From my perspective, they were adding features just to find ways to grow revenue. (I get it, you don't have a huge moat by simply hosting static sites.) But their features seemed very out of touch with our needs, and I can't imagine we were the only ones.
As a Gatsby user on a large-scale website, I'm disappointed to see this acquisition because I'll now constantly be worried they'll try to pull a similar stunt with Gatsby.
Since then, I've been using Next.js + Vercel on side projects, and now with this acquisition, I don't see that changing going forward.
Trust and loyalty is everything in the developer community. It's hard to gain and easy to break. Hopefully other developer-focused alternatives will keep this first and foremost in their head so we don't end up in this situation with other platforms down the road.
If you want “old reliable” that works how you expect it to, with the ease of use of a modern platform, and one that won’t break the bank, my pick would be Cloudflare or Render.
I'd love more detail on this. We have made major investments in open source and ensuring Vercel is an open platform.
◆ The Vercel Build Output API exposes all the underlying primitives of the platform for every framework to take advantage of (https://vercel.com/blog/build-output-api)
◆ We've diligently invested in standard-compliant API signatures. Serverless Functions adopted the Node.js request / response standard (as opposed to e.g.: AWS Lambda inventing a new one) and Edge Functions adopt the Web standard. We've joined WinterCG to foster this standardization effort (https://wintercg.org/)
◆ We've always invested in API compatibility between local development, self hosting and Vercel infrastructure (e.g.: `vc dev` is open source https://github.com/vercel/vercel).
◆ We're continuing to invest here. Next.js and Vercel build outputs are always getting more detailed, we're exploring support for running build outputs locally (`vc start`) as an open source offering, etc.
> they don’t seem to care much about security
We added support for your feature request, and security remains the top priority of the company. Some recent ships:
◆ https://vercel.com/changelog/access-tokens-can-now-be-scoped...
◆ https://vercel.com/changelog/share-environment-variables-acr...
◆ https://vercel.com/changelog/expiration-dates-now-available-...
◆ https://vercel.com/changelog/protected-preview-deployments-a...
◆ https://vercel.com/changelog/increased-security-with-view-on...
◆ https://vercel.com/changelog/enhanced-security-with-new-api-...
We called them and begged them to give us an extension so we could perform the release, and their sales rep treated us like we were the irresponsible ones for not reading the emails they had sent us carefully enough.
We've since moved to Vercel and will never use Netlify again because of the way they managed this.
Why else would they add features?
$2,500/mo to host a static site is ludicrous.
Full SSH access, generous limits, very active community.
This is bad news for full stack JavaScript applications and ecosystem. This is gonna cause vendor lock-in, it's already showing in some of them. Open source is losing and something needs to change.
I am seeing a future where you have to rewrite your whole app in a different framework just to change hosts.
I recognize that fear. And have made similar observations of the current landscape.
Our hope in this instance is actually that the opposite is true.
The goal of this acquisition is not to OWN a JavaScript framework. Gatsby Inc is far bigger than Gatsby.js
The Gatsby.js project will join the Solid.js and Eleventy open source projects that Netlify already support through full time employment but who's roadmaps and operations are their own. Using those tools is not a means for Netlify to funnel developers into our platform, nor a means to attempt to lock users in. Our philosophy is that an abundance and variety of such tools is good for the web (and as a result good for us). Also that more tools will come in future and that we'd like to try to provide the best experience and support for whatever those might be down the line. We can't own it all. We'd prefer to support it.
Meanwhile, Gatsby Inc have created very powerful build and content orchestration tooling which is currently only available to Gatsby.js users. This acquisition will result in those capabilities being made available to any frameworks further helping all comers to the frameworks landscape.
This sounds ridiculous to me. The "powerful build and content orchestration tooling" of Gatsby Inc. is basically the same stuff that everyone else is doing in this space. This includes:
- The traditional Gatsby competitors (Vercel, GH Pages).
- Heroku, Fly.io and similar.
- Cloud-specific options such as AWS Amplify.
We plan to do the exact opposite. Right now there are features in Gatsby that were built to support only Gatsby Cloud. I know this all too well as I had to reverse engineer them to implement them on Netlify! We don't want that anymore. I am hoping that Gatsby will be like SvelteKit, Remix, Astro, Nuxt etc and will be platform agnostic again. Whether that's via an adapter pattern (my preference) or something else remains to be seen. This acquisition was not about controlling a framework, just as we don't attempt to control SolidJS or 11ty now.
Also, I think Netlify and company know that a framework that is locked in won't be adopted. The history of mainstream developer tooling over the last thirty years is a migration away from proprietary languages and frameworks, and it's going to take more than a few rogue JS fullstack frameworks to change that.
Every single fortune 1000 company has the problem Valhalla is trying to solve. Most have painted themselves into a multi-CMS corner and are closer to copy/paste solutions for getting content where it’s needed than the sort of GraphQL approach Gatsby (the company) is advocating.
The marketing-speak here is something like “all your content, no matter where it lives, delivered to your customers, no matter where they are.”
https://www.gatsbyjs.com/products/valhalla-content-hub/
Edit: typo
Don’t hold me to it, just an educated guess.
God forbid there's actual paid engineers and support behind popular JavaScript tooling.
You still have Nuxt ;)
Gatsby's Vahalla Content Hub supports multiple (not all at once) meta frameworks like Next.js, Gatsby, Nuxt, Remix, SvelteKit, etc...
tl;dr all features work self-hosted
Netfliy is still keeping up for the most part with Vercel though it is definitely behind. My biggest pet peeve with both companies is their pricing model on bandwidth. 1 TB free and then they charge 40-55 bucks for every additional 100GB! That just seems so lop sided to me.
And I can tell you from working at companies that use them that this usually compounds fairly quickly for medium to high traffic sites and you end up paying a lot. It's still worth it (especially if you compare against the dev time to keep things running smoothly) but wish it was cheaper.
I think it just means that you can use different stuff together, but I'm having a hard time piecing together how that's new, and why Netlify purchased Gatsby to do this.
But why would someone waste their time adding a few subscribers to my old, non updated blog everyday? A couple weeks later I got an email from Netlify saying that I was being upgraded to a payment plan because of the amount of activity on my Netlify hosted form.
I think this rounds out more in the CMS / React realm, which gives them a direct line to compete with Next.js
I feel like the acquisition is more focused on Gatsby Cloud than Gatsby (the framework).
I would have preferred more support for 11ty or SolidStart since they employ the creators of those two frameworks already.
Had Gatsby found a scalable business model?
Maybe this is more of a saving-face/acquihire for Gatsby. Granted, there is potentially some strategic benefit for Netlify, but not enough to justify a large acquisition price (the price is not mentioned in the press-release).
That's likely a mixture of stock and cash. As it seems to be an acquihire, likely mostly stock in order to retain them.
Netlify Acquires Gatsby Inc. to Accelerate Adoption of Composable Web Architectures
Acquisition of new Valhalla Content Hub platform provides Enterprise developers increased flexibility when building composable web experiences with any modern web framework
Gatsby web framework to remain open source for all developers to use
I guess you could have said the same about RedHat, yet IBM acquired them for $34 billion. I wonder why they would pay that much for an open source company? Hmmmm... there must be a reason?
Other companies use those technologies and have to pay for commercial licenses? They can freeze out competitors? I don't know, just spitballing.
This seems like an odd choice.
How many people were let go as a result of this acquisition? (I know for a fact that the number is not zero)
