Aol to Be Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5b
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AOL is being sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B, sparking concerns about the company's future and Bending Spoons' business practices.
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Oct 29, 2025 at 12:28 PM EDT
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Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
Without a constant stream of new investment, the company simply can't afford to be loaded up with SV staff producing features that nobody will pay for. Bending Spoons change the business model to 'normal business'. They move to much cheaper European staff, stop work on nonsense 'features', concentrate instead on servicing their existing customers with a stable platform and well thought out incremental advances.
So they take businesses that are dying because nobody will give them free money any more, and make them into real sustainable businesses that can stand on their own two feet?
It's not about sustainable business, they are literally enshittifiers. I know quite a few employees, they literally debate whether a UX change to make a X to close a payment modal almost invisible is "too evil or not" and they go with it anyway.
So, we're not kind to companies who ruin their product for a short-term revenue increase then why all this positive spin for a company whose business model is to do exactly and only that?
Damn.
The company bought the product to bilk money out of its existing users. They throw the product in the bin once all the users have gone.
Sadly, some ants get infected with corydceps. Tragic for the ant, but the other ants get it the fuck away from their colony, because they don't want to be next.
They wanted the product not the developers.
A friend I know is going through such an acquisition, funny thing is it's a European company acquiring his, but owned by an American PE firm. The American PE firm knows that cutting-edge tech is developed by expensive engineers on the West Coast, but when it's time to milk a more mature company for cash flow, you want cheaper European staff.
So on par with actual value created.
https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...
I enjoyed this part:
No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.
For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.
If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!)
Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?
Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big multinational.
But give people any excuse and they'll run with it.
In the UK custom has always been to require a standard opt-out to be signed as part of hiring process.
We get time and money compensation for that.
1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-lay-off-75-185...
2. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/route-planning-app-kom...
Source: I'm a wikipedia editor unaffiliated with bending spoons.
Edit: I see another complaint about IP editing. I am looking into this.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...
How could they “get into broadband”? They weren’t going to be able to create the last mile infrastructure. We see how that worked out for Google.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
Maybe use their temporary dial-up riches to line up long-term rights to premium content. I suspect before YouTube took off, nobody knew the potential for online video, and they could have probably locked in contracts at very low prices.
I'm guessing excess GPUs maybe? Everyone gets their own AI home lab!
https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discont...
And I have people in my contacts whose active email ends in "@aol.com".
I constantly see ads for services like RocketMoney which helps people find and cancel subscriptions. I could arguably be in the "too much money" camp, but I couldn't imagine seeing an unknown/unused charge on my credit card bill and not immediately cancelling it. Nonetheless, RocketMoney seems like a widely used product.
I don't go over my bill every month but get a notification upon every new charge, and sometimes the only way I know that a charge I just put on at a store is the same one I got a notification for is because the charge amount is some relatively unique number.
I have a friend who tried to switch to a MVNO (Cricket, I think) to save money and immediately switched back. Even though both companies were on the same network, the MVNO customers must have had a lower priority, because their service level was noticeably worse when literally the only thing that changed was the SIM card.
The thing is, this is highly variable -- and also geographically variable -- and some MVNOs can now offer similar priority as a mainstream plan. US Mobile is one, which I've been using for a couple years. Their neat advantage is that they will sell you a SIM (or e-sim) that rides on your choice of the big 3, and they'll also let you port between them without any other change to your account. They call this "Tele-Port". Some people will do that even just to go on a vacation to a state with different "best carrier", since there's nothing stopping you.
That business model is what a lot of tech companies actually bank on that why they require a credit card on a free sign up.
Forgetting that you have a small amount deducted for a service you are no longer using, isn't. It is minor oversight.
The way that language is abused by people when it comes to these sorts of subjects is bordering on semantic manipulation. Which in itself is a form of deceit.
But, of course, no one can tell off the comfortable class. It's "perverse" and "abuse" and "deceit" and "manipulation". eyeroll
If the subject were as minor as you say, you wouldn't be trotting out that kind of characterization. I hit a nerve.
I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve paid them over the years for VMs I no longer need. A week ago I finally pulled the plug on those servers. Not a moment too soon…
Additionally: it seems likely that it was the result of gas station pump skimmers, just because the card in question had never been used for any other kind of transaction.
I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.
This only works profitably because the users let themselves be stepped on, of course. But then again users who put their notes into a remote company's computer are those kind of people.
20 years from Bending Spoons will be the final resting place of Anthropic.
Yeah. I have some biz clients with long-held verizon.net email accounts. Ever since 2017, verizon.net has felt like some barely-there netherverse, where the laws of physics keep upending themselves for funsies.
In this analogy, the laws of physics are pop/imap/smtp settings (and auth req), which aren't at all well-tethered. I suspect the engineers have the server settings printed on D&D dice; I think they reroll their mail servers whenever the game isn't exciting enough.
So what happens to those biz email accounts now - now that the entire AOL snowglobe has been picked up by a different corporate toddler? I have no way to tell.
AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years.
(Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)
Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better.
I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to time.
If you increase your price as substantially as they did, you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting. It's not clear they have been successful in this yet, losing market share to other competitors.
That is they aren't actively trying to compete and take in new users, but stem the flow and increase revenue from their existing customer base who find exporting their data hard.
We've seen this before with lotus notes and other software and we will see it again.
> you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting
You’re shifting the goalposts. Either they’re doing the bare minimum to maintain it, or they’re improving it with new features. And that too improving it with enough new features to justify a higher price.
And honestly, neither of these are bad things because none of their products have strong lock ins. Either they’re maintaining a service that was otherwise failing and therefore keeping existing users satisfied, or they’re growing and improving it.
Software is hard, so whether they’re successful or not remains to be seen. And turnaround stories almost never happen in software so they’re taking on an even harder job, but so far there’s little evidence that they’re been user hostile.
Considering the features they have added and polished, I can't say they're not trying to add new users. With their pricing strategy, they moved up tiers. They were looking like bargain bin software, but with the new price, they are not. They pulled a Chivas Regal with that move.
They are one of the companies which use AI in a saner way, and inherit a powerful foundation, and they didn't kill any integrations or export options.
The .enex format is still the best export format for these kinds of tools, from my experience.
If you look at their changelogs, you can see that this is not a "let's optimize and extort" operation. They have recreated the tool, and listen user feedback intently.
As I said, I'm not an active Evernote user anymore, so I have no skin in their game. I just want a tool I depended this long to survive in a good shape.
For me, it's not nostalgia or being afraid of being burned again. It's just I have no real reason to migrate back at this point.
I could never prove that the fake accounts were them, but the optics weren’t good.
I was a very early Evernote (paid) user. But they lost their way sometime after they became a unicorn, so I bailed out.
I had assumed, since they were bought, that it was just a way to squeeze money from existing users. I had no idea they were actually improving things.
When I converted many years ago it required 3rd party tools and was slightly more involved (but still totally worth it).
Last time I tried the Obsidian web clipper, it was pretty rough. It would drop images or include ads. I found the Evernote clipper to be pretty much flawless.
Evernote's OCR capabilities are also great. Somehow it's able to do a better job of recognizing my handwriting than even I can do sometimes. Last I checked, Obsidian isn't very good at this which is strange because the two big platforms — Windows and MacOS — both have excellent OCR APIs they could use for free.
I'm not sure that my relationship with tools is so bloodless that it is only driven by dollars, cents, and minutes. I'm not sure I have to clench my teeth and write that product manager a cheque.
Bending Spoons not only fixed that particular bug, but added a lot of useful features from other tools like "Block based editing" from Notion.
They are actively improving the product in every way, and they record short monthly recap videos to talk about the improvements. They didn't milk and kill the product. It's an interesting watch.
For me, the ship has sailed unfortunately. I divided that Evernote corpus into two, and personal parts went to Notion and technical part carried to Obsidian, and converted to a digital garden.
I have no hard feelings for them, though. I wish them the best of luck.
Obsidian is very good for technical and static knowledge bases. I use their publish feature for my digital garden. Having local markdown files and working on them is great. Obsidian is basically a secret sauce over markdown file format.
On the other hand, dynamic content lives much better in Notion. Databases, formulae, interconnection between other services etc. makes it a great project management tool for my life. However, due to the file format and everything can be interconnected forms both a walled garden and moat at the same time.
Both serve different niches and work very differently. So neither one is a silver bullet by themselves for all scenarios.
But Obsidian is a great knowledge management tool if used right, that's true.
(Although having said that, I do drop most of my notes into iOS/macOS Drafts these days which also doesn't have IFTTT support. But I could probably lash something up with webhooks and SQLite if absolutely necessary.)
I have no reason to believe they are nice guys, but I also don't have the opposite. But it's interesting to me by default you think they are in the wrong.
Supposedly the people that hired all those employees didn't know what they were doing and mismanaged the company all the way to needing to sell. Why are the bad guys the ones that actually are willing to do the hard work of making the product profitable so that it can keep existing?
The fault should be with the previous owners that drove it to the ground leaving no more options, not bending spoons, imo. If it was well managed it wouldn't need to be sold.
- VC funny money creating illusion of jobs for a bit = I sleep
- Turning it into a real money engine that can sustain the product for years = real shit
They are an acquisition company fueled almost solely by VC loans. They want big returns, you don't get those from normal business, but you do from squeezing the life out of something.
I'd say it's only just slightly improved now, with a few bugs fixed and features improved. Not at all worth the price increase.
And it was horrible for a good 6 months after the acquisition... Some days I could not login to the website for several hours. Images in some notes wouldn't load some days. Searches would be missing results. Bug reports sat idle for a couple months before someone would respond asking for more info.
Under the previous ownership, the gap between Evernote's valuation (ie what investors had put in) and revenue (what investors would getting back) was so great that just surviving wasn't a strategy; the business could only value the existing userbase and product as a starting point for building a much larger userbase. That's a path to enshittification.
In fact this is much like the older form of PE, where efficiency gains were the main objective.
Bigger PE firms now usually focus on roll-up strategies (buy loads of similar companies and merge, say car washes is big right now for example, as well as dental, vet and family doctor/GP practices) as well as utilising bucket loads of leverage to amplify gains. This does not however make what bending spoons is doing not PE.
The fact they use some of the same tools doesn't mean they are doing the same thing. The majority of Blending Spoon's employees are devs, not finance people.
1) Nope, they are focused on taking advantage of customer lock-in to raise prices, while reducing operating expenses to increase cash flows. There may be some initial reinvestment to increase surplus of its users, before raising prices substantially. 2) "recoup the cost of investment+ profit"? Yeah lets see if that pans out. The acquisition price is assumed to be under a going-concern basis in perpetuity, if they muck things up with the choices they make the acquisitions have a limited life to increase and capture those cash flows to deliver a positive NPV investment. The demand for the firms products are not perfectly inelastic w.r.t to price.
(This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the prices.)
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