Airtable has been acquired by Bending Spoons reuters.com/legal/transactional/bending-spoons-makes-first-post-ipo-acquisition-with-13-billion-airtable-deal-2026-08-04 Some analysis: x.com/mariluukkainen/status/2084566842861932894

oh great.... everything's just fine!

“Bending Spoons, typically acquires companies that are trading at a decent discount to their private valuations, trims the staff, streamlines products, and tries to make them run profitably.” sooo…their recent pivot towards enterprise customers didn’t work out, i guess..?

To be followed, I guess Hard to tell how it’s gonna reshape it

My take on why the acquisition price was so low: Airtable lacked a good VP sales that reshape pricing. Here is the story: • Airtable built a great database builder, a revolutionary tool • The front end (i.e. interfaces) was never great, only the back-end was • Some tools came in to compensate that: Stacker, Softr, Glide, etc. They offered much better front end, with fine permission management, etc. • But in doing so, those tools by-passed entirely Airtable's per seat pricing logic • Which means companies built with a few creators having paying seats and many users interacting with the data via a 3rd party tool, without paying a seat for that • Airtable became a database that's charging per seat. Which does not make any sense. They ended up extracting little of the value they generate. • The original promise to replace Excel was gone because of the way Airtable customers used Airtable. To me that's the true story. Some will say "nah, that's because vibe coding replaced low coding". I don't buy that. If I had been Airtable's CRO, I'd have done this: • Bring Airtable front end to same level as Stacker / Softr. With an acquisition or two if needed • Put Sam as "SVP of frontend" to bring Airtable front end to even higher level. Best in class. • Put Michael as "SVP of ecosystem" and develop strong connections so customer don't "bring Airtable and Hubspot in Glide" but just "bring Hubspot in Airtable" • Increase to 100M records limit • Optional: cut connections to companies who syphon my seats (Noloco, if not acquired) What do you think?

I partially agree with you @dry-byte-39442 - I have that ackward conversation every year when I tell them our business runs on Airtable but I only need 20 creator licences to maintain Enterprise level - Tools like Stacker, Softr, and Noloco circumvent that licensing. I think Airtable would shoot themselves in the foot if they closed down the ability to use our own data in external tooling such as the front-end options - fillout, Docsautomator, etc - without those products, my company would never have gone as far as we have with Airtable. It wasn't until I discovered Stacker that our use of Airtable sky-rocketed. It gave us the ability to present data to the right audience through complex permissions and customised views while DocsAutomator spits out lovely PDFs of that data - Airtables "Page" extension is hopeless and should be deprecated. Like many, we use Airtable as a data and automation layer - interfaces is a fiasco. It takes three times as long to do something over, for example, Stacker and Noloco. My suggestion for them to raise revenues would be allow and support the growth of third-party tooling (embrace it via a a development partnership programme), allow a number of API calls on each plan and for those that need more, a connector licence is required - priced fairly. I attended Daretable a couple of years ago in New York and the merest mention of third-party tooling was met with some sort of horror with someone from Airtable even using their fingers to make a cross!! WTF I genuinely hope Bending Spoons does right by Airtable - it's a fantastic product, has strong ARR and a large user base - they'd be stupid to piss them off..... but then I discovered, they own AOL! Never knew that was still a thing!