The Durable Shape of Product Engineering · juanloco.dev

On August 4th Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable for $1.285 billion. Airtable raised $1.4 billion getting there. The company sold for less than the money that went into it, and for about a ninth of the $11.7 billion it was worth in 2021.

Sales like this got a name in February, when Anthropic shipped Claude Cowork and roughly $285 billion came off software valuations inside two days. The SaaSpocalypse, in the version I keep reading, is a broad repricing of software as a business. I'm seeing less a repricing, and more of a stark bimodal distribution of outcomes.

Valuation, August 2025 to August 2026

0.1×1×10×

Airtable-89%Canva-26%Ramp+96%

Figma-60%Stripe+74%Anthropic+392%

A common explanation is that companies were slow to AI and got eaten. Airtable was not slow. It shipped Omni in June 2025, publicly refounded itself as an AI-native company, launched Superagent in January 2026, its first standalone product in thirteen years, then shut Superagent down in April and relaunched the whole thing as Hyperagent on its own domain. Three agent products in ten months, one of them already retired into the next. Whatever killed the valuation, it was not a failure to notice.

Before signing, Airtable reorganized. It moved one product line, Hyperagent, into a separate company called Hyperagent Inc. Bending Spoons bought everything else: the core platform, about $480 million in annual recurring revenue, still growing north of twenty percent.

What the filing shows is that the new product could not be attached to the old company. Somebody did the math and concluded Hyperagent inside Airtable was worth less than Hyperagent beside it. The reason is price.

Marginal cost

For twenty years software cost a lot to build and almost nothing to serve. Getting the first version out took years and salary. Serving the ten-thousandth customer after that cost about the price of bandwidth, ninety cents of gross profit on every incremental dollar forever. That pairing justified 30X revenue multiples, and it made the per-seat subscription an excellent container. If serving is free, the correct strategy is to hang as much as possible off one contract and amortize it across a growing base. Building and distribution were where the money went. Scale was free.

AI inverted both halves. Building got dramatically cheaper. Serving got expensive, and worse than expensive, it got variable, because inference bills per request against a subscription price negotiated before anyone knew what a request would cost.

Canva is the clearest case. It shipped hard into AI: it bought Affinity and made it free, launched Sheets and Code, and its AI features were used at enormous volume. In August it cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast by a third, down to twenty percent, and the stated reason was that demand came in above plan and inference costs broke the model. Canva had already cut its AI serving costs by roughly ninety percent by moving to models it trained itself, to the point where its video model reportedly runs 17X cheaper than a comparable frontier model. That did not save the quarter, because usage grew faster than the savings. Canva then slowed the rollout of a product people liked.

Figma got the same treatment in the same month. Second quarter revenue grew 48 percent to $370 million, earnings beat, full-year guidance went up, and the stock fell about 16.5% after hours. What got priced was the cost line: cost of revenue more than doubled year over year, and non-GAAP gross margin came in at 85 percent against 90 a year earlier. Figma had started metering AI with credits in March, and margin was already recovering, up two and a half points on the quarter. It got marked down anyway, on a beat and a raise, because what the market is now reading is the direction of the cost curve rather than the level of the margin.

You could underprice a seat, overprovision features, give away usage for free and it didn't matter because the incremental cost of serving another user was basically zero. That's not the case anymore.

Jamin Ball, Clouded Judgement, March 2026

The most extreme version is not a subscription company at all. OpenAI built Sora, a credible TikTok competitor, in months. It hit number one on the App Store and passed a million downloads in five days, beating ChatGPT's own record. It then lost about a million dollars a day against roughly two million dollars in lifetime in-app revenue. OpenAI announced the shutdown on March 24th and closed the app on April 26th, taking with it a three-year Disney licensing agreement and the billion dollars of Disney equity investment attached to it, announced in December and never actually paid. Every viral hit made Sora worse off. The consumer platforms I grew up on got their content free, because users shot it, and paid only to store and stream it afterwards. Sora burned compute to manufacture every clip, so the cost sat at creation, and it was paid...