“Airplane”, co-founded by Ravi Parikh & Josh Ma in 2021, is a software development firm that offers a suite of tools for building internal UIs. The tools are not no-code tools, but rather they allow scripts to morph into apps in such a way that security & accessibility are balanced & easy to achieve.
Ravi & Josh found that companies all face the same set of issues when developing internal tools to manage their businesses. These problems occurred in 3 key areas:
Accessibility, safety & time. Teams, such as sales or customer relations departments, do not have access to the data they require to efficiently do their work. They might need to update systems that they don’t have access to & no inbuilt tool exists on their dashboard to accomplish the task. They have to approach a manager or engineer to accomplish simple things, say for instance a refund. Engineers are faced with headaches on how to build accessible, but safe tools that have a friendly UI for employees. Many key internal operations are inaccessible to the people who need them & would need to invest huge amounts of time & expend effort to build them well. What happens is that a tool is built quickly to accomplish a task, but it’s usually lacking in functionality & is unsafe.
Airplane’s solution offers the following:
Speed, flexibility, safety & automation. Airplane allows engineers to take complex or company-specific operations & turn them into safe, accessible, reusable internal apps in minutes. The tooling framework offers developers a variety of backend implementation options, such as 3rd-party API, app endpoint, SQL query or command line script. While for safety, developers can add user-specific permissions & other safety features very easily. Airplane provides automatic notifications, permissions, audit logs, multi-step workflows, multi-person approval systems & much more without added input from an engineer.
The platform has 2 paid pricing plans, but also offers a free plan that includes 2 environments, 3 days of activity history & 1,000 runs/month.
Image credit: Airplane
