This is interesting. The founder of Craft has exited to Polymarket, taking another free app he invented (Craft Agents) with him. The funds from the transactions were used to pay off Craft’s financial investors allowing the team to assume full ownership and control of the company.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CraftDocs/comments/1ugftl6/crafts_next_chapter/
Wanna take bets on how all this will work out?
Katie
I am not a betting man, but my guess is that Craft will ultimately be sold to a company like Bending Spoons or Applause. This is purely intuition; I have not researched it and will not take the time to do so, but I do not hear much about Craft lately, which causes me to wonder how many individuals and companies are paying the subscription given how many alternatives there are.
Given the company he’s moving too, I wonder if Craft’s founder is himself a betting man? 
Interesting – I don’t recall any other similar “exit” where investors get bought out and the team is taking over the app. I’d be curious what the governance structure of the company is like now, or even just how many individuals are now sharing ownership and with what level of control.
Regardless, I’m haven’t been using Craft in a while, but this does feel a lot better than the usual “our incredible journey” news.
I agree. The founder leaving without outright selling the company doesn’t give me warm and fuzzy feelings about the commercial success of the app.
If I was using Craft right now, I would be abandoning ship
The market Craft operates in is over populated, there are many similar products which means it’s likely difficult to maintain enough subscribers. I wonder if, with a number of people leaving, it may be more sustainable.
At the same time, more and more people want a system which uses Plain markdown files rather than proprietary formats and databases. Lock in is a concern.
It’ll be interesting to see what they can do with Craft, when I tried it it seemed like a well thought out app.
I’d certainly be regularly exporting a copy of my data.
If people are close to the product and the team, they may stick with it to see what happens.
Fortunately for Craft users, it has solid export options.
Such gloomy opinions. They sold code, not the code for the core product but other code that the buyer wanted, and used to proceeds to pay off their debt. It’s a small staff; always has been. Now they are debt-free and control their employer.
Why decide it’s time to “take all my data and go away”?
Katie
This definitely looks like an acquihire to me. If I’m parsing the public statements correctly, the proceeds from the sale of Craft Agents to Polymarket were used to cash out Craft Docs Limited, Inc.'s existing investors, leaving the remaining team in possession of the company and its assets.
Craft is a lovely app. Not everyone wants to be elbows-deep in a folder of plain markdown files or confronted with the build-your-own-adventure that is Notion—for them, Craft might deliver just the right amount of polish and intelligibility.
I’m surprised at the nature of the reactions so far!
When I read their news yesterday, I thought this was a cool story about a development team who’d lost a much respected founder but had become a team-owned business.
The team seemed pleased.
I felt warm and fuzzy.
Am I being naive?
Who knows what the future holds, and I certainly don’t have any inside knowledge, but I’ve been a paying Craft user since it launched and have had opinions about quite a number of the changes the team has made over the years. They’ve been kind enough to ask me about them sometimes.
I was surprised that Craft’s founder stayed as long as he did. He has always been a “serial entrepreneur” and comes across as someone who loves the startup environment, having a vision, inspiring and building a team and he’s awfully good at setting out a thoughtful, somewhat opinionated picture of the future for his products, which has helped get a lot of investment. It’s way beyond building hype - he makes new things happen. My guess is that he’s never been very interested once the initial building and delivery of his vision is complete. He’s always sold the company (usually for a lot) and moved on to something new. None of that is meant to be a criticism. It’s obvious that Craft is a mature product, the rapid growth phase is over, it is never going to take over the corporate world on the Notion scale and the team has now spent many months trying to pay some of the technical debt - the early design decisions that require vast work and commitment to change, but are “paper cuts” every time you use it and where the effort does not deliver a shiny new feature. I can’t imagine that being very attractive to Balint and it’s an environment where a lot of debt or investment is not helpful.
The team is deeply committed to Craft, and I think for the long term. Them owning it is deeply sensible. They want it to be great for its customers. The recent emphasis on AI-based development (that led to the development of Craft Agents) seems to have been in tension with some of the detailed polish and development e.g. in the Craft editor. I doubt there’s been a falling out, but this change does clarify things. The announcement was genuinely grateful to their founder and his decision, and I think that’s real.
As I said, who knows what the future holds, but I think there might be a happy and sustainable future for Craft owned by and reflecting its team ownership. I hope so.
This is the input we needed. someone who’s close to the product and the team who build it.
I am happily using Craft and will continue to do so, as there seems to be no reason to jump ship. It remains polished and beautifully designed, and adheres to Apple’s UI guidelines. The team is responsive, fixes things, and regularly introduces new features via major updates. There is almost full feature parity across platforms, including the web.
I just wanted to point out, for those who have perhaps not used it at all and since it seems there is some concern around that, that while Craft clearly does not store data in pure text files that would be easily accessible (e.g. in Markdown), its export options are plentiful, and so are its import options.
If it stops serving its purpose at any point in the future – or if it is sold to Bending Spoons – the export options are much richer and much more flexible than, e.g. in Apple Notes. It will also export directly to many of the major apps if installed. So if there’s an app where I don’t see data portability as an immediate concern, it’s Craft.
Craft also allows local on-device folders of all the files attached to a document.
I’m a happy paying subscriber for the last 4 years and I’m hoping it keep serving my needs daily. I found the team very responsive, even on Reddit, and with the TestFlight feedback form. There are still some friction based on my usage and they have kept improving it and are very open to feedback and criticism.
I’m quite happy with the change and I hope they kept their team tidy and efficient.
