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Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

forbes.com

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Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#111

Post by underwater »

morcutt wrote: post #96
underwater wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Gatsby with Contentful for our marketing site and blog. It's been a nightmare. We publish content multiple times a week. It's taken a huge amount of effort and paying Gatsby a lot of money for their SaaS products to get a setup that any serious publisher (like a newspaper) would laugh at. The whole product being built around static site generation is a huge limitation. Things like republishing at a reasonable…

I've been involved in a site that has over 10k pages and it worked fine. Sanity has a preview feature and Gatsby incremental builds are available now (which I haven't used yet) but should bring your build times down significantly.

We use Gatsby preview. It frustrates me that we are paying a lot of money for a substandard solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

The same goes for Gatsby incremental builds. We don't want to run a web server, so instead we should pay to run a build server 24/7 so we can have a warm cache available when we need to build!?

The annoying part is that there is not reason a static site generator should have these limitations. Gatsby's entire revenue model is based on solving problems that only exist because of the bad architectural decisions in their open source product.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#112

Post by dan_can_code »

$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.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#114

Post by bradstewart »

ramraj07 wrote: post #105
KorematsuFred wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have got it right. I own dozens of static websites from 100 pages to 1M pages. I am the ideal customer for a company like Gatsby. I had all the content in my mysql and accessible through a REST api. I had python scripts that would pull data from REST and generate .MD files which then Jekyll would convert to static sites. Everything worked fairly well except long build times for the 1M pages site which was…

A million statically generated pages seems to be an interesting use case (also your use of cloud run suggests it's not high traffic). Is this common at all though?

Big documentation sites.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#115

Post by armandososa »

yodon wrote: post #86
nogabebop23 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

On the other hand, Netlify will support whatever next static framework is in fashion from day one.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#116

Post by tuesday20 »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #42
ritchiea wrote: post #3

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 functi…

I think you have got it right. I own dozens of static websites from 100 pages to 1M pages. I am the ideal customer for a company like Gatsby. I had all the content in my mysql and accessible through a REST api. I had python scripts that would pull data from REST and generate .MD files which then Jekyll would convert to static sites. Everything worked fairly well except long build times for the 1M pages site which was…

Million pages? What is the site about?

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#117

Post by grupthink »

manigandham wrote: post #58
chmac wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, the thing that sets Gatsby apart is the integration of the built static site and React to do pre-fetching. The output from Gatsby is not just HTML, it's HTML + React javascript, with data loaded from JSON files. That means that once the site has loaded, Gatsby can pre-emptively fetch all the linked pages, both React components and data, to give instantaneous second click page loads. That's a pretty impressive…

Web performance doesn't need any of that. Browsers are very good at parsing HTML and CDNs are a commodity now. A directory of HTML files is about as fast as it gets, no preloading necessary (and you avoid all that JS payload too).

What if you want to make a site-wide change (e.g. GDPR mandates a cookie banner)?

With Gatsby's approach, you only modify the js that renders the template. Then, if a site-wide change needs to be made, you make a single change in the js template.

With the static-HTML-served-from-directories approach, you would have to rebuild all the HTML for your entire site if you wanted a template change and a database to store all the articles/posts for you to rebuild the HTML.

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