> 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?
The analysis largely holds tbh even if the ARR is higher. At some point, euphoric private market valuations don't hold when there are public comps (of which there are many for Airtable)
And the company if you compare to those public comps is still worth a fraction of its last valuation although to their credit is probably is worth more than its total equity funding.
I'm happy to update the analysis if someone has verifiable revenue figures - else I have to use the figures that have been leaked or given to the press historically.
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.
Thanks for that link. I think he's correct, no-code is dead. What he hasn't made clear in the article and I think is implied is that low-code is the future.
"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.
> Also didnt Airtable just layoff 230 people 4 months ago. now they're acquihiring?
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."
The pandemic/WFH was probably a boon for Airtable, as companies were learning new ways to collaborate. Hiring and firing can be highly cyclical or trendy (think of how many companies have desperately hired for AI roles in the past year).
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.
Parent made a wildly inaccurate statement, and had a (quickly deleted) snarky follow-up to jeremyjh's reply. If I come back to this thread in a year, I don't want to be confused.
It seems like you flagged my comment because you didn't like it, consider it similar behavior.
fyi: Flagging is for comments that violate the HN guidelines, downvotes are for comments you "didn't like".
> If I come back to this thread in a year, I don't want to be confused.
Unless it's someone in power trying to cover something up, I think we should respect someone's decision to delete their comment. Just delete your own if it's now out of context.
Do you check back in a year?
> a (quickly deleted) snarky follow-up to jeremyjh's reply.
Thanks. I posted that comment and then I was like... they can believe whatever they want. I don't want to waste my time arguing with random people online
I have a lot of respect for the product and the folks at Airplane. And I (even as a "competitor") find it sad that such a great product is being shut down. My best guess is that they were running out of cash.
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.
I think the Airplane Linkedin is overrun by people who say they work on an Airplane (the word not the company) :) It looks like they only had ~20 employees so not a super large team.
I completely echo the sentiment of being frugal. (We are a competition to both retool and airplane and bootstrapped)
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.
Another competitor of Retool with around 150 employees is very far away from 1m in revenue as far as I know. They recently did a layoff as well. VC money that flowed in 2021 has created a bunch a money burning machines.
Our startup evaluated Airtable, Retool, and Airplane, and settled on Airplane. We liked the Airplane because it's developer-friendly. But the way they throw all customers under the bus is sad.
Hope the acquisition works out. I used to work for FileMaker, and from the business perspective, their products are complementary to each other.
we'd love to make the migration as easy as possible and would definitely be open to building an import tool. In the meantime if you're migrating feel free to email me at jamie at retool.com and I'd be happy to help import
"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:
(Founder of windmill.dev, the closest alternative to Airplane and we are OSS)
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.
We use windmill.dev since a couple of months now and are really happy. Development is very transparent as you can join their discord and give them feedback. We've had multiple moments where things were modified, adjusted or improved in <1h after we mentioned something. Seems like a great team. +1.
Your self hosted pricing seems difficult to understand. Why limit SSO users? Secondly, prices include per vcpu ? Is it like microsft style per CPU pricing ?
We limit SSO users in the pro versions vs enterprise because the pro version is only meant for small teams.
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 dont think their enterprise edition is open source. they only say open source on the first "free and open source" pricing table, presumably rest of enterprsise editions aren't
It is fine to market on HN, as we have Show HN already, but in this case, it is still acceptable as they are offering a specific solution to the problem defined in the post, namely that Airplane customers must move off a shutdown product.
You often do on threads like these, with people posting about their related projects. As long as people are respectful and relevant, not spammy, the HN crowd generally sees it positively.
In my experience, it's quite common, and it's accepted as long as people do it respectfully. Sometimes, there's pushback, especially if someone seems like they're denigrating other options.
In this case, it feels particularly appropriate. I'm an Airplane user, and I came to this article specifically hoping to see what options there are to migrate to.
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 have never used Airplane but have done projects in Retool which is really nice but little on the pricey side since they charge on a per user basis not on a per app basis. Wish they charged on a usage or app model since it makes it really expensive at first.
I know a lot of people using it so i doubt it is going away.
I don't understand the tone of this announcement at all. "This is your captain speaking. I'm excited to announce that I have a parachute. Also, the plane is crashing. I wish you all the best in the new year."
What don't you understand? The captain likes that he has a parachute and doesn't give a flying fuck about you now that he no longer needs your money. This is just another expression of the enduring essence of Silicon Valley; it would be shocking to see something different.
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 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.
(Cofounder of Superblocks, an Airplane alternative)
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.
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.
You might be surprised how many shadow IT projects end up becoming load-bearing members in businesses. (I think this is mostly a good thing, because it works out a lot more often than it fails, but when it fails like this, it can be very disruptive.)
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 throw everyone under the bus
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.
How many businesses have the in-house expertise to maintain a defunct codebase? And for how many of those that do is it actually an optimal use of resources?
When we took over the codebase, it was 50-50 whether or not we'd really continue with it long term or just fix a couple important bugs and work on porting to something new. Then we managed to hire a couple of the core devs from the product and decided to keep it.
We were lucky that they did a good job with the escrowed code and had everything we needed to build the software on day one.
>And for how many of those that do is it actually an optimal use of resources?
That's impossible to answer -- depends on how hard it would be to port to another product to fill the need (assuming you can find such a product), or write a new system from scratch to do what that product does.
Me too, only a few people in the company knew the terms of the agreement, apparently it was the only code escrow agreement that company made and it was protected under NDA. I don't think we paid a premium for it, but signed a longer term licensing agreement.
This is more common practice than you think. But it is common in enterprise realm not in SaaS realm where you just self signup and it is Product-led upsell.
woudl love to learn more - what startup was this? why could they not have gone out to market to compete with you instead of letting you whitelabel their product?
It was a pretty low level product near the bottom of our infrastructure tier and we built everything on top of it. It worked well for our specific use case, but apparently not a general enough need to succeed on its own. It's not like we took their product, added a new skin and sold it as our own.
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 ~15 months (~$2.1M/month).
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).
I wonder if there's a business/service that estimates "remaining funding" based on raised funds vs. number of employees and their respective role's average salary? You could almost see it coming when a company is still in the early stages, probably not generating revenue, and burning up cash. The fact I even think about this means someone in the area of business finance thought of it a looong time ago... haha
Could probably build this with paid access to Crunchbase data set and LinkedIn headcount. Their roles, when advertised, should have (broadly defined) cash comp depending on state pay transparency laws. Cool idea.
Seriously though, if you're a business like https://simpleclosure.com/ you'd probably use this for prospecting. Recruiters too might pay for such a list to recruit from companies in peril ("motivated talent"). Lots of ways to potentially squeeze some fiat from this idea imho.
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.
most reasonable companies have limits to prevent abuse of that stuff, in the fine print. a professional company like airplane would not let that bankrupt them, this is rookie league
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...
The bank is just someone else's money, the grocery store is just someone else's food, the OS is just someone else's code.
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.
I am one of the first abstra users. I can not be happier. Support service is top notch and the tech it's sound and stable. You can create apps in a few lines of code! Love it
Have used Abstra for almost 2 years now, their product velocity is truly second to none, and prefer writing code, helper function and cron jobs in python!
I think super highly of the Airplane team and what they've built. Startups are a tough journey, especially so over the last year. There's never a good way to shut down so the criticism isn't surprising and perhaps fair. But I doubt anyone's walking to the bank with glee. The best they can do is to try and do right by their team, their customers, and their investors. I hope they take another crack at it again in the future.
They had a great website and UX. Would love to know why this change.
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.
As another competitor to Airplane (not a direct one, however), I also find it really sad that they are shutting down. They were able to build a good product for their market segment, but it seems like they failed operationally and burned through all their cash. And probably because AI is attracting all the available VC money now, it was hard for them to raise more.
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.
Just a few days ago I was reading a post about how low code wasn't that great, and a poster talked about how they had an intern build their entire business on airplane and they were completely sold on low code solutions.
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.
Airplane customers: Our engineering team is in the position to help you migrate your Airplane UIs/Tasks to an alternative platform, even if it’s not to Dropbase.
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.
we do a lot of cron-related seo and for years the airplane guys have been buying ads on tons of cron-related terms including our own brand, with the pitch “ditch your cron jobs for airplane”.
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?
1. You are trying to sell software to someone that often loves writing software themselves.
2. You often can't convince them that they could NOT recreate your product easily. They will pick a tiny subset of functionality and say "oh I whipped up this demo that does 90% of what we need last week".
3. They don't care about the maintenance cost of self-written. In some cases that's their job security.
4. Even if it makes them 50% more productive, their hours or pay won't change.
This is why the "best" products are often in boring areas OR have a unique platform advantage. Think of paypal/stripe.
Another big factor is that devs know that startups can (and, as in this case, will) go out of business, so they’d rather go with an FOSS offering that can’t just disappear with two months to transition off of the platform.
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.
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.
This feels like really bittersweet news - congrats to the Airplane team on the acquisition but it’s sad to see a great tool disappear.
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.
I guess the pilot decided to crash the plane, kill thousands of passengers and celebrate it with words of excitement and gratitude.
Btw, Happy New Year!
I'm really bummed about this. Airplane is one of the dev tooling products I've been most excited about this past year. For those who aren't familiar, I'd say it's like a much fresher version of Jenkins, if you have ever used Jenkins as a runner of operational tasks beyond CI/CD.
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.
All the comments here seem to be interpreting "sunsetting the platform" to mean existing users will have no access to airplane features. Couldn't it just mean "airplane will be part of the Airtable platform moving forward"?
Remember Janssen, the Belgian Johnson & Johnson subsidiary which developed the single-shot covid vaccine? I always vaguely assumed that it was a subsidiary that they _started_, explaining the name, but it was actually a completely separate company called Janssen that they bought in the 60s. Nominative determinism, but for companies!
> 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=...