Netlify 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.)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Vercel has Next.js, Shopify just acquired Remix, now Netlify Gatsby.<p>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.<p>I am seeing a future where you have to rewrite your whole app in a different framework just to change hosts.
Likely 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.<p>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.<p>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.
In 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.<p>I <i>think</i> 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.
The story of gatsby based on stackoverflow polls isn't so good. In 2020 they are (60% loved)[<a href="https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-web-frameworks" rel="nofollow">https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...</a>] in 2021 (its 48%)[<a href="https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-web-frameworks" rel="nofollow">https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...</a>] and 2022 (is 35%)[<a href="https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-web-frameworks" rel="nofollow">https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...</a>]
Was 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.
Didn'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.
Related post from Gatsby's creator, Kyle Mathews:<p><a href="https://www.gatsbyjs.com/blog/gatsby-is-joining-netlify" rel="nofollow">https://www.gatsbyjs.com/blog/gatsby-is-joining-netlify</a>
I 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.<p>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.
Hopefully they got a good deal! Personally I don’t understand the value proposition.<p>I would have preferred more support for 11ty or SolidStart since they employ the creators of those two frameworks already.
This 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.
Maybe the way to think about this isn't so much from the perspective of Netflifys leadership, but Gatsby and their founders/investors.<p>Had Gatsby found a scalable business model?<p>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).
The 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.