to market a compelling DevX around infinitely extensible internal tools – this inspired our custom components [0]
For any customers looking to make a switch, the Superblocks team is ready to help, you can email us directly at help@superblocks.com or use live chat on our website and our Technical Support Engineering team would be happy to lend a hand.
Superblocks has the same concepts as Airplane: workflows, scheduled jobs and views, though our views are achieved through drag-and-drop. Similar to Airplane we have an option to deploy a hybrid on-prem agent [1] to ensure your data never leaves your VPC, though our agent uses bring-your-own-key (BYOK) to sign application definitions. Customers never have to run stateful services on-prem, schedule downtime or handle painful upgrades.
Some of the things developers love about Superblocks beyond the DevX and agent architecture are control flow [2] and streaming [3] via Kafka, Kinesis, OpenAI and LLMs.
For developers who want to take full ownership of what they build, we have a vision around “export to code”, enabling you to build in Superblocks and run on your servers. It’s on our roadmap and something developers are excited about.
[0] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-custom-componen...
[1] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/superblocks-on-prem-agent
[2] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-control-blocks-...
[3] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-real-time-strea...
"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?
Let's be honest, nobody had 'Airplane' as some critical part of their business.
Sucks for customers but is hopefully a soft landing for Airplane team ending up in an org that hard pivoted to B2B recently (and hence can afford to continue their employment).
but also linkedin says that had up to 50 employees. highly doubt they were each making like 500k/yr cash on average
Not to forget again that the cloud is just someone else's computer...
I used to use that cloud quip, until I researched what IaaS is and accepted there can be benefits. And note, that quip is usually used for IaaS, not SaaS.
That all said... This seems like a really shitty rugpull by the company.
Given the abrupt timeline of 3 months, we are urgently prioritizing support for Airplane users.
If you're seeking a more open-source, user-friendly, and secure alternative, please don't hesitate to get in touch:
airplane-to@abstra.io
We promise to make every effort to ensure a smooth and safe transition for you.
A few years ago we were very worried about the seemingly large number of dev tooling VC funded startups. It's hard to beat someone that doesn't need to turn a profit. But just focussing on our niche and improving our products each day has worked.
We make a low-code offering that allows creating interactive applications. We are much less of a generic tool, more specialized towards "real-time" and often finance based apps. If that sounds useful to you please checkout PulseUI: https://www.timestored.com/pulse/
My business partner and I bootstrapped the company 12+ years ago and have been profitably supplying data tooling for years. We've often signed escrow with larger companies to avoid this kind of bus-factor problem and are now going open source: https://github.com/timestored/pulseui Given our first product was started over a decade ago it's a journey to get there.
Interestingly, this is already the second product from the "Internal Tools" segment to shut down. The first one was internal.io, which announced its closure in December. However, in their case, I believe it was more of a product issue, though they still had several big names among their clients.
I wonder if this is a sign of consolidation in the internal tools/low-code segment and how many of the players in this market will be able to survive the current economic situation. I suspect that many VC-funded products, especially the smaller ones, are at high risk. And I can only be grateful that UI Bakery is bootstrapped, profitable, and at one point we decided not to take any investments and grow slowly but remain independent.
This is just one of the many times I think that not owning your own stack always comes to bite your ass in the end.
Cofounder of Dropbase here. We build similar tools to Airplane.
I’m surprised to hear the news. I’ve always been impressed with the product/team and we share the same vision for a more developer-centric product.
We imagine it must be a bummer to have to migrate so suddenly. We want to help in a way that’s actually meaningful.
Reach out to airplane@dropbase.io
Additional info:
- Our latest Show HN for context on the product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38534920
- Our tech stack: Python, Typescript/Javascript, React, AWS, FastAPI, Postgres, Pandas
- Other tools: Stripe, HubSpot, Slack, Snowflake, OpenAPI. We have experience with other app builders and we pick things up fast
Sigh. It truly sucks for the devs that took them up on that pitch. Meanwhile cron is still working fine.
In their defense, dev tools businesses are hard. We’ve navigated it by staying lean with very efficient go to market, but the traditional VC scale-up is very hard to pull off.
I understand why dev tools business are hard, i'm just curious as to what makes them hard? I know one of the things that make it a difficult sell is that devs don't buy much but what else?
This is why the "best" products are often in boring areas OR have a unique platform advantage. Think of paypal/stripe.
Or perhaps, they were worried about too much air causing inflation...
(I'll see myself out)
The rest is accurate.
I wasn’t referring to the “prestige” of certain colleges (ie, “Ivy League” vs public school)
This is very unfortunate news. I have a lot of respect for the founders & the product. In fact I even used Airplane for a few side projects in the past. It's sad to see the product die.
IMO, most folks alluding to them running out money is incorrect. I think they simply ran out of energy or the will to go on. This is very common among early stage companies. But, as consumers, it also highlights the dangers of betting a large part of your workflows on any closed source SaaS. It can disappear with the drop of a hat.
This is why adopting OSS alternatives is essential. OSS solutions like Appsmith, puts you, the user, in control and allows you to determine how you'd like to control your stack. Your migration plans and functioning of tools isn't determined by events halfway across the world & outside your control.
If you are looking to move your workflows from Airplane, we have an early version that resembles Airplane. Do reach out to me at arpit [at] appsmith.com and let us help you.
When we started Zipper.dev, we were really inspired by Airplane’s vision of making it possible to build useful software without a bunch of boilerplate and custom set up. We’re still optimistic that there’s going to be more innovation in this space.
If you’re an Airplane user or someone who’s interested in the idea of making web apps and integrations between tools really simple to build, please hit us up - we’d love to chat (hello@zipper.dev / @zipperdev). Here’s a bit more about what we’re doing at zipper.dev:
* We allow you to write and run Typescript functions without leaving your browser
* There’s a built-in frontend framework so all you need to do is output JSON and you’ll have an interactive UI
* Every Zipper app has a key-value store, a scheduler, secrets, and more
* Connectors for most databases (Postgres, MySQL, and Mongo) and other SaaS tools like Slack, Discord, Notion, GitHub, OpenAI, and more
* Import from NPM, esm.sh, deno.land and even other Zipper apps
We’re in a free open beta and looking for feedback, all you need is a GitHub account to sign up.
And to see it shutdown with such short notice and no blessed migration path or ability to self-host is honestly a bit shocking. As a customer, it would have been nice to have seen this acknowledged with some empathy for the position it puts us in, or some explanation of why it wasn't feasible.
I'm also a little perplexed that Airtable thought highly enough of them to do the acquihire but didn't see value in keeping the product available. A company with Airtable's reach and SaaS sales experience may well have been able to get a lot more customers on the platform.
It's hard to be too mad, because I did enjoy using it and interfacing with their engineers.
Do not rely on closed source for important stuff.
Is this Airtable moving in the direction of low-code rather than no code? Puts them up against tools like:
Budibase [https://github.com/Budibase/budibase]
Retool [Https://retool.com]
happy to advise for free or build-out in Retool for any Airplane users stuck with 2-months to figure out what to do....
/s
