by techtonicshift on 9/16/23, 5:07 AM
We've been using Leaptable.us (
https://leaptable.us/) which is much more simple (it's in beta) however's execution engine is open-source and it's support for AI Agents is the very promising.
We've found it hard to Justify Airtable within our organization. Practically 90% of it's functionality overlaps with Notion databases which users already have and is ingrained within our org deeply.
by xnx on 9/15/23, 10:50 PM
Good tool that fills the huge gap left when Microsoft Access failed to make the jump to the online world. Kudos to everyone who grabbed a slice of that free money pie, but it was never realistic that every app would have hundreds of millions of users.
by nine_zeros on 9/15/23, 10:00 PM
> We had the capital and said, ‘let's hyper-scale; let's recruit as many smart people as we can and just throw them into the business and see what they can do,’
Inner workings of the mysterious "leadership"!
by iancmceachern on 9/16/23, 4:30 AM
I'm sure there are other things it does, but pragmatically every time I've seen Airtable used in business it's used in a way which a simple excel spreadsheet shared on one drive, Dropbox, box, etc. Would do.
Honest question, what does it do that excel does not?
by ericmcer on 9/15/23, 10:52 PM
Thats kind of a crazy valuation to employee count ratio. 237 = 27% of company means they have ~850 or so employees for a company with an 11.7b evaluation. Seems off.
by datavirtue on 9/16/23, 2:11 AM
Interesting. Seems like the enterprise is the opposite direction of what AirTable needs to go in. Good bye Air Table.
I tried to build some apps based on AirTable and found it lacking. Zero idea what use the enterprise is going to find for this. Microsoft has that cornered with Power Platform. Despite it being a rickity piece of shit it smokes AirTable.
by jerrygoyal on 9/16/23, 4:09 AM
I had a bad experience with Airtable because I couldn't purchase the subscription. It turned out Airtable doesn't support cards issued in India. It's surprising that they neglected the whole country.
by Brajeshwar on 9/16/23, 2:32 AM
Almost Airtable-ish Open Source and more economical alternative -
https://baserow.io (no affiliation).
by pedalpete on 9/15/23, 10:55 PM
I'm curious why AirTable needs to shed people in order to focus on becoming a pubic company, but Stripe can continue to grow and remain private.
Is this just the CEO signalling that he wants his exit?
by beckingz on 9/16/23, 1:04 AM
I was wondering when this was going to happen. Airtable is a cool technology, but seemingly overhyped at their price point.
by dsagal on 9/18/23, 10:48 PM
Founder of Grist here (
https://www.getgrist.com/):
- focus on small teams and individuals
- open source (with community contributing!)
- can be run self-managed
- portable data (lossless export in SQLite format)
- full of great features (granular access rules, formulas with python, conditional formatting, webhooks, etc etc)
If it's little-known, it's because we spend too much time building, not enough time selling.
by truetraveller on 9/16/23, 12:02 AM
There's just way too much competition for Airtable:
- Retool with Databases
- Tooljet with Databses
- Budibase
- Baserow
- Grist (getgrist.com)
- Bubble
- The various Google Sheets Builders
- Probably 20+ other apps
by XCSme on 9/16/23, 9:59 PM
I think this is what happens to most companies, and what I also noticed with my projects too. The "big clients" usually make up for most of the revenue, while they require the least support and have the fewest complaints. The most vocal customers are the "cheaper" ones. It also makes marketing easier (spending $500 to get one customer paying $1000/month instead of 1000 customers paying $1/month).
by foxbee on 9/16/23, 9:20 AM
For an open source alternative try something like Budibase or Baserow.
by dustingetz on 9/16/23, 10:57 AM
$150M and slowing growth isn’t even a unicorn. 1.4B raised, founded in 2013