Airtable migration: how to decide after the Bending Spoons acquisition

Bending Spoons completed its $1.285 billion acquisition of Airtable on September 4, 2026. Every team running real work in a base now faces the same question: is it time for an Airtable migration? For most of them, the answer depends less on the new owner than on what their base has quietly become.

There are four realistic paths:

• Stay and protect your contract.
• Move sideways to a spreadsheet-database peer.
• Keep Airtable as the data layer and put a new front end on it.
• Or, if your base has turned into the system that runs part of your operation, move to a platform built to run it.

This guide helps you decide which one is yours.

What Bending Spoons bought, and when anything actually changes

The deal is done. Bending Spoons is a Milan-based software group and has been listed on Nasdaq since July 1, 2026. It announced the agreement on August 4 and completed it on September 4, buying 100% of Airtable’s shares in an all-cash transaction.

The deal values Airtable at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion. Add Airtable’s net cash and you get an equity value of about $2.25 billion. Both figures are well below the $11 billion valuation Airtable had when it raised $735 million in December 2021.

Bending Spoons says it will invest. At close, CEO Luca Ferrari said the company would focus on "investing heavily in Airtable’s product, customer support, and go-to-market capabilities."

What that means for your base today: it keeps working. As of late September 2026, neither company has announced changes to Airtable’s plans or pricing. At other companies Bending Spoons owns, the big changes came in the months after close, not the week of the news. Most teams have a few quarters, not a few days, to make this decision on purpose.

What Bending Spoons has done with the software it already owns

Bending Spoons’ playbook is well documented. TechCrunch says the company aims to make the products it buys more financially successful, "often through price hikes and layoffs that have caused controversy." The Pragmatic Engineer puts it more bluntly: take over the product, let most of the staff go, run it with a much smaller team and raise prices.

The public record supports both descriptions:

• Evernote. After the deal closed in early 2023, Bending Spoons laid off 129 people in February and announced the "first price increase in almost seven years" in April. In December it cut the free plan to 50 notes and one notebook. The Pragmatic Engineer, citing ZDNet, reports that Pro customers who paid $37 a year before 2023 were paying $250 by 2026.
• WeTransfer. Two months after the July 2024 acquisition, Bending Spoons planned to cut 75% of staff.
• Hopin and StreamYard. In April 2024, The Pragmatic Engineer reported that all Hopin staff would be laid off, including around 80 people working on StreamYard.

Look at the Evernote timeline. Layoffs came one month after close, the price rise about four months after, and the free-plan cut about eleven months after. That is where the "quarters, not days" window comes from.

What the record can’t tell you is how any of this will apply to Airtable. Most of the examples above are consumer and prosumer apps. Airtable says it serves more than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100, and many of them are on enterprise contracts. Nobody knows yet whether the same moves will land the same way there, and anyone who says they do is guessing.

First, classify what your Airtable base actually is

Before you compare tools, work out what you are actually migrating. Most Airtable bases fit one of three categories:

A list or a tracker

A content calendar, an equipment register, a CRM for 40 accounts. A handful of people edit it. If it went down for a day, that would be annoying but not damaging. Airtable is very good at this, and the acquisition doesn’t change that. For a base like this, a migration mostly costs you a quarter.

A shared database with views and automations

Several teams work in it. Tables link to each other, other people rely on interfaces you built, and automations send the notifications and update the statuses that keep work moving. Moving it would cost you real effort, and per-seat pricing hits you harder. But it is still a database with a UI on top.

The system that runs a process

People outside your team log in to do their jobs in it. A site supervisor closes out inspections on a phone. A planner assigns crews to shifts. Purchase requests go through approval before they reach the ERP. Some records must not be editable by everyone, and different roles need to see different things. By now it has stopped being a base and become software, usually held together with workarounds and permission setups that were never meant to carry this much. Our guide to a process that has outgrown its spreadsheet covers the step just before this one.

A ten-second test: how many people outside your team log in every week, and what breaks on Monday if it is down? If you answer "none" and "nothing much", you are in the first category. If you answer "dozens" and "the operation", you are in the third.

Four Airtable migration paths, and who each one is for

Each path suits a different category, takes a different amount of effort, and asks you to give up something different. Staying is on the list because it is the right answer for many readers. If you want a wider survey of tools instead of a framework, see our roundup of no-code platforms built for enterprise teams.

Stay, and de-risk the contract instead

Who it fits: most teams with a list or tracker, and many with a shared database. If your base works, your users are happy and your bill is predictable, the acquisition alone is not a reason to spend a quarter rebuilding it somewhere else.

Staying doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means you manage the risk in the contract rather than in the tool:

• Find your renewal date and put it in the calendar of whoever owns the budget.
• Export a full copy of your data now, and keep doing it on a schedule. Airtable exports one grid view at a time as a CSV. You can’t export a full base as a single file, and attachment links in the export expire after a few hours. Snapshots are available on every plan and are good for restoring a base inside Airtable, but they are not a copy you hold outside it.
• Write down your current terms: price per seat, number of billable collaborators, record and automation limits, and anything non-standard in your contract.
• Ask for multi-year rate protection if your renewal falls in the next few quarters. A new owner that has just promised to invest in customer support has every reason to want enterprise accounts to renew quietly.

A rate lock is the cheapest insurance you can get here. It costs you a conversation with your account manager, and if nothing changes, you have lost nothing. By staying, you give up the head start you would have if prices do change later. For most bases in the first two categories, that trade is worth making.

Move to a spreadsheet-database peer

Who it fits: teams that like the way Airtable works and want it cheaper, self-hosted or hosted in a specific region. Airtable’s own record limits are often what pushes teams here. As of September 2026, those limits are 1,000 records per base on Free, 50,000 on Team and 125,000 on Business.

• Baserow is open source under the MIT license and runs in the cloud or self-hosted, with cloud data stored in Germany. Its Airtable importer skips formula, lookup and rollup fields.
• NocoDB can be self-hosted, and its importer brings over links and lookups but not formulas. Its license is now "fair-code", not standard open source.
• Teable is open-core, with an AGPL edition you can self-host. It says its importer handles formulas, lookups and rollups. Its cloud runs in the US.
• Grist is open source under Apache 2.0 and can be self-hosted. Its Airtable import copies a base’s data and attachments but not its views, interfaces or forms.
• Notion and Coda suit bases that are really structured documents. Notion imports CSV files but has no dedicated Airtable importer. Coda, now Superhuman Docs, has an Airtable importer in beta.
• Smartsheet suits project and portfolio tracking. It imports Excel and CSV files but doesn’t keep formulas.

With all of these, the records usually move but the logic doesn’t. Interfaces, automations, scripts and permissions have to be rebuilt by hand, and formula fields are the most common casualty. Plan for a rebuild, not just a data transfer.

And if ownership risk is your worry, note that Smartsheet was itself taken private by Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners in January 2025. Ownership changes happen across the software market.

Keep Airtable as the data layer and put a front end on it

Who it fits: teams with a data model that works but users who struggle with the Airtable interface, or who need to give customers, suppliers or field staff a cleaner view with the right permissions.

Softr and Noloco both recommend this path, and it is a legitimate one. Softr builds portals and internal tools on Airtable, Google Sheets, SQL databases and other sources. It now has its own database too, with an Airtable import tool. Noloco syncs both ways with Airtable and has its own tables. Either one can put a better experience in front of your users quickly. Portal users sign in to the front end, so they don’t take up Airtable seats.

The limit is one of scope. If Airtable stays underneath, you keep its record limits and its API limits: Airtable allows five requests per second per base. You also pay two vendors, each with its own user model. If your worry is depending on Airtable’s roadmap, a front end adds a layer on top of that dependency without removing it. Moving the data into Softr’s or Noloco’s own database does take Airtable out of the stack. But then you are choosing a new platform, and should judge it as one.

Graduate to a platform that runs the process end to end

Who it fits: teams who use Airtable as a system integrated with their processes.

At some point the question stops being "which database?" and becomes "what should this actually be?" Maybe people outside your team log in to do their jobs. Maybe roles need to differ in what they can see and change, the system has to talk to your ERP, or someone uses it on a phone in a yard or on a building site. If so, you are no longer shopping for a base. You are choosing a platform to run part of your operation on.

That is a different purchase, with a different budget. IT and security get involved earlier, and the questions change. Who maintains the app in three years? How do permissions and identity work? How does it integrate with your other systems? How does it behave on a phone with a weak signal? Treat it as a data migration and you will probably end up doing it twice.

This is a well-trodden path. Cocottes, a fresh-food company in Luxembourg, moved off fax machines and manual processes. It now runs production, supply, point of sale and quality on one management system. What you give up is speed at the start. A platform project needs scoping, and the first version takes longer than an import.

The four paths at a glance

Where Appfarm fits, and where it does not

Appfarm is not an Airtable replacement. Airtable is a spreadsheet-database. Appfarm is a platform for building custom operational software. If you want a base with grids, views and a friendlier bill, one of the peers above will serve you better. We would rather tell you that than sell you a migration you don’t need.

Appfarm fits the fourth path. The processes that outgrow Airtable, such as work orders, inspections, crew planning and supplier portals, are common first apps on the platform. You decide what each app does: the forms, the approval steps, who sees which records, the dashboards. Appfarm runs everything underneath it.

It keeps working without you patching it. This news made people worry that a tool they depend on will stop getting attention. Appfarm maintains the platform and frameworks underneath your apps, so they keep working and keep evolving without your team maintaining them. Hosting, databases, authentication, permissions, scaling, backups, and error tracking all run on one managed platform. That matters most if your IT team is small, or you don’t have one.

AI and visual development in one place. Describe what you need and Appfarm generates a working application. The agent builds on a visual canvas where you can review the app and edit it directly: the approval step, who it routes to, what the form asks for. Apps run across devices as progressive web apps (PWAs), which install on a phone, work offline and sync when the signal returns. Appfarm doesn’t build native apps.

Governance that reaches production. Appfarm includes role-based access control, single sign-on with your own identity provider, access logging, ISO 27001 certification and EU hosting. Apps go into production with those controls already in place instead of having them added later. That is what a governed, managed production platform means in practice.

You don’t have to build it yourself. Most teams start by working with Appfarm or an implementation partner to build the first version, then take development in-house later if they want to. The first app is rarely the last. An inspection app, a crew planner and a supplier portal can run on the same foundation instead of becoming three more subscriptions.

On lock-in. You can export your data from Appfarm, but you can’t export an application as code. That means Appfarm carries the same theoretical lock-in as any comparable hosted platform. Almost all software locks you in to some degree, Airtable included. What you build is process and business logic. The questions that matter are whether the platform grows with you and what happens to it over time. For a base in the third category, the riskiest option is usually to leave it where it is.

The cost question: per-seat versus active-user

The two models charge for different things, and that decides which is cheaper for you. Prices are shown in each vendor’s own published currency.

Airtable charges per seat. Every collaborator with Owner, Creator or Editor access is billed every month, whether they opened a base or not. On the Team plan, Airtable’s billing guide says Commenters are billed too. Read-only collaborators, form submissions and share links are free. As of September 2026, Airtable’s pricing is $20 per seat per month on Team and $45 on Business, billed annually. ($24 and $54 billed monthly). Enterprise Scale is custom.

Appfarm charges on active users. Each plan includes a starting bucket of active users, meaning "users who have logged in within the last month". The price doesn’t change with the number of registered users, and guest users who never log in are unlimited. As of September 2026, Free costs €0, Essential €2,350 per month with 100 active users and five apps, Professional €3,550 with 200, and Dedicated from €5,950 with 800. See how Appfarm’s active-user pricing works.

The mechanics only make sense with numbers. Take a hypothetical maintenance operation. It has 300 site staff and supervisors who update work orders and a 10-person office team. In a typical month, about 150 of them log in. Updating records needs edit access, so on Airtable Business all 310 people are billable: 310 × $45 = $13,950 a month, billed annually. On Team, the cost is $6,200, as long as 50,000 records per base is enough. On Appfarm, 150 monthly active users could use the Essential plan with additional 50 seats for €2,950 a month or the Professional plan with a 200-seat bucket for €3,550 a month.

Now flip it. A 12-person team running a shared database pays $240 a month on Airtable Team. No paid Appfarm plan comes close to that, and none is meant to. And if your field staff only submit forms, they are free on Airtable, which changes the math.

So per-seat billing is cheap for small, stable groups of editors, and gets expensive when a large workforce uses the system occasionally. Active-user billing costs more to start with and is built for the opposite pattern. Tide’s field app serving more than 5,000 bus drivers is the kind of headcount where per-seat pricing becomes the biggest line in the budget.

These are license costs only. Add implementation and the time your team spends running each tool before you decide.

What to do in the next 90 days

These steps work whichever path you choose, including staying.

1. Export your data this week, then set up a recurring export. Download each table view as a CSV, and download attachments separately because the links in the export expire.
2. Find your renewal date and put it in the budget owner’s calendar.
3. Write one page on what your base does, who depends on it, and which automations and integrations would break without it.
4. Classify the base: a tracker, a shared database, or the system that runs a process.
5. If your renewal is in the next two quarters, start the rate-lock conversation now.
6. If you are in the third category, scope the process before you look at a single tool: the users, their roles, the integrations and the devices they work on.

Conclusion

The acquisition is a prompt to make a decision you were probably overdue to make anyway. That decision is about what your base has become, not about who owns Airtable. Most readers should stay and lock in their terms. Some should move sideways to a cheaper or self-hosted peer. Others will get what they need from a better front end. And a smaller group has built something that stopped being a base a while ago. For them, this is the moment to build it properly.

If that is you, get started for free.

Frequently asked questions

Is Airtable shutting down?

No. Bending Spoons completed its acquisition of Airtable on September 4, 2026, and says it plans to invest heavily in Airtable’s product, customer support and go-to-market. Your bases, automations and interfaces keep working. As of late September 2026, neither company has announced changes to Airtable’s plans or pricing.

Will Airtable prices go up after the acquisition?

No price changes have been announced. What is documented is what happened elsewhere: at Evernote, Bending Spoons raised prices about four months after the deal closed and cut the free plan later. Nobody knows whether Airtable will follow the same pattern. Either way, note your renewal date, write down your current terms and ask for multi-year rate protection before you renew.

How do I export my data from Airtable?

Download each grid view as a CSV from the web or desktop app. Airtable doesn’t export a full base as one file. Attachments come through as links that expire after a few hours, so download the files separately. Interfaces, automations, scripts, permissions and comments are not included. Snapshots are a backup inside Airtable, not a copy you hold outside it.

How do I migrate from Airtable to Supabase or a SQL database?

Export your tables as CSV files and import them into Postgres. Alternatively, use Supabase’s Airtable Wrapper, which gives read-only access to Airtable data from inside Postgres. Sync tools such as Whalesync offer two-way sync. This is a developer path. You get a real database, and you take on building and maintaining everything Airtable gave you on top of it.

How do I migrate from Airtable to Smartsheet, Notion or Salesforce?

All three import CSV files. Smartsheet suits project and portfolio tracking, but its importer doesn’t keep formulas. Notion suits bases that are really structured documents, and turns a CSV into a Notion database. Salesforce, or a relationship CRM such as Affinity, suits bases that are really a CRM. Salesforce’s Data Import Wizard handles up to 50,000 records at a time.

Can I move from Airtable to Appfarm?

Your data can move, but your base doesn’t port directly. Moving to Appfarm means rebuilding the process as an application. That means mapping the data model, defining roles and permissions, turning automations into workflows and connecting your other systems. AI-powered development means an Appfarm solution engineer or implementation partner can scope and rebuild an existing process very quickly. But it is only worth doing for bases that run a process.

Is a rate lock worth asking for before renewal?

Yes. It costs you a conversation, and if nothing changes, you have lost nothing. Timing matters. A new owner that has just promised to invest in customer support has every reason to keep enterprise customers renewing quietly. Your negotiating position is strongest before any pricing changes are announced, not after.