The term 'static sites' is somewhat misused, its a spectrum that goes from static pages edited locally that get 1 page-view a month to the front-end code for la

The term 'static sites' is somewhat misused, its a spectrum that goes from static pages edited locally that get 1 page-view a month to the front-end code for large corporations which get millions of page-views a month. All of those fall under the modern usage of the term 'static sites'. As you move up that spectrum your static site suddenly needs to get built using a bunch of tooling, its dynamic in the sense that it interacts with many backend services via JS APIs, etc. If you have a single HTML page which you edit manually and enjoy uploading to S3 using Transmit then sure that's a legitimate workflow and I've used it for years before migrating all of my sites to Netlify. Once your front-end needs its own build process there's a huge benefit in utilizing a service like Netlify to run your builds for you. This also gets you into the workflow of using source-control for your front-end (you're either doing it already or editing HTML files locally) and its just so convenient when your commits trigger instant builds+deploys - one less thing to worry about. In fact Netlify's new Deploy Previews and Deploy Contexts which build+deploy as many of your branches as you'd like is enabling completely new workflows that are genuinely helping teams scale their capacity because they spend less time on the mechanics of everything. Like some have mentioned Netlify is like 9 tools built into one service taking care of you all along the way, and of course there's a free plan which beats GitLab/GitHub Pages every day of the week because that's what the company is set up to do, its not just a side feature they are maintaining. Netlify serves small personal blogs and main sites for billion dollar companies and spends its resources further developing tools to make developers and devops people's lives easier. So once you commit and Netlify builds it also does atomic cache invalidations, deploys to a CDN, offers integrated pre-rendering/form-handling, password protection, snippet injection and many more features to make life simpler. Can you do all these things manually on your computer or on a VPS? of course you can, but are we developers lazy and enjoy tooling and services that let us spend time coding as opposed to devops'ing what some have already commoditized? yep. If you prefer your own Git installation and don't see benefit in using Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket/etc then Netlify is likely not for you. Disclosure: I'm a Netlify investor and avid user.