Landing and Keeping

The first time someone paid us through the App Store, it was $11.99, for lifetime access. It came some time after our iPhone app went public, in October 2009, and I don't remember the day. I remember the feeling: relief, for about as long as a breath out, then straight back to watching the numbers. I was always worried about revenue and always hoping for better. The landing didn't feel like a landing.

That word lifetime came back to us. Years later, when the company moved to subscriptions, the people who had bought lifetime access held us to it, and they had every right to. A sale is a promise as well as a price, and you carry the promise long after the money's in.

That's the question in this letter, Emma. When a small maker's work gets paid for, what is the landing paid in, and who holds what afterwards?

Sailors call it landfall when a boat reaches land after a passage, the moment a long reckoning finally touches something solid. Landfall is real. But keeping the cargo once you're in is a second voyage, and the record mostly stops watching once the boat ties up.

Joshua Slocum, who sailed alone around the world, ended his whole book with a landing, in the line that opens this letter. To weather-bitt a cable is to give it an extra turn around the post it's made fast to, so it holds in bad weather. And look at the words he chose for the boat: safe in port, "for the present". He had made land, and he still wrote it down as a position that would need keeping.

There's a young builder I'll call the Shipper. He works alone, ships something every week on cheap monthly tools, and lately he talks about who might buy the whole thing. He's right that a sale is a real landing. I signed for one.

Where the record puts a price on a small maker's work at all, the clearest one is a sale. Base44 was a tool for building apps, described in the press as a "one-man startup" that "hasn't raised any external funding", with six people by the time it was bought. Its founder reported a profit of $189,000.

Wix bought it for about $80 million plus earn-outs through 2029, and about $25 million in retention bonuses. Then it described what it had bought in one dry phrase.

Inconsequential. The buyer paid a large price for a product it expected to add next to nothing to its year. So the price wasn't for that year's revenue. My reading is that it was for the position the buyer was building: the place it wanted to stand.

The same shape is older than AI. DotA began as a mod, a game players built inside another company's game: in this case Blizzard's Warcraft III, using the map editor that shipped with it. Over the years it passed through more than one author's hands. When a court looked at it in 2017, it found that "Blizzard did not ensure that Warcraft III's End User License Agreements ('EULAs') assigned intellectual property created using the World Editor back to the company". The makers held rights of their own, and rights can be sold.

They were. An earlier author, known as Guinsoo, assigned those rights to Riot, another game company, "for a price", and "Riot then transferred those rights to Blizzard in September 2011". That share ended up with the company whose game DotA had been built in.

The later author, IceFrog, was hired by the game company Valve in 2009, and in 2010 assigned "any and all of his rights in DotA and DotA Allstars to Valve for a handsome price". That's the court's account, and it doesn't give the price. Valve registered the DOTA trademark, which was granted in 2013 after an opposition to it was dismissed.

The case that 2017 ruling came from ended in dismissals whose terms weren't found, so no court ever finally decided who owned DotA.

So the makers were paid at the sale: a handsome price in one case, a price in the other. The lasting rights, the name and the game, ended up with two companies.

So here is who got what from Base44's landing. The sellers and staff received the price and the bonuses. That's the one transfer the record measures, though not who got what share. Wix holds the product now. On Wix's adjusted figures it entered 2026 at a near-zero gross margin, meaning almost nothing was left after the cost of serving it, which the research reads as a sign of how much the AI model bill takes.

That's the product's life inside the buyer, and it takes nothing back from what the sellers were paid. The model bill is a third collector, with its share a forecast and its provider unnamed. And the users, as everywhere in this record, are the least measured of all.