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Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

171 points by theunquietone 6y ago

city17 6y ago
Could someone explain what Gatsby's path is to eventually making a lot of money? I'm always a bit wary of open source frameworks that claim to be all about their community getting funded with lots of venture capital.
- gk1 6y ago
  This is it: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/ https://www.gatsbyjs.com/ SaaS for deploying and running Gatsby sites, with add-ons, competitive with Netlify and Vercel. As more companies use Gatsby, they (and the VCs) are making a bet that some meaningful percentage of them are willing to pay money if it means reducing their development or maintenance burdens.
  - nogabebop23 6y ago
    It seems crazy to go with them when you can move further up the food chain to someone like netlify and host your gatsby site with a lot of value-add
- hi_its_trevor 6y ago
  Provide gatsby services and tooling for enterprise customers, something along the lines of the wordpress ecosystem? Seems like they're going the way of meteor though, so who knows.
ritchiea 6y ago
I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages function. I just couldn't figure out what value Gatsby was supposed to be delivering that was better than any of its competitors. Gatsby has slick looking docs and a lot of VC money and as far as I can tell a painful development experience. For most use cases you'll still have to write a backend API to handle form submissions, 3rd party calls and other Ajax. What does Gatsby actually do other than package together a bunch of trendy web technologies with Wieden Kennedy designed documentation?
- cpursley 6y ago
  > Gatsby has slick looking docs I think you might be on to something; I don't even bother with projects without good docs or a readme. Edit: Not sarcasm. I value my time.
  - gk1 6y ago
    Can't tell if that's sarcasm or not. I've 100% seen startups lose prospects and deals because the docs weren't great. If anyone who's selling software thinks their docs are only for users, and don't get read by prospective customers, they're missing out on customer prospects without even realizing. Many people even skip the homepage and everything else and jump straight to the docs to figure out what the product does, whom it's for, how it works, what it integrates with, and so on.
    - ritchiea 6y ago
      Good documentation is immensely valuable. Likely an absolute must have to be a huge ecosystem like node, rails, etc. But extensive documentation certainly can't replace being a simple, well organized and elegant tool for the job. Last I checked the Gatsby docs felt more complete than the Next.js docs. Writing this out makes me want to head over to to the Next.js repo and start contributing.
    - hckr_news 6y ago
      If I recall correctly that’s what Patrick Collison said about one of the reasons why Stripe grew so quick as they had such useful docs. Good, robust documentation is crucial for any software project or business.
      - cyral 6y ago
        I can totally see why. Stripe’s docs are really the best I’ve seen. Not only are the docs good but the API is very logical and well made, definitely much better than their competitors like Authorize.Net.
  - 6y ago
bithavoc 6y ago
Gatsby.js raised money, Next.js raised money, and then Gatsby.js raised even more money.
- yodon 6y ago
  Thanks for pointer to the next.js raise, this significantly increases the odds I'll use them - the last few times I'd checked the project's commit history, it looked like the lion's share were from one guy who could disappear at any time due to a better job, a girlfriend, or getting hit by a bus.
  - subpixel 6y ago
    I'm curious where Netlify (who has raised $95M) fits in the landscape when the dust settles.
    - nogabebop23 6y ago
      I think their strategy is to commoditize the Next.js and Gatsby differentiation; They host all JAM-stacks pretty equally. The add a lot of paid dynamic add-ons that are hard to do statically (and that they told you were BAD_THINGS at the start) like form processing and user management. I think their model is more realistic as a superset of what Gatsby can offer, but I'm not convinced it justifies 100 million dollars of VC investment. BUT - I'm always off by a factor of 4x (projected costs, effort estimates) so if you think it's worth 25 million, then you should go for it!
      - yodon 6y ago
        I like Netlify but I suspect it's much easier for Gatsby and Next to add Netlify-like functionality to their offerings than the reverse. I suspect one is unlikely to need both (Gatsby SaaS or Next SaaS) and (Netlify SaaS), which doesn't bode well for Netlify.
        armandososa 6y ago
cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
it's kind of ironic that the main value proposition of static site generators like Gatsby is that it's just a file so it's portable and you can take them anywhere, instead of getting locked into server/client based database systems, yet here they are, trying to monetize by building the "the best way to build and maintain Gatsby sites". From my point of view, if they succeed in achieving that goal, that means Gatsby the open source project has failed, because it contradicts its purpose. I can understand them raising a few million dollars, but $28M? Not so sure, I actually think the VC money will do more harm than good.
- tiborsaas 6y ago
  That's just going with the WordPress model. You can install WP anywhere, but for convenience you can pay a small fee and speed things up. But I also think that 28mill is outrageously lot of money for what the service is. True SV scale :)
  - cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
    it's different from wordpress, for the reason I mentioned above. The main value proposition of static site generators COMPARED TO 1st generation CMS like Wordpress is that they don't require a database and are lightweight and portable. It is common sense that not everyone will want to run their own database and a server, so a wordpress.com makes sense. But static sites can be deployed anywhere and there already is a huge ecosystem of vendor independent and free static site hosting sites like Github (which is subsidized by Microsoft), Gitlab, etc. For Gatsby to survive and thrive in this ecosystem that is completely different from the wordpress ecosystem, they will probably need to do a lot of things to create a lockin, in which case there is no point in using Gatsby. After all, all Gatsby does is just compile some files into static site. Nothing magic in there.
    - tiborsaas 6y ago
      For you with a technical background, it's different. For Bob the marketing guy, it's just another tool to create a website. There's indeed little magic involved so Gatsby has to do a really good job to keep customers both integration and speed wise.
stevebmark 6y ago
I don't think enough people are thinking about what will happen when these companies do eventually run out of money (both Next.js and Gatsby). Not just to their hosting services, but to the open source tech driving the platform itself. Meteor never gained much traction but it sat in a similar parallel of hoping to provide hosting services and just burnt money away. Next.js* however has gained a lot of traction, but it's worrying to monetize these open source style tools that a lot of companies are building fundamental infrastructure on. I don't know if this kind of open source > paid hosting business model has paid off in other similar spaces. Are there examples? * Edit: Excuse me, Vercel!
- city17 6y ago
  Isn't Wordpress a perfect example of that model?
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    Wordpress requires some degree of setup, with the end users simply accessing the installed web application. With Gatsby, if you're at the point where you're ready to deploy, you've already done most of the technical work yourself, so the value add is far diminished vs managed Wordpress hosting.
    - nogabebop23 6y ago
      this is true in some sense; the value of JAM-stack apps is that they are portable and deployment is vastly simplified and requires limited resources (web-accessible file storage). How much value-add is there to be captured? Netlify already gives me everything I need for free at this scale. Once I move into their enterprise features the competition heats up.
- cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  open source => paid hosting model makes sense when the tech is heavy and not easily portable anyway. For example, confluence develops kafka and makes money with kafka cloud. Mongodb develops mongodb and makes money with their cloud, etc. None of these are portable systems. On the other hand, the whole reason for static site generators is its lightweightness. So by design it's hard for these vendors to have lockin....unless, they deliberately create lockins. Which is why i think this model is not really a good model. They created something that's valuable exactly because it frees people from getting locked in, but they will probably need to make money by trying their best to lock in users. The only endgame I can see from this is these people using up all the VC money to give out freebies to attract as many users as possible, and then selling to Microsoft.
niklearnstodev 6y ago
Gatsby's really fun to use developing small apps, and their docs make it easy to get started with Gatsby, React AND front-end in general. They've created a good overall experience for beginners, which could create a decent user base. That being said, the path to monetization seems hairy (competitive market with many free options, the previously mentioned fact that Gatsby's overall goal is to generate portable files). Is there any way that this is some bizarre VC effort to fund open source or do something nice? Or is that excessively wishful thinking?
- subpixel 6y ago
  Some of what Gatsby is doing is approaching a no-code way of building highly performant sites. https://blocks-ui.com https://blocks-ui.com So with that, Wix & Squarespace become comparable models. Hypothetically.
Deimorz 6y ago
Official blog post: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2020-05-27-announcing-series-b-funding/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2020-05-27-announcing-series-b...
hn_reddit_human 6y ago
Does the commercial offering from Gatsby offer hosting? I couldn't figure it out from the https://gatsbyjs.com https://gatsbyjs.com page. Gatsby and NextJS (Vercel) are both backed by CRV[1,2]. It seems like a fairly competitive overlap. Would love to hear takes from folks on HN about the feasibility and comparison of Gatsby's and Vercel's business models and competitive overlaps. [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200527005268/en/Gatsby-Raises-28M-Series-Funding-Web-Built https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200527005268/en/Gat... [2] https://medium.com/crv-insights/from-next-to-now-to-21m-for-vercel-b32f7671d4f2 https://medium.com/crv-insights/from-next-to-now-to-21m-for-...
- fardeem 6y ago
  Haven't really used Gatsby but vercel is magical. Like once you link up your GitHub repo, the fact that everything works so smoothly is delightful. A lot of other platforms try to compete with vercel on ease of use (heroku) but doesn't even come close. Next.js + vercel seems like cheating honestly
ao3p2 6y ago
Wordpress > Gatsby, dev experience on gatsby is bad! Headless is a dead end, need a fullstack solution, a next generation wordpress is what's needed.
untilHellbanned 6y ago
I get it. Funding saving life on earth isn't predictable like some $10/month SAAS like this. Doesn't make the pain that humans choose money over earth every time less painful.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
josefrichter 6y ago
Gatsby is very interesting experiment. Pull stuff from all kinds of sources via graphql. I like toying with it. I just don't see practical use :-) Too complex for non-geeks, too limiting for geeks.
sunpazed 6y ago
I’ve used Gatsby for generating my wife’s static blog. It’s as simple as adding a new Markdown file, and building. The React workflow makes customising layouts and interactions much easier for those familiar with the ecosystem. For anything more than that, I’d stick to a dynamic framework.
save_ferris 6y ago
> Gatsby says it aims to be the platform behind 1% of websites by 2024; it claims it currently supports 0.1%. I find it really hard to believe that they're powering 0.1% of the web at this point, that's gotta be millions of sites. The only way that figure is accurate is if they're counting all of the people spinning up tutorial sites.
- jariel 6y ago
  Yes, this is totally misleading. My bet is that it's not .1% of web sites, rather .1% of web traffic. Because web content is a 1/x curve with the top few taking up all the usage ... if they have even a couple 'semi big name clients' then they could be behind 0.1% of traffic. And maybe by 'web' they mean just USA. And maybe by 'powered' they mean, the company 'uses gatsby somewhere' so they claim all traffic from the company in their data. Which is kind of like Simpsons episode logic, but hey. We need the Simpsons writing team to get together with the 'Silicon Valley' folks and make cartoons that mock startup stuff like this.
bbutterworth 6y ago
I initially got very frustrated with Gatsby. Most new web frameworks makes things easier and faster. Gatsby is not about making a website easier to make. Its about making really fast websites easier to make. Its complicated: you need to use GraphQL to load an image, and you need to choose the right query based on what component you're using. Eventually, I embraced the complexity, and the plugin system really helps. Oh, but I still hate the 'theme' feature. I prefer the old 'starter' way.
- nobody0 6y ago
  Have you tried Nextjs? which does not force you to write GraphQL.
jariel 6y ago
Yet again another company with mangled communications, please, please, would be Engineers making products, make sure that you communicate 'what it is' above all else. The top-level marketing jargon is always the same: "Make your site in minutes, not weeks! Deploy globally! Uses modern tech" Sure, that's ok. But the 'How it works' visual on the page explains nothing really, it's just a pile of buzzwords. The 'QuickStart' goes right into *command line installs of technology. WTF DOES IT DO? Are we point-and-click building hosted sites like Shopify? Do they even host? Is it just a web framework? A cloud-based dev environment? Some people are attracted to 'new tech' like candy and will love to dig into this. I used to be this, but now after years of rabbit holes and a lot more experience, I've realized that the onus is on the 'maker' to explain, and frankly, my (your!) time is valuable. Please take the time to make a small introductory section that uses a few words as possible to get the meaning across to a 'technically minded business person' or even a 'developer totally unfamiliar with the tech'.
- cellis 6y ago
  If you can't take the time to figure out what it does, then you're not the target market. It's really not that hard. It's a web framework for building static sites. As it says right in the hero of the site: "Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps"
- alphachloride 6y ago
  I agree. The website is constricting its audience. Gatsby is a static[1] site generator of sorts. It compiles your source code/text into a HTML site at design time. So you don't have to rely on setting up a database and server for your website. It is not quite like other static site generators like Hugo or Jekyll. They use markdown files which are compiled to HTML. Gatsby instead uses javascript files with functions that return HTML that is rendered as a page. By using a programming language to define web pages, the designer gets some flexibility when creating a static site. It is different from a dynamic[2] hosting application like Wordpress where you have a database entry which is queried and rendered into a page at run time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_web_page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_web_page [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_web_page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_web_page
webdelv 6y ago
I Initially thought Gatsby was great. As someone who enjoys using React, being able to use it for web sites in a way that’s well optimized and SEO friendly was appealing. However… after using Gatsby for a fairly simple site it didn’t take me long to realise that this approach add’s a fair bit of complexity and limitations. Prepare for long build times for simple changes, which becomes a bit silly once you hook up a CMS that triggers builds for each change. As a content editor having to wait 5 minutes for your change to be deployed kinda sucks. GraphQL for loading data often felt overkill and a lot of hassle. If you want to add something like a simple contact form you are encouraged to use external services which just get’s out of hand for what I want to be a simple self-contained site. The end result doesn't even feel that fast due to the React re-hydration that takes place. I ended up switching back to a traditional server-side solution which provided a much faster experience (in both tests and perceived speed) and more flexibility. It turn’s out the browser is pretty good at caching static assets and you can achieve the same SSG benefits with Caching and a CDN without the restrictions. I’m sure there are cases where Gatsby performs well, and it’s the best tool I’m aware of for bundling React pages in an SEO friendly, optimised way. But I think for the kind of project’s it’s useful for, something like Jekyll or Hugo may be more suitable. For more complex site’s that would actually benefit from React, it seems like the SSR alternative (Next) would be easier to scale.
karaokeyoga 6y ago
Interesting data point in this discussion: https://reactjs.org https://reactjs.org (the official React site) was built with Gatsby. They also promote it to some extent (e.g., https://reactjs.org/docs/create-a-new-react-app.html#gatsby https://reactjs.org/docs/create-a-new-react-app.html#gatsby).
JSavageOne 6y ago
I used Gatsby about a year ago for a personal blog, but ended up abandoning it for the following reasons: - Very slow build times. It took me over a minute to build a personal blog. - Weird forced implementation of GraphQL. To display something as simple as an image I was forced to use GraphQL. Also your GraphQL can't be dynamically generated, meaning it's hard to make anything modular. And the GraphQL paths has a ton of extraneous nested fields (eg. `data.file.childImageSharp.fixed`) - Version upgrades were a pain in the ass and would often break my site. - My site actually seemed slow. For example, links don't work until the entire JS loads and executes, so if your internet isn't fast then your website basically isn't functional for the first 2-5 seconds despite the page being visible. - Very few themes (maybe be better now, but at the time the selection was awful, especially compared to Jekyll). No real concept of themes in the first place, switching from one theme to another requires an entire code rewrite. - Limited functionality built-in. For example, want tagging? You'll need to code that in. Gatsby sits in an odd spot of not being simple enough to save you a lot of time or empower a non-technical person to manage (eg. like WordPress), but not flexible enough to do anything you want since it's an opinionated SSG framework. It's like you're getting all the complexity of a React/GraphQL application, without any of the flexibility of being able to pick your own stack. Sure it has a nice plugin system, but beyond that since you need a developer to set up and maintain a Gatsby site anyways, I don't see any reason not to just use Next.js (which can export to static) since all Gatsby really does beyond that is converting markdown to HTML, which is just done through an npm library anyways. If writing a Next.js website is overkill, then why do you need to be devoting engineering resources to this in the first place? Why not just use some no-code solution like WordPress? Or if you really want a separate headless CMS, then Jekyll felt easier and faster to me with more theme options (though again it's been a year since I touched these, so I imagine things have improved). Don't get me wrong I love SSGs as nothing beats the performance, ease of deployment, and low cost of static sites. But if I'm going to use a SSG framework, it better be dead simple and/or easy to customize, otherwise I might as well just use some off-the-shelf "no-code" solution (eg. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace), or use a framework like Next.js that let's me customize my stack instead of being locked into Gatsby's. Gatsby's $200m valuation makes absolutely no sense to me unless they're planning some drastic changes I'm not aware of.
dan_can_code 6y ago
$28M seems like an awful lot for a static site generator. The issue I see Gatsby facing is that the poor developer experience will catch up with them, regardless as to whether they expand their ecosystem (plugins etc). If the developer experience isn't improved, I doubt their money will convince '1%' of all websites development teams to make the switch. Especially if this thread is a good approximation of the mood towards developing with gatsby. However, it's much too easy to join in with the typical HN cynicism to shiny new things. Maybe Gatsby will surprise us and become a contender within the CMS space before long.
davidivadavid 6y ago
Probably a dumb question: if the main benefit is speed, why wouldn't I just want to use a plugin to make my Wordpress site static?

171 points by theunquietone 6y ago

Could someone explain what Gatsby's path is to eventually making a lot of money? I'm always a bit wary of open source frameworks that claim to be all about their community getting funded with lots of venture capital.

gk1 6y ago
This is it: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/ https://www.gatsbyjs.com/ SaaS for deploying and running Gatsby sites, with add-ons, competitive with Netlify and Vercel. As more companies use Gatsby, they (and the VCs) are making a bet that some meaningful percentage of them are willing to pay money if it means reducing their development or maintenance burdens.
- nogabebop23 6y ago
  It seems crazy to go with them when you can move further up the food chain to someone like netlify and host your gatsby site with a lot of value-add
hi_its_trevor 6y ago
Provide gatsby services and tooling for enterprise customers, something along the lines of the wordpress ecosystem? Seems like they're going the way of meteor though, so who knows.

ritchiea 6y ago

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages function. I just couldn't figure out what value Gatsby was supposed to be delivering that was better than any of its competitors. Gatsby has slick looking docs and a lot of VC money and as far as I can tell a painful development experience. For most use cases you'll still have to write a backend API to handle form submissions, 3rd party calls and other Ajax. What does Gatsby actually do other than package together a bunch of trendy web technologies with Wieden Kennedy designed documentation?

cpursley 6y ago
> Gatsby has slick looking docs I think you might be on to something; I don't even bother with projects without good docs or a readme. Edit: Not sarcasm. I value my time.
- gk1 6y ago
  Can't tell if that's sarcasm or not. I've 100% seen startups lose prospects and deals because the docs weren't great. If anyone who's selling software thinks their docs are only for users, and don't get read by prospective customers, they're missing out on customer prospects without even realizing. Many people even skip the homepage and everything else and jump straight to the docs to figure out what the product does, whom it's for, how it works, what it integrates with, and so on.
  - ritchiea 6y ago
    Good documentation is immensely valuable. Likely an absolute must have to be a huge ecosystem like node, rails, etc. But extensive documentation certainly can't replace being a simple, well organized and elegant tool for the job. Last I checked the Gatsby docs felt more complete than the Next.js docs. Writing this out makes me want to head over to to the Next.js repo and start contributing.
  - hckr_news 6y ago
    If I recall correctly that’s what Patrick Collison said about one of the reasons why Stripe grew so quick as they had such useful docs. Good, robust documentation is crucial for any software project or business.
    - cyral 6y ago
      I can totally see why. Stripe’s docs are really the best I’ve seen. Not only are the docs good but the API is very logical and well made, definitely much better than their competitors like Authorize.Net.
- 6y ago

bithavoc 6y ago

Gatsby.js raised money, Next.js raised money, and then Gatsby.js raised even more money.

yodon 6y ago
Thanks for pointer to the next.js raise, this significantly increases the odds I'll use them - the last few times I'd checked the project's commit history, it looked like the lion's share were from one guy who could disappear at any time due to a better job, a girlfriend, or getting hit by a bus.
- subpixel 6y ago
  I'm curious where Netlify (who has raised $95M) fits in the landscape when the dust settles.
  - nogabebop23 6y ago
    I think their strategy is to commoditize the Next.js and Gatsby differentiation; They host all JAM-stacks pretty equally. The add a lot of paid dynamic add-ons that are hard to do statically (and that they told you were BAD_THINGS at the start) like form processing and user management. I think their model is more realistic as a superset of what Gatsby can offer, but I'm not convinced it justifies 100 million dollars of VC investment. BUT - I'm always off by a factor of 4x (projected costs, effort estimates) so if you think it's worth 25 million, then you should go for it!
    - yodon 6y ago
      I like Netlify but I suspect it's much easier for Gatsby and Next to add Netlify-like functionality to their offerings than the reverse. I suspect one is unlikely to need both (Gatsby SaaS or Next SaaS) and (Netlify SaaS), which doesn't bode well for Netlify.
      - armandososa 6y ago

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago

it's kind of ironic that the main value proposition of static site generators like Gatsby is that it's just a file so it's portable and you can take them anywhere, instead of getting locked into server/client based database systems, yet here they are, trying to monetize by building the "the best way to build and maintain Gatsby sites". From my point of view, if they succeed in achieving that goal, that means Gatsby the open source project has failed, because it contradicts its purpose. I can understand them raising a few million dollars, but $28M? Not so sure, I actually think the VC money will do more harm than good.

tiborsaas 6y ago
That's just going with the WordPress model. You can install WP anywhere, but for convenience you can pay a small fee and speed things up. But I also think that 28mill is outrageously lot of money for what the service is. True SV scale :)
- cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  it's different from wordpress, for the reason I mentioned above. The main value proposition of static site generators COMPARED TO 1st generation CMS like Wordpress is that they don't require a database and are lightweight and portable. It is common sense that not everyone will want to run their own database and a server, so a wordpress.com makes sense. But static sites can be deployed anywhere and there already is a huge ecosystem of vendor independent and free static site hosting sites like Github (which is subsidized by Microsoft), Gitlab, etc. For Gatsby to survive and thrive in this ecosystem that is completely different from the wordpress ecosystem, they will probably need to do a lot of things to create a lockin, in which case there is no point in using Gatsby. After all, all Gatsby does is just compile some files into static site. Nothing magic in there.
  - tiborsaas 6y ago
    For you with a technical background, it's different. For Bob the marketing guy, it's just another tool to create a website. There's indeed little magic involved so Gatsby has to do a really good job to keep customers both integration and speed wise.

stevebmark 6y ago

I don't think enough people are thinking about what will happen when these companies do eventually run out of money (both Next.js and Gatsby). Not just to their hosting services, but to the open source tech driving the platform itself. Meteor never gained much traction but it sat in a similar parallel of hoping to provide hosting services and just burnt money away. Next.js* however has gained a lot of traction, but it's worrying to monetize these open source style tools that a lot of companies are building fundamental infrastructure on. I don't know if this kind of open source > paid hosting business model has paid off in other similar spaces. Are there examples? * Edit: Excuse me, Vercel!

city17 6y ago
Isn't Wordpress a perfect example of that model?
- bdcravens 6y ago
  Wordpress requires some degree of setup, with the end users simply accessing the installed web application. With Gatsby, if you're at the point where you're ready to deploy, you've already done most of the technical work yourself, so the value add is far diminished vs managed Wordpress hosting.
  - nogabebop23 6y ago
    this is true in some sense; the value of JAM-stack apps is that they are portable and deployment is vastly simplified and requires limited resources (web-accessible file storage). How much value-add is there to be captured? Netlify already gives me everything I need for free at this scale. Once I move into their enterprise features the competition heats up.
cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
open source => paid hosting model makes sense when the tech is heavy and not easily portable anyway. For example, confluence develops kafka and makes money with kafka cloud. Mongodb develops mongodb and makes money with their cloud, etc. None of these are portable systems. On the other hand, the whole reason for static site generators is its lightweightness. So by design it's hard for these vendors to have lockin....unless, they deliberately create lockins. Which is why i think this model is not really a good model. They created something that's valuable exactly because it frees people from getting locked in, but they will probably need to make money by trying their best to lock in users. The only endgame I can see from this is these people using up all the VC money to give out freebies to attract as many users as possible, and then selling to Microsoft.

niklearnstodev 6y ago

Gatsby's really fun to use developing small apps, and their docs make it easy to get started with Gatsby, React AND front-end in general. They've created a good overall experience for beginners, which could create a decent user base. That being said, the path to monetization seems hairy (competitive market with many free options, the previously mentioned fact that Gatsby's overall goal is to generate portable files). Is there any way that this is some bizarre VC effort to fund open source or do something nice? Or is that excessively wishful thinking?

subpixel 6y ago
Some of what Gatsby is doing is approaching a no-code way of building highly performant sites. https://blocks-ui.com https://blocks-ui.com So with that, Wix & Squarespace become comparable models. Hypothetically.

Deimorz 6y ago

Official blog post: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2020-05-27-announcing-series-b-funding/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2020-05-27-announcing-series-b...

hn_reddit_human 6y ago

Does the commercial offering from Gatsby offer hosting? I couldn't figure it out from the https://gatsbyjs.com https://gatsbyjs.com page. Gatsby and NextJS (Vercel) are both backed by CRV[1,2]. It seems like a fairly competitive overlap. Would love to hear takes from folks on HN about the feasibility and comparison of Gatsby's and Vercel's business models and competitive overlaps. [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200527005268/en/Gatsby-Raises-28M-Series-Funding-Web-Built https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200527005268/en/Gat... [2] https://medium.com/crv-insights/from-next-to-now-to-21m-for-vercel-b32f7671d4f2 https://medium.com/crv-insights/from-next-to-now-to-21m-for-...

fardeem 6y ago
Haven't really used Gatsby but vercel is magical. Like once you link up your GitHub repo, the fact that everything works so smoothly is delightful. A lot of other platforms try to compete with vercel on ease of use (heroku) but doesn't even come close. Next.js + vercel seems like cheating honestly

ao3p2 6y ago

Wordpress > Gatsby, dev experience on gatsby is bad! Headless is a dead end, need a fullstack solution, a next generation wordpress is what's needed.

untilHellbanned 6y ago

I get it. Funding saving life on earth isn't predictable like some $10/month SAAS like this. Doesn't make the pain that humans choose money over earth every time less painful.

deleted 6y ago

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josefrichter 6y ago

Gatsby is very interesting experiment. Pull stuff from all kinds of sources via graphql. I like toying with it. I just don't see practical use :-) Too complex for non-geeks, too limiting for geeks.

sunpazed 6y ago

I’ve used Gatsby for generating my wife’s static blog. It’s as simple as adding a new Markdown file, and building. The React workflow makes customising layouts and interactions much easier for those familiar with the ecosystem. For anything more than that, I’d stick to a dynamic framework.

save_ferris 6y ago

> Gatsby says it aims to be the platform behind 1% of websites by 2024; it claims it currently supports 0.1%. I find it really hard to believe that they're powering 0.1% of the web at this point, that's gotta be millions of sites. The only way that figure is accurate is if they're counting all of the people spinning up tutorial sites.

jariel 6y ago
Yes, this is totally misleading. My bet is that it's not .1% of web sites, rather .1% of web traffic. Because web content is a 1/x curve with the top few taking up all the usage ... if they have even a couple 'semi big name clients' then they could be behind 0.1% of traffic. And maybe by 'web' they mean just USA. And maybe by 'powered' they mean, the company 'uses gatsby somewhere' so they claim all traffic from the company in their data. Which is kind of like Simpsons episode logic, but hey. We need the Simpsons writing team to get together with the 'Silicon Valley' folks and make cartoons that mock startup stuff like this.

bbutterworth 6y ago

I initially got very frustrated with Gatsby. Most new web frameworks makes things easier and faster. Gatsby is not about making a website easier to make. Its about making really fast websites easier to make. Its complicated: you need to use GraphQL to load an image, and you need to choose the right query based on what component you're using. Eventually, I embraced the complexity, and the plugin system really helps. Oh, but I still hate the 'theme' feature. I prefer the old 'starter' way.

nobody0 6y ago
Have you tried Nextjs? which does not force you to write GraphQL.

jariel 6y ago

Yet again another company with mangled communications, please, please, would be Engineers making products, make sure that you communicate 'what it is' above all else. The top-level marketing jargon is always the same: "Make your site in minutes, not weeks! Deploy globally! Uses modern tech" Sure, that's ok. But the 'How it works' visual on the page explains nothing really, it's just a pile of buzzwords. The 'QuickStart' goes right into *command line installs of technology. WTF DOES IT DO? Are we point-and-click building hosted sites like Shopify? Do they even host? Is it just a web framework? A cloud-based dev environment? Some people are attracted to 'new tech' like candy and will love to dig into this. I used to be this, but now after years of rabbit holes and a lot more experience, I've realized that the onus is on the 'maker' to explain, and frankly, my (your!) time is valuable. Please take the time to make a small introductory section that uses a few words as possible to get the meaning across to a 'technically minded business person' or even a 'developer totally unfamiliar with the tech'.

cellis 6y ago
If you can't take the time to figure out what it does, then you're not the target market. It's really not that hard. It's a web framework for building static sites. As it says right in the hero of the site: "Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps"
alphachloride 6y ago
I agree. The website is constricting its audience. Gatsby is a static[1] site generator of sorts. It compiles your source code/text into a HTML site at design time. So you don't have to rely on setting up a database and server for your website. It is not quite like other static site generators like Hugo or Jekyll. They use markdown files which are compiled to HTML. Gatsby instead uses javascript files with functions that return HTML that is rendered as a page. By using a programming language to define web pages, the designer gets some flexibility when creating a static site. It is different from a dynamic[2] hosting application like Wordpress where you have a database entry which is queried and rendered into a page at run time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_web_page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_web_page [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_web_page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_web_page

webdelv 6y ago

I Initially thought Gatsby was great. As someone who enjoys using React, being able to use it for web sites in a way that’s well optimized and SEO friendly was appealing. However… after using Gatsby for a fairly simple site it didn’t take me long to realise that this approach add’s a fair bit of complexity and limitations. Prepare for long build times for simple changes, which becomes a bit silly once you hook up a CMS that triggers builds for each change. As a content editor having to wait 5 minutes for your change to be deployed kinda sucks. GraphQL for loading data often felt overkill and a lot of hassle. If you want to add something like a simple contact form you are encouraged to use external services which just get’s out of hand for what I want to be a simple self-contained site. The end result doesn't even feel that fast due to the React re-hydration that takes place. I ended up switching back to a traditional server-side solution which provided a much faster experience (in both tests and perceived speed) and more flexibility. It turn’s out the browser is pretty good at caching static assets and you can achieve the same SSG benefits with Caching and a CDN without the restrictions. I’m sure there are cases where Gatsby performs well, and it’s the best tool I’m aware of for bundling React pages in an SEO friendly, optimised way. But I think for the kind of project’s it’s useful for, something like Jekyll or Hugo may be more suitable. For more complex site’s that would actually benefit from React, it seems like the SSR alternative (Next) would be easier to scale.

karaokeyoga 6y ago

Interesting data point in this discussion: https://reactjs.org https://reactjs.org (the official React site) was built with Gatsby. They also promote it to some extent (e.g., https://reactjs.org/docs/create-a-new-react-app.html#gatsby https://reactjs.org/docs/create-a-new-react-app.html#gatsby).

JSavageOne 6y ago

I used Gatsby about a year ago for a personal blog, but ended up abandoning it for the following reasons: - Very slow build times. It took me over a minute to build a personal blog. - Weird forced implementation of GraphQL. To display something as simple as an image I was forced to use GraphQL. Also your GraphQL can't be dynamically generated, meaning it's hard to make anything modular. And the GraphQL paths has a ton of extraneous nested fields (eg. `data.file.childImageSharp.fixed`) - Version upgrades were a pain in the ass and would often break my site. - My site actually seemed slow. For example, links don't work until the entire JS loads and executes, so if your internet isn't fast then your website basically isn't functional for the first 2-5 seconds despite the page being visible. - Very few themes (maybe be better now, but at the time the selection was awful, especially compared to Jekyll). No real concept of themes in the first place, switching from one theme to another requires an entire code rewrite. - Limited functionality built-in. For example, want tagging? You'll need to code that in. Gatsby sits in an odd spot of not being simple enough to save you a lot of time or empower a non-technical person to manage (eg. like WordPress), but not flexible enough to do anything you want since it's an opinionated SSG framework. It's like you're getting all the complexity of a React/GraphQL application, without any of the flexibility of being able to pick your own stack. Sure it has a nice plugin system, but beyond that since you need a developer to set up and maintain a Gatsby site anyways, I don't see any reason not to just use Next.js (which can export to static) since all Gatsby really does beyond that is converting markdown to HTML, which is just done through an npm library anyways. If writing a Next.js website is overkill, then why do you need to be devoting engineering resources to this in the first place? Why not just use some no-code solution like WordPress? Or if you really want a separate headless CMS, then Jekyll felt easier and faster to me with more theme options (though again it's been a year since I touched these, so I imagine things have improved). Don't get me wrong I love SSGs as nothing beats the performance, ease of deployment, and low cost of static sites. But if I'm going to use a SSG framework, it better be dead simple and/or easy to customize, otherwise I might as well just use some off-the-shelf "no-code" solution (eg. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace), or use a framework like Next.js that let's me customize my stack instead of being locked into Gatsby's. Gatsby's $200m valuation makes absolutely no sense to me unless they're planning some drastic changes I'm not aware of.

dan_can_code 6y ago

$28M seems like an awful lot for a static site generator. The issue I see Gatsby facing is that the poor developer experience will catch up with them, regardless as to whether they expand their ecosystem (plugins etc). If the developer experience isn't improved, I doubt their money will convince '1%' of all websites development teams to make the switch. Especially if this thread is a good approximation of the mood towards developing with gatsby. However, it's much too easy to join in with the typical HN cynicism to shiny new things. Maybe Gatsby will surprise us and become a contender within the CMS space before long.

davidivadavid 6y ago

Probably a dumb question: if the main benefit is speed, why wouldn't I just want to use a plugin to make my Wordpress site static?