On Tuesday, Bending Spoons announced a definitive agreement to acquire Airtable for $1.285 billion in cash. Counting Airtable’s cash balance, the equity value comes to roughly $2.25 billion.
If your operations run on Airtable, you probably had two reactions at once: what actually changes for me? and what’s a Bending Spoons?
At XRAY, Airtable has been one of our preferred database solutions from the very beginning. We’re one of their certified partners, and we’ve used it in dozens of engagements with clients.
As a company, we’re deeply invested in the Airtable platform.
Here’s what we know, and what we’re telling our clients to do about it.
Airtable raised about $1.35 billion since 2013. At its 2021 peak, investors valued it above $11 billion. Tuesday’s deal prices it at about a fifth of that.
But to be clear, this wasn’t a fire sale of a dying product. Airtable’s annual recurring revenue sits around $480 million and grew more than 20% over the past year.
A healthy, growing company just sold for a fraction of its peak valuation. Axios called it one of the first major “SaaSpocalypse” sales.
It won't be the last — SaaS valuations are resetting across the board. That is why the smart response isn't fleeing any one platform. It's making sure your workflows can survive whoever owns it.
The Airtable deal is expected to close later this year, pending regulatory approval. Until then, both companies operate independently. As an Airtable user, your bases, your automations, and your bill are all unchanged for now.
However, the future may present some new challenges, and the track record of Bending Spoons has left many Airtable users uneasy.
Bending Spoons is a Milan-based company, public on Nasdaq since July, that buys established software brands and runs them for profit.
You know their portfolio even if you don’t know their name: Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, Vimeo, and — earlier this year — AOL and Eventbrite.
Their playbook has been remarkably consistent, which has led to some understandable concern for Airtable users.
In acquisition after acquisition, Bending Spoons cut costs hard. After buying Evernote, they laid off staff and moved operations to Europe.
They also raise prices. The cost of Evernote’s Personal plan roughly doubled in one year under their ownership, and free tiers tightened across the portfolio.
But there’s one critical piece that the doom and gloom headlines skip: after Bending Spoons buys a product, that product keeps shipping.
Evernote put out more updates in the two years after the acquisition than in the several years before it.
Bending Spoons buys products to run them, not to bury them.
Here’s XRAY’s forecast in one line: Airtable isn’t going away. It will probably cost more, and its roadmap priorities will change.
Ripping out a production Airtable system this week means reacting to a headline. Migration has real costs — rebuild time, retraining, broken integrations, data-mapping risk — and for most teams those costs dwarf even a steep price increase.
The teams that get hurt when a platform changes hands aren’t the ones who stayed too long. They’re the ones who couldn’t answer basic questions about their own stack when the terms changed.
Treat this news as the deadline for the stack hygiene you’ve been meaning to do anyway.
Expect pricing announcements after close. For self-serve and lower tiers, changes can land fast.
Bending Spoons applied Evernote's free-tier limits to existing users, not just new ones. Enterprise contracts are protected until renewal, which is precisely why the first post-close renewal cycle is the signal to watch: do legacy customers get grandfathered terms, or take-it-or-leave-it uplifts?
Airtable’s AI roadmap may be reconsidered in light of new objectives for Bending Spoons. Airtable spent this past year becoming an “AI-native” company, acquiring DeepSky and hiring a CTO from OpenAI, and whether that ambition survives a profit-focused owner is the biggest open product question.
In terms of release cadence, the Evernote precedent says shipping can speed up under new ownership. Watch the first two quarters after close to see if the pattern holds.
Platform risk isn’t a reason to panic. It’s a reason to know your exit cost.
Put a real figure on it: how many hours and dollars would it take to move your critical workflows off Airtable? Once you have that number, two things happen.
First, you’ll probably find that staying is the right call at almost any plausible price increase - and now you know that from your own math, not a headline.
Second, whatever the next two years bring — new pricing, new packaging, new priorities — you'll be responding with a decision instead of a scramble.
Teams that can't answer that question take whatever comes next. Teams that can answer it have the ability to choose.
That’s the work this acquisition hands you. Not migration — portability.
Documented schemas, monitored automations, and workflows designed around your process rather than any single vendor’s feature set.
We’ve built hundreds of Airtable systems, and we’re not telling anyone to leave. Airtable is still one of the best operational databases in the world, and nothing announced Tuesday changes what it does well.
We also run XRAY itself on Airtable: our CRM, our project management, our finance ops. Whatever Bending Spoons does next happens to us before it happens to any client. Nobody watches this closer.
What we started doing this week is running acquisition-readiness reviews with our clients: footprint inventory, schema documentation, seat audits, renewal strategy, and a concrete exit-cost estimate. Whatever Bending Spoons does next, it should be a line item for you, not a crisis.
If Airtable runs something your business can’t function without, and you can’t currently answer “what would it cost us to leave” — that’s the gap to close this quarter. We can help, whether that’s an hour of expert eyes on your setup or a full portability review.
Your tools will keep getting bought and sold. Your workflows should survive all of it. And one commitment, on the record: the moment our recommendation on Airtable changes, our clients will hear it from us first, not from a press release.
Book a free call with our consulting team today to start assessing the role that Airtable plays in your stack.
