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Today we’re publicly launching Airplane, a platform that lets engineers quickly create lightweight internal apps for their teammates. Airplane is the simplest, fastest way for engineers to create new internal tools.
I previously co-founded Heap and Josh was CTO at Benchling. Both companies have large customer-facing teams–support, professional services, sales, customer success, operations–who need to frequently read and write customer data. Our engineering team was too swamped to build the tooling that the customer teams needed, and as a result people on eng would get interrupted constantly to run scripts or SQL queries on behalf of our customer teams.
There were many solutions we explored to helping build internal tools–admin panel builders, open source frameworks, etc–but they were all too heavyweight, inflexible, and didn’t help us address most of our needs.
We built Airplane to address these problems. Airplane is simple but powerful–in minutes, an engineer can transform a script, SQL query, or REST endpoint into a lightweight app that anyone can use. We’ve built Airplane according to a few principles:
⚡ Speed: Take any internal operation–no matter how complex or bespoke–and turn it into an accessible, reusable, safe internal app in minutes or less.
???? Flexibility: Implement the backend logic however works best for an operation–a command-line script, SQL query, application endpoint, third-party API, and more.
???? Safety: Easily specify exactly who has permissions to access an operation, what constraints the operation should run under, validate inputs, make sure there’s an audit log, and more.
⚙️ Automation: Get notifications, permissions, audit logs, multi-step workflows, multi-person approval flows, and more in just a few seconds of configuration work.
We’ve been in closed beta for the last 6 months, but as of today, Airplane is open for anyone to sign up and try out. For now, Airplane is free for anyone to use.
Please share your feedback, questions, and comments!
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– Ravi Parikh
