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Netlify acquires Gatsby
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- IceWreck 4y agoTheir competitor Vercel has NextJS so they decided to buy Gatsby ?
- QuiiBz 4y ago> We’re excited to integrate Gatsby’s cloud innovations into the Netlify platform I feel like the acquisition is more focused on Gatsby Cloud than Gatsby (the framework).
- no_wizard 4y agoThey have an in-house framework person with Ryan Carniato (Solid JS) and in-house SSG expertise with Zach Leatherman (11ty). I think this rounds out more in the CMS / React realm, which gives them a direct line to compete with Next.js
- benatkin 4y agoThey're also involved somewhat in RedwoodJS. Tom Preston-Werner who started Redwood is on their board and an investor in them. Like Gatsby, RedwoodJS uses GraphQL. https://tom.preston-werner.com/2020/03/04/joining-the-netlify-board.html https://tom.preston-werner.com/2020/03/04/joining-the-netlif... https://redwoodjs.com/ https://redwoodjs.com/
- no_wizard 4y agoRedwood is super cool and if you're a startup and just getting moving, Redwood is a pretty logical choice. However, its not grasped nearly the same mindshare as Remix, let alone Next.js, and its arguably superior to Remix at least
- bovermyer 4y agoWhy Gatsby, specifically? This seems like an odd choice.
- onion2k 4y agoI think it's an acquihire. They don't necessarily want Gatsby. They want the team who built Gatsby.
- ferdowsi 4y agoStrange time to do an acquihire given that Netlify just had a round of layoffs.
- bdcravens 4y agoJust means Gatsby's talent is more desired than those they employed.
- reducesuffering 4y agoI'm surprised this was the only other comment so far about it. It has to be an acquihire. Gatsby is a dead framework going forward.
- goodoldneon 4y agoWhy is it dead?
- reducesuffering 4y agoCheck the 5 year chart trajectory: https://npmtrends.com/gatsby-vs-next https://npmtrends.com/gatsby-vs-next and https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=gatsby%2Cnext.js https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=gatsby%2Cnext...
- LunaSea 4y ago
- teg4n_ 4y agoHopefully they got a good deal! Personally I don’t understand the value proposition. I would have preferred more support for 11ty or SolidStart since they employ the creators of those two frameworks already.
- impulser_ 4y agoThey are buying the Gatsby company which is more than just the Gatsby framework.
- ferdowsi 4y agoThe statement doesn't say how much Gatsby was acquired for. Hope that Gatsby equity holders weren't bought out at a steep discount, given the current macro situation.
- ramraj07 4y agoBut they held equity on an Overcomplicated jekyll implementation, so why not value at it’s true worth?
- schnebbau 4y agoPeople still use Gatsby?
- trallnag 4y agoHugo?
- xeromal 4y agoI know this comment is a joke but in a big production environment, you eventually have to commit to a tech/stack. You can't just change everything every 2 years when a new hotness comes.
- blantonl 4y agoI don't know about you but we change stacks and go on massive rewrites of frameworks and code every two years to stay busy. /s
- winrid 4y agoOh, what's wrong with it? It looked nice and was considering using it for a marketing site.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoIt's pretty tightly coupled to webpack and has a reputation for being extremely slow to rebuild a site. Fine for small sites but I've heard of painful multiple minute long rebuild cycles for large sites with a lot of content.
- si1entstill 4y agoThey give you really nice incremental builds out of the box, which are particularly easy to set up with gatsby cloud (the actual purchase here). Their abstractions are more opinionated, but a lot more "just works" off the shelf with configuration instead of coding.
- moafzalmulla 4y agoI just want to know how much for :)
- moafzalmulla 4y agoI just want to know how much Gatsby was acquired for ? ;)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pigtailgirl 4y ago-- my guess is this is a way to roll Gatsby investors into netlify stock - and get the team into netlify - probably more a merger vs acquisition --
- jasonjmcghee 4y agoThey raised ~$47M and it's not clear how successful they've been. Assuming it's been a bit rocky and this was a soft landing, the my ball park guess is ~$75M. That's likely a mixture of stock and cash. As it seems to be an acquihire, likely mostly stock in order to retain them.
- fatih-erikli 4y agoGatsby was an open-source project. What they acquired exactly? Have they purchased a usb stick installed gatsby in it?
- __alexs 4y agoGatsby Inc is a SaaS that provides hosting.
- ushakov 4y agoaren't they just an AWS wrapper?
- madeofpalk 4y agoWho's "they" - Netlify or Gatsby?
- fatih-erikli 4y agoDoes it matter? How many person do you know around your circle, uses netlify or gatsby? It sounds like a cdn business to me
- madeofpalk 4y agoIsn't a CDN just a wrapper around Dell?
- lukevp 4y agoWait until you hear about Heroku!
- fatih-erikli 4y agoIt's fastly. Fastly dns' points to a server in located in CA.
- rburhum 4y agoPlease don’t take this the wrong way, but that is like saying that AWS EC2 is “just a wrapper” of Xen, or that AWS RDS for PostgreSQL is “just a wrapper” of PostgreSQL. There is an entire business around those with value add/sales/support/marketing as well as a strategy for growth.
- lechacker 4y agoDidn't Netlify have layoffs recently? Wouldn't expect a non-public company that needed to layoff +10% of their workforce to have the kind of cash to buy out another company.
- awestroke 4y agoLayoffs are rarely done because off lack of cash. It's just cost cutting to increase shareholder profits. An investment means potential revenue growth
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- luispa 4y agoNetlify just acquire 2018.
- awill 4y agoThis kind of stuff is annoying. Netlify had no need to acquire this. They just want to increase their revenue. As a Hugo user on Netlify, I hope this doesn't affect me negatively.
- tmpz22 4y agoI would guess its a down-round type of acquisition at the urging of Gatsby's investors and founders. They raised 10M+, this allows their investors and founders to get some liquidity back and Netlify picks it up on the cheap.
- cfltlayoffs 4y agoYeah I've seen this for a bunch of startups that weren't profitable and struggled to close a new funding round. They pay back the VCs, the employees get zeroed out, and the execs usually get a retention bonus in the 6 figure range.
- LightHugger 4y agoIt's typical "buy and shut down competition"...
- dmix 4y agoHow exactly does Netlify shut down competition with this?
- whstl 4y agoAs some people mentioned elsewhere, the acquisition is probably more focused on Gatsby Cloud than Gatsby itself (which remains open source), and Gatsby Cloud is a Netlify competitor.
- ushakov 4y ago> Gatsby Cloud is a Netlify competitor That's a bold assumption. What's Gatsby Cloud's market share? Zero-point-something percent?
- joshmanders 4y agoVercel has Next.js, Shopify just acquired Remix, now Netlify Gatsby. 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.
- throwingrocks 4y agoPure FUD
- 9dev 4y agoCounter to this, there’s SvelteKit, for example, which provides „adapters“ for the different platforms, eg. Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare. I hope that’s the way we’re going to oppose this movement as a whole.
- rsstack 4y agoThat's how they all worked before being acquired. SK is Vercel now too and we don't know yet how it'll change over time.
- leerob 4y agoSvelteKit remains independent and no plans to change that.
- rich_harris 4y agoSvelte creator and Vercel employee here. Vercel does indeed invest heavily in Svelte and SvelteKit, not least by employing me and Simon Holthausen (and potentially others in future), but there's no danger of lock-in — we're just two members of a much larger core team. Governance-wise, it's an independent project, and we'd be thrilled if other companies also chose to employ core team members! You can see pull requests like https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/pull/8740 https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/pull/8740 as an example of how we approach the relationship between SvelteKit and Vercel — we're adding a new feature and Vercel will be the first adapter that gets to take advantage of it, but we're careful to design the feature in a platform-agnostic way (we even @'d a Netlify engineer to make sure that they're aware of the work in case they also want to take advantage of it). Anyway, I'm sure this will be said elsewhere in the thread but it bears repeating — the Next team similarly works hard to make sure that your Next apps can be self-hosted and run on other platforms.
- johntiger1 4y agoInteresting, I remember writing my first static site a while back using gatsby. Wonder if this changes anything
- brycewray 4y agoRelated post from Gatsby's creator, Kyle Mathews: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/blog/gatsby-is-joining-netlify https://www.gatsbyjs.com/blog/gatsby-is-joining-netlify
- asadlionpk 4y agoGatsby is dead weight. Likely an acquihire.
- KMnO4 4y agoWhy would they need to pay the premium when there are literally tens of thousands very skilled devs out of work right now?
- nullcipher 4y agoDo you know how much they paid?
- discodave 4y agoWho says they paid a premium? The price isn't mentioned in the press release.
- corywatilo 4y agoNetlify lost my trust a year ago when they tried to increase our company's pricing more than 10x. (We were paying ~$200/mo, then they tried to force us into a $2,500+ plan because we were 1 seat over their self-serve threshold.) 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.
- bradgessler 4y agoIs there a “back to the basics” company or offering for hosting static sites that is essentially what Netlify was when it launched?
- simantel 4y agoGitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Render.com's static hosting, probably others?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tmslnz 4y agoWe use and swear by Opalstack.com, which is made by some of the same peeps that worked for the may-as-well-be-defunct Webfaction. Full SSH access, generous limits, very active community.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoJust get a $5 digital ocean droplet and throw nginx on it. All the static hosting in the world at your fingertips.
- discodave 4y agoMaybe the way to think about this isn't so much from the perspective of Netflifys leadership, but Gatsby and their founders/investors. 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).
- davidw 4y agoWas scanning the page really quickly and though that Netflix had acquired the Gatsby franchise and we could look forward to "Great Gatsby 2 - The Vendetta", "The Greatest Gatsby", "Gatsby Strikes Back" and so on.
- CharlesW 4y agoIn case Netlify folks are reading: I feel like this was written by someone who lives and breathes "composable web architectures" to the point that they forgot to mention what they are, why they're interesting, and how Netlify's support for them is unique. 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.
- bilater 4y agoLikely was an acquihire because Gatsby has been dying for a while now. It was my first (post CRA) React framework so I used to have love for it and its been sad to see its decline. 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.
- lukeingalls 4y agoThe story of gatsby based on stackoverflow polls isn't so good. In 2020 they are (60% loved)[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-web-frameworks https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...] in 2021 (its 48%)[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-web-frameworks https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...] and 2022 (is 35%)[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-web-frameworks https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...]
- Raed667 4y ago> we are thrilled to join forces How many people were let go as a result of this acquisition? (I know for a fact that the number is not zero)
- merlinoa 4y agoI host an old blog on netlify. I don't update it anymore, but a few months ago I started seeing a large uptick in subscribers. They were all subscribing through the netlify subscription form. It was around 8 to 10 new subscribers a day where before it was one every couple months. I emailed several of the new subscribers and got no response. After a few days I strongly suspected these were not real subscribers. 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.
- rk06 4y agoEvery time i read these comments I am glad that Evan (creator of Vue and Vite) decided to be independent of Tech Companies