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?
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 i…
WordPress seems to have worked out well. If the company (wordpress.com) goes under, the platform (wordpress.org) will stay alive and well. The companies that relied on wordpress.com can just migrate to any other premium WP service, such as WP Engine.
For Gatsby.js users the alternatives in a Gatsby-the-company-goes-under scenario would be limited to just Netlify and DIY (and maybe Vercel?). If the demand for managed-Gatsby grows then so will the supply, thus giving people more options in a worst-case scenario.
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 i…
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....…
The Gatsby model is Wordpress. Be the default choice, be open source, run a thriving hosting business and empower a huge economy around theming and extending your main product.
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 t…
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…
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…
That's great but isn't a site that must be statically built and deployed to add a new page a niche use case for todays web? You can't use it for a site like HN, a content hub, a social media site, so many use cases that rely heavily on dynamic content from a database. And yes technically you can use it for those things but you're building the static front end with lots of page building logic and complex graphQL queries and ALSO a database backend with your content or CMS as a service like maybe contentful? That's a lot of complexity and unique architecture to maximize for the time to first paint metric. It seems like the Gatsby use case is agencies, branding, advertising campaigns. Which definitely is a sizable market, but sizable enough for what kind of returns on a $28M round?
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…
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…
> But, if web performance is the goal, Gatsby is hard to beat.
There's lots of other SSGs that do the same thing, so Gatsby does not have any exclusivity on creating a performant static website.
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…
Currently working on a project using gatsby, have had some big wins but other things have been a pain. The single biggest feature you get is SSR rendering for an application built in react. There are lots of little goodies like Gatsby Image and Gatsby Link that are actually really awesome.
I personally am not that huge of a fan of the graphQl layer, we have been using it with basic use cases and still have run into issues with it.
Definitely not a revolutionary framework or tech, but for its use cases it does work.
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 i…
Isn't Wordpress a perfect example of that model?
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.
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…
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…