Airplane Blog

Congrats on the (unintentional) launch and on getting into YC! We’re working on something similar at https://www.airplane.dev/ - same scripts-to-apps approach, schedules, trigger from Slack, etc. Would love to chat sometime and compare notes if you’re up for it - [email protected]

I have been following this space for really long time. I think closest competitor is Airplane.dev [1]. One of the most difficult thing to sell as a sales person is to sell an open ended workflow and UI engine and ask me to segment and prospect customers. It is not that you cant sell it, it is just too broad even for your customers to figure out a usecase, because theres always a specific tool to solve the usecase. For instance, stripe refund is one most common usecase posted by all of these platform, but there are actual tools that just does stripe refund and they solve it in depth. You can argue these tools are value for money but then if it involves build time, in long run it becomes expensive. Retool is actually captured the market really well. It is basically become the verb in the internal tool market, it is hard to compete with that even as an opensource project. [1] https://airplane.dev

Hey folks! We're Josh and Ravi, co-founders of Airplane (https://www.airplane.dev/). Airplane is a platform for quickly building internal tools. We let you turn scripts of various types (Python, JS, shell, SQL, REST, ...) into lightweight internal apps for your support, operations, and other teams. Today, we provide UIs, notifications, permissions, approvals, audit logs, and more out of the box. In the future, we'll support increasingly more complicated workflows and interfaces. I was previously CTO at Benchling (YC S12) and Ravi previously co-founded Heap (YC W13). Across our companies and many others we've talked to, we've seen various combinations of chatbots, scripts, and Jira tickets adding friction, interrupts, and errors to processes across the entire, well, company. We hope Airplane serves as a useful tool to tackle these problems. We'd love to hear your feedback on Airplane! It's free to sign up and start using.

I was curious about this article. How much of the AI hype was demoralizing to his perception of the company's future? Attempting to read between the lines, maybe he was down no more than just no-code. He might have thought AI would outperform in the same space where internal tools platforms (Airtable/Retool) currently live. Following that thought, perhaps Airtable/Retool may be looking to pivot away fast from low-code/no-code into AI-first connections to internal knowledgebases & databases. https://www.airplane.dev/blog/no-code-has-no-future-in-a-world-of-ai

Depends on how many cron jobs you have and what you need out of it? Operating Temporal is not that hard -- you can start with `temporal --dev` on your own box. I have a "Nomad-Temporal" Terraform Module to stand one up on Nomad. [1] Temporal has Helm Charts for Kubernetes [2]. There is also Temporal Cloud [3]. That said, there is currently a chasm between "script in cronjob" to "scheduled task in Temporal". The focus of Temporal is more "Enterprise, get your Business Processes on Temporal", not "soloist, ditch your cron". There's certainly space for somebody to a make DAG dataflow thing or lower-code product over Temporal. Airplane.dev [4] was built on Temporal and was approaching this; acquired by AirTable. [1] https://github.com/neomantra/terraform-nomad-temporal [2] https://github.com/temporalio/helm-charts [3] https://temporal.io/cloud [4] https://www.airplane.dev

It’s something like https://www.airplane.dev/ a closer alternative to Refine? Or how does it compare?

Your competitors -> https://www.airplane.dev/, https://windmill.dev

but what is the real user story? take a look at https://www.airplane.dev and https://www.scriptkit.com

extremely ironic that the founders wrote a blog post entitled "How to gain conviction to work on a startup idea for 10+ years" https://www.airplane.dev/blog/how-to-gain-conviction-to-work-on-a-star…

Yes, this is sad to hear. This blog post from Airplane https://www.airplane.dev/blog/no-code-has-no-future-in-a-world-of-ai had resonated with me. I think platforms which help teams securely deploy and manage low-code solutions generated with AI assistance are going to become popular. The challenge for Airplane might have been that SaaS (as against open source) in the developer tools space is difficult to sell.

(disclaimer: Dev Advocate for Airplane) Seems like that would be a good fit for Airplane's Schedules: https://www.airplane.dev/schedules. It's pretty much as straightforward as deploying your Python script (and any dependencies with requirements.txt) and setting up your schedule for when you want it to run!

Airplane too, does have a coding assistant similar to this [1]. [1] https://www.airplane.dev/autopilot