Airtable Was Acquired by Bending Spoons: What to Do First

Bending Spoons agreed in early August 2026 to buy Airtable, and announced the completed purchase on 4 September. In mid-October it said it was parting ways with a large portion of Airtable’s pre-acquisition team. If your company runs on Airtable, you have probably heard some version of “prices are going up” or “everyone is leaving”. The layoffs are confirmed; a price rise is not. This is a calm, practical plan for the first step, which is not leaving. It is making sure that whatever happens next, your data is safe, portable, and yours.

What actually happened

Bending Spoons, which listed on Nasdaq in July 2026, agreed to acquire Airtable for about $1.285 billion in enterprise value, roughly $2.25 billion once Airtable’s cash is counted (TechCrunch). It bought 100% of the company in cash, and announced the completed purchase on 4 September (Bending Spoons release). Bending Spoons has said it plans to invest in the product, customer support, and go-to-market. Airtable’s co-founder Howie Liu has said he is confident the new owner has the resources to help Airtable keep delivering value.

Since the deal closed, the biggest change has been to the team. In mid-October, Bending Spoons’ product leader announced publicly on X that it was laying off a large part of the Airtable team, and Airtable’s head of product development told staff the company was parting ways with a large portion of the pre-acquisition team, who would leave by the end of that week with substantial separation packages. Airtable had roughly 800 employees before the deal (Hoodline), and neither company has said how many people are going. Bending Spoons said the cuts do not reflect the quality of the people’s work and reflect its belief that small teams ship more and better. Airtable has said, in its own “Back to bases” update, that customers’ plans, prices, and service offerings will not change, and it has described coming work on its AI assistant, custom apps, automations, forms, and integrations. As of this writing, Airtable’s published pricing, plan limits, and product availability have not changed because of the deal.

Why people are nervous anyway

The worry started with precedent, and the first part of it has now shown up at Airtable. Bending Spoons also owns Evernote, WeTransfer, and Vimeo. Press coverage reports staff cuts at WeTransfer and Vimeo, and price rises at WeTransfer and Evernote. TechCrunch describes the company’s usual approach as buying firms at a discount, cutting staff, streamlining products, and working to make them profitable, and the Airtable layoffs fit the first half of that pattern. Price rises are the part that has not happened here. Bending Spoons says the user bases of its companies are stable or growing, and it does not publish per-company figures, so outsiders cannot verify either side.

Airtable is also different in kind. A note-taking app or a file-transfer tool is usually easier to replace. For many teams an Airtable base is the system of record, wired into forms, automations, interfaces, and an API. That is why a price or packaging change, if one ever came, would be harder to absorb here than for a simple app, and why preparing early costs little compared with scrambling later.

Phase 0: protect your data before anything changes

Think of this as buying insurance on a house you have no plan to sell. It takes far less effort than a migration, costs little or nothing, and turns every future announcement into a decision you can make calmly.

1. Take an inventory

List every base that matters, how many tables and records each holds, and who owns it. Note which ones power something outside Airtable: a customer-facing site built on Softr, Glide, or Noloco, an internal tool, a reporting dashboard, a Zapier or Make scenario. The bases that other things depend on are the ones to protect first.

2. Map your dependencies

Write down the automations, scripts, interfaces, and integrations attached to each base, and which Airtable-specific features they use. This is the part that decides how hard a future move would be, and it is the part nobody documents until they need to. If the one person who understands a base left tomorrow, could anyone else maintain it?

3. Test your export path

Airtable lets you export each table to CSV. Do it for your most important base and look closely at what you got. Linked records arrive as plain text names, not relationships. Formulas, rollups, and lookups arrive as their current values, with the logic gone. Attachments arrive as links, and Airtable’s attachment links are temporary, so a file you cannot open next quarter is a file you did not really save. A CSV is a snapshot of values, not a copy of your system.

4. Measure how complex your base really is

How hard a future migration would be depends far less on record count than on formulas, rollups, lookups, and link structure. Our free complexity check reads your base structure and gives you a score, so you know now whether your base is a quick move or a serious project, before anyone is asking you for a date.

5. Get a copy of your data you control

The strongest form of insurance is a faithful copy of the base in a PostgreSQL database that you own: tables named after your Airtable tables, linked records as foreign keys, and formulas, rollups, and lookups rebuilt as SQL. You can keep working in Airtable as normal and keep that copy as your safety net, or later move your workflows onto it. You can try this on a slice of one base with the free trial, no credit card needed, and see what comes out before committing to anything. Our guide to syncing after migration covers keeping the two in step.

6. Set your trigger in advance

Agree internally, now, what would make you move: a price increase above a number you choose, a plan limit that removes something you rely on, an API change that breaks an integration, or a degraded support experience. When a trigger fires, you then have a plan to execute, not an argument to have.

What would change the picture

Watch for four things: a change to published pricing or plan limits, a change to API access or rate limits, slower or thinner support, and any announcement that retires a feature you depend on. With much of the team gone, support and the pace of fixes are the ones to watch first. No pricing, plan-limit, or API change has been announced. If one is, you will be glad you finished Phase 0.

If it starts affecting your business

Match the response to the signal, and start with the cheapest fix. Moving is the last step, not the first.

If pricing or plan limits change

Start with your number: seats × price per seat × 12. Then try the cheap fixes. Check whether everyone with an editor seat actually edits, and whether the plan you are on is the plan you need. Ask your Airtable contact when your plan renews and whether the price can be held for the term; you are asking, not assuming. Only if the new number crosses the line you set in advance does moving become worth the work.

If API access or rate limits change

List every integration that calls the API: automations, scripts, site builders, dashboards. Most breakage here is quiet, so check logs and failed runs first. Caching and queuing can buy time. If an application depends on the API, this is the signal where a copy of your data outside Airtable pays off most.

If support slows or fixes stall

Keep a record of tickets and response times, and write a short runbook for each important base: who owns it, what is attached to it, how to restore it. With much of the team gone, this is the signal most likely to show up first, and it is the one a runbook and a copy you control soften the most.

If a feature you rely on is retired

Find out exactly what depends on it, then look for a workaround inside Airtable before looking outside it. Airtable’s October update lists additions, not removals, so this is a watch item rather than a current one.

Your options if you decide to move

There are four realistic paths. None is right for everyone.

1. Stay and adjust. Trim seats, right-size the plan, renegotiate. Best when the problem is cost, not capability. The trade-off is that you stay dependent on one vendor.
2. Another Airtable-style app. Tools such as Baserow, NocoDB, and Teable give you a familiar grid. Quickest to adopt. The trade-off is that coverage varies, so check how each one handles linked records, formulas, rollups, and attachments before you commit.
3. A database you own, plus an interface. PostgreSQL with an admin tool or app builder on top. Best when Airtable is the backend of an application, you need reporting, or you want ownership. The trade-off is more setup and someone to look after it.
4. A hybrid. Keep editing in Airtable and keep a PostgreSQL copy for reporting, applications, and insurance. Best when the team likes the interface but you want a safety net. The trade-off is two systems to keep in step; the guide to syncing covers that.

Questions to ask any alternative

What happens to linked records, formulas, rollups and lookups, and attachments? What happens to views, permissions, and automations? Can you get your data out again, in a format you can use? What does it cost and who hosts it at your size? How long would a move take for a base as complex as yours? A tool that cannot answer these plainly is a risk, whichever route you choose.

The comparison of migration options and the step-by-step migration guide go deeper. If you want a second pair of eyes on a complicated base, a short discovery call is free and carries no obligation.