11 ms·

Airtable acquires Airplane

185 points by axfan 3y ago

ctb9 3y ago
Welp, this changes my 2024 outlook. 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.
- kamikaz1k 3y ago
  Retool?
  - Rapzid 3y ago
    A retool is probably a given.
    - CrypticShift 3y ago
      ... with https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/ as an option
  - jonnycoder 3y ago
    “Retooling, that’s a good excuse. I’LL RETOOL YOU!”
- morgante 3y ago
  I think windmill.dev is conceptually closest to Airplane, and since it’s OSS you don’t run the same risk if disappearance.
- jlahijani 3y ago
  Xano
- adrr 3y ago
  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.
- SpaghettiX 3y ago
  I haven't used it, but Tooljet is the open source Retool. Also, there's AppSmith and Budibase. Both open source. https://www.tooljet.com/ https://www.tooljet.com/ https://www.appsmith.com/ https://www.appsmith.com/ https://budibase.com/ https://budibase.com/
- foxbee 3y ago
  Give Budibase a whirl - it's open source and sits between Airtable and Airplane from a UX perspective.
- kevinkatzke 3y ago
  Take a look at Superblocks: https://www.superblocks.com/ https://www.superblocks.com/
veeti 3y ago
"Thousands of engineers use Airplane to rapidly build UIs and workload automation for engineering, support, and operations teams." "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?
- throwitaway222 3y ago
  But does it matter - he said he's excited!
  - Rapzid 3y ago
    Excited the Airplane is not falling off the end of the runway..
    - sundaeofshock 3y ago
      More likely he is excited to cash out.
  - horsebridge 3y ago
    Well, it has been an Incredible Journey. https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- hipadev23 3y ago
  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.
  - macspoofing 3y ago
    >Don't integrate early-stage SaaS as critical to your business is the main lesson here. Let's be honest, nobody had 'Airplane' as some critical part of their business.
Rapzid 3y ago
That's crazy. They raised a ton of money and the fact that the airplane.dev platform is being sunsetted.. How graceful was this.. landing?
- esafak 3y ago
  The jokes are writing themselves, aren't they :)
  - Evidlo 3y ago
    They ran out of runway.
57FkMytWjyFu 3y ago
[flagged]
dekhn 3y ago
"An update on Airplane" "The update is we're cancelling it"
- pixl97 3y ago
  "Hello this is your captain speaking.... The wings have fallen off the airplane and we'll be landing very shortly"
- throwuxiytayq 3y ago
  Reminds me of how my boss set up a meeting to discuss my future in the company the other day.
  - ok_dad 3y ago
    “The future is now: you’re fired.”
- Rapzid 3y ago
  All hands brace for impact.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jonnycoder 3y ago
  “Dear loyal customers, in these robust economic times we regret to inform you that we are laying you off. You have 3 months of support severance.”
loeber 3y ago
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.
- morgante 3y ago
  > Over 450,000 organizations use Airtable and over 50% of the Fortune 500 are paying customers That’s Airtable (the acquirer) not Airplane. I’d be astonished if Airplane had anywhere near that much traction.
  - ralmidani 3y ago
    Airplanes don’t need traction, they need lift.
    - rizky05 3y ago
      They also need a runway, which they don't.
      - HEGalloway 3y ago
        maybe all they need is a layover?
        wharvle 3y ago
        The real trouble was that most of the flight crew ordered the fish.
Havoc 3y ago
I hope all the people who bought tickets used their hand luggage allowance on a parachute
grpt 3y ago
For an alternative to airplane.dev, you can checkout Windmill. https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill 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&query=airplane.dev%20windmill&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- samstave 3y ago
  [flagged]
swyx 3y ago
> 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? Edit: Airtable also speculated to be worth 1-2b now: https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703492397739516068?lang=en https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703492397739516068?lang=...
- jhatemyjob 3y ago
  -
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    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.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - temp_praneshp 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      Why are you reposting a comment that the author deleted?
wizwit999 3y ago
An acqui-hire one year after a $32M round, oof.
- throwup238 3y ago
  Thank god for that liquidation preference! said the VCs.
xwowsersx 3y ago
I suppose they determined the acquired company was just plane redundant. Or perhaps, they were worried about too much air causing inflation... (I'll see myself out)
fb03 3y ago
Airdrawer.
IvyMike 3y ago
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."
- wly_cdgr 3y ago
  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.
open_ 3y ago
This is why open source and/or self-hosting tools are important.
goofed 3y ago
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!
xyst 3y ago
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.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  No need to bash on B-schools. There are plenty of grifters and unremarkable people at A-schools who got in there with money and a white-sounding name. The rest is accurate.
  - xyst 3y ago
    B-schools is “business schools”. I wasn’t referring to the “prestige” of certain colleges (ie, “Ivy League” vs public school)
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      Oh, my bad. It's the first time I see it written this way.
dvdhsu 3y ago
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.
- swyx 3y ago
  > You just have to build a great product [1], sarcasm or is there a missing reference somewhere?
  - dvdhsu 3y ago
    Sorry, forgot to write the footnote so just removed it. Agreed that building a great product and finding PMF is hard. But "not hiring" shouldn't be! (So yes, I suppose the comment was tongue in cheek, haha.)
Viaaaron 3y ago
ouch! migrating tools can be intimidating for such an important part of your business happy to advise for free or build-out in Retool for any Airplane users stuck with 2-months to figure out what to do....
wgyn 3y ago
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.
theGnuMe 3y ago
Competitive space.. YC should consolidate these startups to create a better salesforce. All the pieces are there.
hobs 3y ago
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.
encoderer 3y ago
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.
- HEGalloway 3y ago
  > dev tools businesses are hard 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?
  - gbear605 3y ago
    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.
  - RyanHamilton 3y ago
    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.
rubenfiszel 3y ago
(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. (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 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 https://www.windmill.dev/docs/advanced/cli)
- wolverine876 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    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.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      Show HN is different. Why don't I see other marketing like the GGP?
zubairq 3y ago
Nice to see consolidation in the low code space. Congratulations to both Airplane and Airtable!
HEGalloway 3y ago
pretty sure they only acquired it because of the word "air" in the name /s
- autonomousErwin 3y ago
  Rumour has it Brian Chesky is in talks with Airtable...
- rsynnott 3y ago
  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!
ttymck 3y ago
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"?
- Rapzid 3y ago
  Almost certainly not.
  - gorkemcetin 3y ago
    It would otherwise be a part of the announcement.
- acjohnson55 3y ago
  Unfortunately, they have confirmed that their service is shutting completely down in March.
necatiozmen 3y ago
This is good example of vendor lock-in problem on low-code tools.
foxbee 3y ago
Congratulations to the Airplane team. 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 https://github.com/Budibase/budibase] Retool [Https://retool.com]
vlugovsky 3y ago
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.
RyanHamilton 3y ago
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/ 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 https://github.com/timestored/pulseui Given our first product was started over a decade ago it's a journey to get there.
bradmenezes 3y ago
(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. [0] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-custom-components-in-superblocks https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-custom-componen... [1] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/superblocks-on-prem-agent https://www.superblocks.com/blog/superblocks-on-prem-agent [2] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-control-blocks-build-any-backend-business-logic-visually https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-control-blocks-... [3] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-real-time-streaming-apps-in-superblocks https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-real-time-strea...
jimmyechan 3y ago
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. Reach out to airplane@dropbase.io Additional info: - Our latest Show HN for context on the product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38534920 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
sachinr 3y ago
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.
ebsalberto 3y ago
We are pretty heavy users of Airplane and they just disrupted our roadmap for the next two months. Do not rely on closed source for important stuff.
acjohnson55 3y ago
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.
brunovcosta 3y ago
Founder of https://abstra.io https://abstra.io here (YC S21, a python friendly alternative to Airplane). 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.
- franciscomello 3y ago
  cool
  - pedrox 3y ago
    Nice. I was told Abstra is solid. Will give a try, thanks.
- lucasgs 3y ago
  Thanks for this offer, it will be a life saver for many.
- blessedcreator 3y ago
  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!
- acbernardes 3y ago
  abstra is awesome!
- mestor 3y ago
  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
mohanarpit 3y ago
Founder of Appsmith (https://appsmith.com https://appsmith.com) here. 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.

185 points by axfan 3y ago

ctb9 3y ago

Welp, this changes my 2024 outlook. 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.

kamikaz1k 3y ago
Retool?
- Rapzid 3y ago
  A retool is probably a given.
  - CrypticShift 3y ago
    ... with https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/ as an option
- jonnycoder 3y ago
  “Retooling, that’s a good excuse. I’LL RETOOL YOU!”
morgante 3y ago
I think windmill.dev is conceptually closest to Airplane, and since it’s OSS you don’t run the same risk if disappearance.
jlahijani 3y ago
Xano
adrr 3y ago
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.
SpaghettiX 3y ago
I haven't used it, but Tooljet is the open source Retool. Also, there's AppSmith and Budibase. Both open source. https://www.tooljet.com/ https://www.tooljet.com/ https://www.appsmith.com/ https://www.appsmith.com/ https://budibase.com/ https://budibase.com/
foxbee 3y ago
Give Budibase a whirl - it's open source and sits between Airtable and Airplane from a UX perspective.
kevinkatzke 3y ago
Take a look at Superblocks: https://www.superblocks.com/ https://www.superblocks.com/

veeti 3y ago

"Thousands of engineers use Airplane to rapidly build UIs and workload automation for engineering, support, and operations teams." "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?

throwitaway222 3y ago
But does it matter - he said he's excited!
- Rapzid 3y ago
  Excited the Airplane is not falling off the end of the runway..
  - sundaeofshock 3y ago
    More likely he is excited to cash out.
- horsebridge 3y ago
  Well, it has been an Incredible Journey. https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
hipadev23 3y ago
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.
- macspoofing 3y ago
  >Don't integrate early-stage SaaS as critical to your business is the main lesson here. Let's be honest, nobody had 'Airplane' as some critical part of their business.

Rapzid 3y ago

That's crazy. They raised a ton of money and the fact that the airplane.dev platform is being sunsetted.. How graceful was this.. landing?

esafak 3y ago
The jokes are writing themselves, aren't they :)
- Evidlo 3y ago
  They ran out of runway.

57FkMytWjyFu 3y ago

[flagged]

dekhn 3y ago

"An update on Airplane" "The update is we're cancelling it"

pixl97 3y ago
"Hello this is your captain speaking.... The wings have fallen off the airplane and we'll be landing very shortly"
throwuxiytayq 3y ago
Reminds me of how my boss set up a meeting to discuss my future in the company the other day.
- ok_dad 3y ago
  “The future is now: you’re fired.”
Rapzid 3y ago
All hands brace for impact.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jonnycoder 3y ago
“Dear loyal customers, in these robust economic times we regret to inform you that we are laying you off. You have 3 months of support severance.”

loeber 3y ago

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.

morgante 3y ago
> Over 450,000 organizations use Airtable and over 50% of the Fortune 500 are paying customers That’s Airtable (the acquirer) not Airplane. I’d be astonished if Airplane had anywhere near that much traction.
- ralmidani 3y ago
  Airplanes don’t need traction, they need lift.
  - rizky05 3y ago
    They also need a runway, which they don't.
    - HEGalloway 3y ago
      maybe all they need is a layover?
      - wharvle 3y ago
        The real trouble was that most of the flight crew ordered the fish.

Havoc 3y ago

I hope all the people who bought tickets used their hand luggage allowance on a parachute

grpt 3y ago

For an alternative to airplane.dev, you can checkout Windmill. https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill 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&query=airplane.dev%20windmill&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

samstave 3y ago
[flagged]

swyx 3y ago

> 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? Edit: Airtable also speculated to be worth 1-2b now: https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703492397739516068?lang=en https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703492397739516068?lang=...

jhatemyjob 3y ago
-
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- temp_praneshp 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Why are you reposting a comment that the author deleted?

wizwit999 3y ago

An acqui-hire one year after a $32M round, oof.

throwup238 3y ago
Thank god for that liquidation preference! said the VCs.

xwowsersx 3y ago

I suppose they determined the acquired company was just plane redundant. Or perhaps, they were worried about too much air causing inflation... (I'll see myself out)

fb03 3y ago

Airdrawer.

IvyMike 3y ago

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."

wly_cdgr 3y ago
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.

open_ 3y ago

This is why open source and/or self-hosting tools are important.

goofed 3y ago

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!

xyst 3y ago

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.

antisthenes 3y ago
No need to bash on B-schools. There are plenty of grifters and unremarkable people at A-schools who got in there with money and a white-sounding name. The rest is accurate.
- xyst 3y ago
  B-schools is “business schools”. I wasn’t referring to the “prestige” of certain colleges (ie, “Ivy League” vs public school)
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    Oh, my bad. It's the first time I see it written this way.

dvdhsu 3y ago

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.

swyx 3y ago
> You just have to build a great product [1], sarcasm or is there a missing reference somewhere?
- dvdhsu 3y ago
  Sorry, forgot to write the footnote so just removed it. Agreed that building a great product and finding PMF is hard. But "not hiring" shouldn't be! (So yes, I suppose the comment was tongue in cheek, haha.)

Viaaaron 3y ago

ouch! migrating tools can be intimidating for such an important part of your business happy to advise for free or build-out in Retool for any Airplane users stuck with 2-months to figure out what to do....

wgyn 3y ago

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.

theGnuMe 3y ago

Competitive space.. YC should consolidate these startups to create a better salesforce. All the pieces are there.

hobs 3y ago

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.

encoderer 3y ago

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.

HEGalloway 3y ago
> dev tools businesses are hard 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?
- gbear605 3y ago
  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.
- RyanHamilton 3y ago
  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.

rubenfiszel 3y ago

(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. (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 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 https://www.windmill.dev/docs/advanced/cli)

wolverine876 3y ago
[flagged]
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  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.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Show HN is different. Why don't I see other marketing like the GGP?

zubairq 3y ago

Nice to see consolidation in the low code space. Congratulations to both Airplane and Airtable!

HEGalloway 3y ago

pretty sure they only acquired it because of the word "air" in the name /s

autonomousErwin 3y ago
Rumour has it Brian Chesky is in talks with Airtable...
rsynnott 3y ago
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!

ttymck 3y ago

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"?

Rapzid 3y ago
Almost certainly not.
- gorkemcetin 3y ago
  It would otherwise be a part of the announcement.
acjohnson55 3y ago
Unfortunately, they have confirmed that their service is shutting completely down in March.

necatiozmen 3y ago

This is good example of vendor lock-in problem on low-code tools.

foxbee 3y ago

Congratulations to the Airplane team. 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 https://github.com/Budibase/budibase] Retool [Https://retool.com]

vlugovsky 3y ago

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.

RyanHamilton 3y ago

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/ 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 https://github.com/timestored/pulseui Given our first product was started over a decade ago it's a journey to get there.

bradmenezes 3y ago

(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. [0] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-custom-components-in-superblocks https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-custom-componen... [1] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/superblocks-on-prem-agent https://www.superblocks.com/blog/superblocks-on-prem-agent [2] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-control-blocks-build-any-backend-business-logic-visually https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-control-blocks-... [3] https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-real-time-streaming-apps-in-superblocks https://www.superblocks.com/blog/introducing-real-time-strea...

jimmyechan 3y ago

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. Reach out to airplane@dropbase.io Additional info: - Our latest Show HN for context on the product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38534920 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

sachinr 3y ago

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.

ebsalberto 3y ago

We are pretty heavy users of Airplane and they just disrupted our roadmap for the next two months. Do not rely on closed source for important stuff.

acjohnson55 3y ago

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.

brunovcosta 3y ago

Founder of https://abstra.io https://abstra.io here (YC S21, a python friendly alternative to Airplane). 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.

franciscomello 3y ago
cool
- pedrox 3y ago
  Nice. I was told Abstra is solid. Will give a try, thanks.
lucasgs 3y ago
Thanks for this offer, it will be a life saver for many.
blessedcreator 3y ago
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!
acbernardes 3y ago
abstra is awesome!
mestor 3y ago
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

mohanarpit 3y ago

Founder of Appsmith (https://appsmith.com https://appsmith.com) here. 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.