Show HN: Bootstrapped Alternative to Airplane.dev
Hi founders!
Yesterday, when we learned that Airplane.dev was shutting down, we decided it might be the time for our first post on HN. We hope to assist Airplane customers in migrating to our platform (https://uibakery.io ↗) to minimize the impact of this unfortunate event.
UI Bakery is a bootstrapped company and has not taken any VC investments. My co-founders and I, all software engineers, funded this business with the profits from our previous software services business. In the early stages of our previous venture, we developed several popular open-source projects (admin dashboard template, Angular UI kit). Thus our client projects often included admin panels, dashboards, and portals. As a result, the idea of building a platform that would allow faster delivery and also support a subscription-based business model was a no-brainer. Eventually, we made the risky decision to fully commit to UI Bakery. After a period of searching for PMF, we built a small and effective team (10 people, growing now), and became profitable.
UI Bakery can help build both internal tools and external-facing apps (in fact, some of our clients embed UI Bakery on public websites). Our users can: - Connect to 30 data sources (SQL and NoSQL, HTTP APIs, and 3rd-party services like Salesforce and Stripe). - Use the Drag and Drop UI builder with 75 components to build responsive web apps based on your data. - Create simple and sophisticated business logic with Actions that can read/write data from data sources on UI interactions and as scheduled jobs/webhooks. - Generate code/SQL with AI code generation and Chat with UI Bakery documentation Assistant to build apps faster
Alongside features similar to competitors, UI Bakery enhances the developer experience with multi-step actions, varied workflows, and multi-page applications. Our pricing is also tailored to be competitive. A distinctive feature is our Shared Permission Groups, enabling unlimited end-user access at a fixed fee for identical permission sets, adding value and scalability.
We believe UI Bakery can be a good alternative to Airplane and other internal tool builders in the current economic environment. Most of these products are VC-funded, and investors are more likely to further invest in AI than low-code platforms. Therefore, their founders may face tough decisions: shut down their business (like internal.io did), sell it (as Airplane did), or buy out shares (a rare move like Gumroad). Previously, I have heard concerns during the demos about our lack of fundraising, but now I believe the tables have turned. Having a bootstrapped and profitable vendor seems like an advantage for a large number of businesses.
Feel free to share your feedback, and let us know what you think about UI Bakery.
Thanks!
Published in 2024, this chronicle by @vlugovsky details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
UI Bakery is truly incredible. Our development team has adopted it for our front end development process over a year ago and we got tremendous results.
Our speed of building apps has gone up a lot, and what I really like is that Advanced developers like the ones on my team do not have to be limited by limitations in UI Bakery, as there is just so much room to put custom components and to control the functionality of the apps built in it. We were literally able to restructure our entire software development process and can now build big functional enterprise systems in a matter of weeks, not many months or years!
I also really like their company and their team. We have an enterprise agreement with them and have a dedicated chat with their team. We got the best ever support with these guys. Not only do they make sure to attend to us usually in as little as an hour, but they also are very proactive about figuring out our needs and they are very receptive to the idea of improving their product accordingly. This is the best support I have ever received on this Earth, and I am not exaggerating.
They innovate their product very frequently. Every week there is a major new version update and the speed of advancement is huge with them.
I think they are a very solid company. They make very good decisions and their team is smart. From what I understand they are a private and profitable business so they definitely won't be going out of business.
If you aren't using UI Bakery in your development operation right now, you are missing out on a huge speed boost, and the slow traditional development process you have is costing you a ton more money than it would cost to even get the highest tier of Enterprise plan of UI Bakery. By not using UI Bakery, you're wasting time and money every day and it is a lot more that way. So you're paying the price either way, you just have to chose which price you want to pay.
So if you're a software builder company serious about speeding up and streamlining your development process and want to innovate and speed it up with the best technology available and work with the most competent product team on this planet, give these guys a shout, and even better, get their Enterprise plan.
The only way to do it is with UI Bakery.
Check them out at https://uibakery.io ↗ and you'll thank me later!
Be great and enjoy the day!
Mykola Bashlakov President and CEO @ Elite Software Automation
Interesting. They raised $32M in Sep 2022 and now are shutting down because got acqui-hired by Airtable. Wonder what happens to the investors in this case ? Is this considered a loss overall ? What about existing customers of Airplane ?
I like that you are bootstrapping it. It does not look like a limitation anymore, but more as an advantage. How do you differentiate in terms of product?
do you provide any guidance on how to migrate from Airplane to your platform?
Hi, @vlugovsky. How long will UIBakery be live, what term do you guarantee?