[simonw]

"On January 3, the acquisition and product shutdown was publicly announced. As expected, customers were shocked and upset. Many had been using Airplane for critical workflows within their organizations, and they now had to replace huge chunks of internal tooling before the final shutoff on March 1."

Building things on an early-stage no-code platform like this without at least an open source escape hatch feels like a huge risk to me.

[aidos]

Totally. We’ve tried Retool in the past and it wasn’t for me, but I’ve also looked at both airplane and windmill not long ago but decided the risk / reward just isn’t there.

Sucks to be a customer on the other side of this now.

[sauwan]

Why not windmill? It's open source, no? I'm only peripherally aware of it, so just curious what people who have dug in on it more think.

[datadrivenangel]

It's a danger of all SaaS. If you can't run it yourself, you can't fully prevent this from happening.

Of course, the benefits of taking on this risk may often be worth it. Smart bets don't always pay out.

[simonw]

Escape hatches can work. I took a bet on Mapzen a few years ago - when they shut down my employer had features that depended on their WhosOnFirst API. Because the data behind that was openly licensed we managed to migrate off it to our own (MySQL spatial table-based) solution before the shutdown.

It was still a big pain, but it would have been a whole lot worse without that escape hatch.

[buremba]

I think even for SaaS products, the enterprise customer contracts should include statements around making the source/infra code available under an open license. That would help companies gain confidence in a way that they can always hire the ex-employees and continue using the product.