APITable

Details

The APITable core project is licensed under an AGPLv3 license, and this appears to be an open-core project, with limits mentioned seemingly imposed (looking at their pricing guidance) on the open version with extra features and higher limits on other variants.

Their AGPLv3 license guidance is potentially misleading, as it states:

If you remove the “Powered by APITable” logo on embedded APITable page, you’d then need to release your own embedding application under the AGPL. To avoid this, you can instead purchase an Enterprise Edition package.

But this isn’t really correct. You may still need to provide access to sources (and attribution) for the modified (removed logo) version of APITable, but the embedding application would not be subject to the AGPLv3 unless somehow strongly linked and distributed specifically as combined works.

This was raised with them on GitHub, from which clarification was suggested as an intent, but never really applied as far as we can tell.

There are some marketing concerns looking at the project:

• Distinction between open (and non-open) features is unclear.
• In their GitHub project description they self-proclaim “better than all other Airtable open-source alternatives.”.
• There’s confusion as they seem to be switching branding from APITable to AITable

In terms of funding, it’s raised at least $10m of funding from IDG Capital, GL Ventures, 5Y Capital and Eminence Ventures, while also generating revenue from paid variations of the software and SASS services using the software.