Bending Spoons kept Filmic's app and cut all 22 of its people

Bending Spoons is a Milan app studio that buys and overhauls consumer apps; Filmic made the pro video app Filmic Pro.

Acquired apps are products detachable from their creators: a centralised platform team can run Filmic Pro without anyone who built it.

Bending Spoons acquired Filmic — maker of Filmic Pro and the multi-camera DoubleTake app Apple featured at the iPhone 11 launch — in July 2023, announcing the deal in September. It quickly imposed its standard commercial model, replacing Filmic's one-time purchase price with subscriptions.

In November 2023 the entire original team left, including CTO Christopher Cohen and COO Kevin Buonagurio; founder and former CEO Neill Barham's LinkedIn showed he departed the same month. A Bending Spoons spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that all 22 original members had gone, saying the product was 'fully integrated into the Bending Spoons platform' and development would continue with a dedicated internal team. The company had form: 129 Evernote staff were laid off in February 2023 after that acquisition, and Evernote's free tier was cut to 50 notes the month before Filmic's team exit.

Filmic continued as a product under a dedicated Bending Spoons team; none of the 22 people who built it remained by December 2023.

The playbook was explicit: product continues, team replaced — a 'seamless user experience' promised from a team that had only worked alongside the original builders.

Pricing changed before people did: subscriptions replaced Filmic's one-time purchase within months of the acquisition.

Filmic fit a pattern: 129 Evernote employees cut in February 2023, and Evernote's free tier tightened to 50 notes that November.

Seniority left with the team — CTO, COO and founder Neill Barham all departed in the same month.

Acquirers that treat apps as replaceable engines can strip the original team — but the playbook's real test is whether the product survives the people who knew it.

As of December 4, 2023, Bending Spoons ran Filmic with a dedicated in-house team alongside its own video editor Splice, while the wider portfolio — Evernote, Remini and others — absorbed the same overhauls. The all-team layoff became an early, widely cited example of the company's post-acquisition method.