Bending Spoons bought the database and spreadsheet tool Airtable in September for $1.285 billion, and in the same month agreed to buy the online whiteboard Miro for $1.355 billion. It already owns Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL and Eventbrite. The prices are the interesting part, because they show what software is now worth and who decides what happens to the tools you pay for.
Software is priced by who stays, not by what it could become
Airtable was valued at more than $11 billion in 2021, so it sold for about a fifth of that. Miro's price was about 90% below the valuation it reached in 2022, and it works out to a bit over two years of Miro's subscription revenue. In 2021 investors paid for growth stories. A buyer in 2026 pays for people who already subscribe and are unlikely to cancel.
AI is a large part of why. Bending Spoons says AI wrote or co-wrote more than 90% of its code changes by March 2026, up from under 10% a year earlier, with engineers still reviewing the work. When a few engineers can maintain a product that once needed hundreds, the code stops being the scarce thing. The scarce thing is a customer who has already put years of data into the tool and has no wish to move it.
What the new owner does with that customer
The pattern is the same each time: keep the product, cut the team, and raise prices where it hurts least. Its stock-market filing said it planned to keep only a few hundred of the 1,830 people who came with AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo. Its chief executive has said it often raises prices for the heaviest users while making the product better for free users. For a business, the heaviest user is the business: the recruiter whose whole pipeline sits in one Airtable base, or the team whose workshops all happen on one Miro board.
The company has a reason to behave this way. Without the companies it buys, its revenue grew only 3% in the second quarter, so every product it owns is there to produce cash for the next purchase. Vimeo shows the other side: Bending Spoons says the product got faster and more stable after most of the staff left. Both can be true, and as a customer you only learn which one you got after the price letter arrives.
The same AI makes leaving cheaper
A buyer who prices on the assumption that customers will not move is counting on something that gets weaker every year. Take a recruiting team with three years of candidates in Airtable. Moving used to mean a consultant and weeks of work. Now someone on the team can ask an assistant to export every table, write a short script that loads them into another tool or a plain spreadsheet, and check that the row counts match. I would put that at an afternoon, not a project.
So the tools that keep their customers will be the ones where leaving really is hard, such as Miro, which has to be left by whole organizations at once, along with their integrations and habits. The rest will find that the price they can charge is limited by how quickly a customer can try something else.
Do that homework before the email comes. For any tool your work depends on, keep a recent export in a plain format such as CSV, and know which alternative you would try first. After a price letter you are negotiating with a deadline; before it, you are a customer with options.