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Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

sitesauce.app

31–40 of 69 posts

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#31
post #18

This costs $20/month, what happens when someone releases an open source version that essentially does the same thing but for free?

Open source tools already exist. Wget can and is used to build out static copies of websites. It's also possible to get most of the benefit by using a reverse proxy cache with super long TTLs and a targeted purging strategy to handle content updates.

If you're tempted to point out that those approaches are a pain to use and don't work perfectly, well a) welcome to a lot of open source, and b) that's why commercial ventures can still succeed.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#32
post #29

Let me start off by saying good job on launching. Is there an ability to stop automatic deployments on change and instead allow for manual deployments? Also, I am a bit confused about the hosting. On your landing page you say: "Sitesauce hosts your static sites on Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost." Then in your Terms of Service you say: "You agree t…

Sitesauce allows you to login with your Vercel account once you create an account with us. Once you've done that, we use their API to set everything we need up.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#33
Wow this is pretty cool! Seems like a great tool to throw onto an existing CMS, allowing clients to retain the flexibility of editing their website directly.

Does this deal with/forward dynamic content on the same domain? Or do admin panels, etc have to be hosted on a separate subdomain?

EDIT: Wow, Miguel is even completely transparent (https://sitesauce.app/open) with his revenue and costs. That's incredibly inspiring to see from an 18 year old.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#34
post #18

This costs $20/month, what happens when someone releases an open source version that essentially does the same thing but for free?

Free? Let's be clear. There is no such thing. Ever.

Everything has a cost. You can spend money. Or you can spend time. But either way, you will spend.

For example, Product X is $20 per month. To do the same yourself is 60 to 90 minutes per month. It's fair that you might not mind the time. You want to learn something new. But the idea that you're saving $20 per month is the wrong lens.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#35
I like it, will have to try this on my wp site.

Thank you for creating this. It's a great product, something I'd happily pay $20 for.

I think you should perhaps market this to the SEO community. They care tons about pagespeed. Also, set up an affiliate program.

All the best!

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#36
Wow, I've considered building this exact same app for about 11 years now, but I never did it because I thought there would never be a large enough market to make it successful.

Kudos to you for actually building and launching! Hope you have a lot of success and prove me wrong about the market size.

EDIT: After going through the site and your video, it appears as though you crawl the dynamic site, and generate static pages out of it. It's not really clear if you support sites that render on the client side. Do you?

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#38
post #29

Let me start off by saying good job on launching. Is there an ability to stop automatic deployments on change and instead allow for manual deployments? Also, I am a bit confused about the hosting. On your landing page you say: "Sitesauce hosts your static sites on Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost." Then in your Terms of Service you say: "You agree t…

Sitesauce allows you to login with your Vercel account once you create an account with us. Once you've done that, we use their API to set everything we need up.

In that case perhaps the wording on the front page should be:

"Sitesauce publishes your static sites to Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost."

That makes it clear that you aren't the one hosting and that it is actually Vercel. My initial understanding was that you would pull my data and host it yourself using Vercel as your host. Since you are using the host's API do you have any plans to integrate with other hosts, such as AWS?

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#39
post #23

I love this site. It's truly impressive for any solo founder, regardless of the age, let along an 18 year old. Yeah, you kind of rely on the generosity of your vendor (Vercel, in this case), but that's really the only option if you want to keep costs low. I hated Wordpress so much so that I wrote my own CMS + static site generator using a different approach and used it for clients who run sites with 3 million+ visito…

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