Bending Spoons, the Italian software holding company, agreed on September 10, 2026 to acquire Miro — the visual-collaboration whiteboard used by more than 100 million people across 250,000 customers — for $1.355 billion in enterprise value, roughly $1.79 billion including Miro’s net cash. Bending Spoons has a well-documented pattern of steep price increases and mass layoffs at the software companies it acquires, including Evernote, WeTransfer and, most recently, the time-tracking tool Harvest. Nothing about Miro’s product or pricing has been announced to change before the deal closes, expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, but the history is public enough that anyone relying on Miro’s free tier has a legitimate reason to check their options now rather than after the fact.
The deal was not an isolated move. Six days earlier, on September 4, 2026, Bending Spoons closed its $1.285 billion acquisition of Airtable — its first deal since going public on Nasdaq (ticker BSP) on July 1, 2026, an IPO that raised $1.68 billion. Miro’s own blog framed the sale in upbeat terms, with founder and CEO Andrey Khusid writing that “the best version of Miro is still ahead of us,” while Bending Spoons said only that “until the transaction closes, both companies will continue to operate independently” and that post-closing decisions about structure and roles would come “after closing,” once its team gets to know Miro’s operations.
There is no single best Miro alternative, because “best” depends on what you’re actually hedging against. Excalidraw ranks first here for anyone whose real concern is structural: it’s open source and self-hostable, so its free product cannot be revoked by a future owner the way a hosted free tier can. Cnvs.app ranks second for a more direct version of the same worry — there simply is no paid tier on it today for a future owner to raise. Below, all seven ranked on exposure to that specific risk alongside the usual free-tier caps, signup friction and facilitation depth.
Bending Spoons’ acquisition playbook, in its own numbers
The pattern is not speculation; it’s reported, named, and in at least one case confirmed by Bending Spoons’ own CEO. After acquiring WeTransfer in mid-2024, Bending Spoons laid off roughly 75% of its staff — TechCrunch put the number at over 260 of WeTransfer’s roughly 350 employees — and capped WeTransfer’s free plan at 10 transfers per month. After acquiring Evernote in 2022, Bending Spoons cut headcount and tightened the free tier enough that long-time users, per investigative outlet Follow the Money, described the app as “becoming increasingly expensive”; Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari has disputed the framing, saying the company has “almost every time greatly increased the value for free users.” Most recently, Bloomberg reported on August 13, 2026 that customers of Harvest, the time-tracking tool Bending Spoons had acquired, saw some bills rise more than tenfold after a switch from flat per-seat pricing to usage-based fees. None of this guarantees Miro follows the same path — Miro is a much larger, more enterprise-weighted business (nearly 90% of its roughly $600 million in annual recurring revenue already comes from business and enterprise customers) than a WeTransfer or a Harvest — but it is the specific, sourced reason a “wait and see” approach carries real risk for anyone on Miro’s free plan.
What actually changes, and when
Concretely: nothing yet. Both companies have said operations continue independently until the deal closes, expected in Q4 2026 pending regulatory approval — mergers of this size routinely draw antitrust review, which is itself a reason the timeline could slip. Bending Spoons’ own public statements about integration are notably vague on specifics and explicit about sequencing: staffing and structural decisions are described as something that happens “after closing,” not before. That gives current Miro users a real but bounded window — likely several months — in which the product works exactly as it does today. The honest advice is not to panic-migrate, but to know your exit before you need one, which is the whole point of ranking alternatives now rather than after an announcement forces the question.
How to choose, if you’re hedging
Match the alternative to what you’re actually protecting against. If your priority is a guarantee that survives any future ownership change, choose an open-source, self-hostable tool — Excalidraw or tldraw — where the code itself, not a company’s pricing page, is the thing you can rely on. If your priority is simply avoiding a subscription that could be hiked, Cnvs.app has no paid tier to raise, though it’s a smaller, closed-source product without that same self-hosted fallback. If you’d only leave Miro reluctantly and mainly need a like-for-like substitute for structured facilitation, Mural and Lucidspark are the closest functional matches, while FigJam is the right call if your boards already feed into Figma design files — and Figma itself, now a large public company, carries a different risk profile than a company built specifically around leveraged software buyouts.
Where this leaves the whiteboard market
Bending Spoons’ acquisition pace — Vimeo, Brightcove, AOL, Eventbrite, Airtable and now Miro inside roughly eighteen months, funded in part by its own $1.68 billion IPO — signals that consolidation in productivity software is accelerating, not slowing. For buyers, the practical lesson from Jamboard’s 2025 shutdown and now Miro’s sale is the same: a free tier’s durability depends less on how generous it looks today and more on who owns the business model behind it, and whether that model has room to survive a new owner’s spreadsheet. Open-source, self-hostable tools are structurally insulated from that question in a way no amount of vendor goodwill can match; everything else in this category, including the product Miro is becoming, is a bet on the next owner’s intentions.