
Netlify, a sevice for quickly rolling out static websites, raises $2.1M - jamesheroku
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/17/netlify-a-sevice-for-quickly-rolling-out-static-websites-raises-2-1m/
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marcc
Pretty cool. We were recently discussing how a service like this could exist.
Excited to try it out.

One suggestion - on the Signup page, you ask for a lot of permissions right
away from Github. I think it would be better if you just collected
profile/email address and then when I started exploring a little more and
working to get my first site deployed, only then ask for the additional
permissions.

~~~
calavera
Thanks!

Signup permissions is definitely something we need to work on more. We
optimized them at the beginning to give people the best experience possible,
but we'll definitely iterate to allow using Netlify with less permissions. We
just need to find the right workflow to still keep it as simple and powerful
as possible.

~~~
marcc
Just to follow up. I have a hugo site that has a pretty custom directory
layout. I managed to sign up and get it provisioned with letsencrypt already.
Definitely cool.

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StavrosK
I think I'm not understanding what it does, but why does it cost $9/mo/site to
serve some static content? Isn't that basically free nowadays?

I guess my question is "what does Netlify do that GitHub pages doesn't"?

~~~
calavera
Netlify CTO here (so I'm very biased).

These are some things that you can do with our Pages tier _FREE_ , that you
cannot do with GH Pages:

\- We don't restrict people to only one static site generator, like Jekyll.
You have use whatever with our Continuous Deployment.

\- Automatic rollbacks at the CDN level. If you push a broken site, you don't
need to stress about fixing the issue, pushing again, and waiting until the
changes are published again. We have a big button that says "Rollback".
Clicking that, our CDN automatically purges your site and promotes the good
version you want. After that, you can spend as much time as you want writing a
proper fix.

\- Deploy Previews for Pull Requests hosted live. We build each pull request
and put it in a subdomain so you can collaborate building sites much easily.
Blog post announcement: [https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing-
deploy-p...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing-deploy-
previews-in-netlify/)

\- Automatic provisioning and renewals of Let's Encrypt certificates for
custom domains. If you have a custom domain, we do that for you, you don't
have to worry about anything.

\- Free custom domains, you have to have a paid subscription with GitHub if
you want to use your own domain.

As I said again, those things are FREE with our initial plan, $0.

Happy to answer more questions if you have more.

~~~
snorremd
Edit: I know the parent comments are comparing to Github. I thought that it
would be useful to let people know about Gitlab's offering.

It appears Gitlab provides support for custom domains on their hosted Gitlab
solution as well as support for different site generators via their Gitlab CI
solution. It is probably not as easy to use as Netlify though.

[http://docs.gitlab.com/ee/pages/README.html#gitlab-pages-
on-...](http://docs.gitlab.com/ee/pages/README.html#gitlab-pages-on-gitlabcom)

~~~
StavrosK
I love Gitlab and use it for all my projects, I should try their Pages at some
point (although I don't use GH pages either, it was just the offering I was
more familiar with from hearing about it).

EDIT: Just tried it, I can't believe how easy it was. Literally just add a CI
task that outputs a "pages" artifact.

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sytse
Congrats! And thanks for adding GitLab integration
[https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/13/gitlab-
integration](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/13/gitlab-integration)

~~~
calavera
Thanks Sid!

It was actually very easy to integrate. Thanks for making the API so easy to
use.

~~~
sytse
You're welcome, glad to hear that.

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ActVen
We use them for our middleman based website. They are fantastic from a
performance and support standpoint.

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welanes
Doesn't Firebase hosting do this already - SSL, CDN, push from the command-
line - for free?

Pubstorm, too.

~~~
atoko
Don't forget [https://zeit.co/now](https://zeit.co/now)

The biggest difference seems to be the caching

~~~
brianllamar
Zeit is an awesome product that I use as well for my node APIs in tandem with
my Static stuff on Netlify. I wish the deploy limits were a bit higher in the
free plan, 20 is so low :(

however Netlify has no limits on builds :)

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Denzel
At first I didn't understand the difference between Netlify vs. Jekyll / Hugo
+ s3_website [1] + S3/CloudFront + git. Admittedly, (1) the OP does a terrible
job differentiating the two, and (2) there's significant overlap. Netlify is
built for "dynamic" static websites, or rather JavaScript applications
(whether they be single-page or not, it doesn't matter). It serves up a static
page, and the JS and APIs do the rest.

So, for anyone who wants a basic breakdown between Netlify's features, and
Jekyll + s3_website + S3/CloudFront + git/GitHub, here's the list of things
BOTH support:

\- Continuous Deployment

\- Custom Domains / Domain Redirects / Domain Aliases

\- Domain Redirects

\- SSL (letsencrypt-s3front helps here [2])

\- Redirects / Reverse Proxying (s3_website helps here with x-amz-redirect-
location header [3])

\- Headers / Custom Headers / Basic Auth

\- Versioning and Rollbacks (handled with git)

Here's the list of things ONLY Netlify supports:

\- GeoIP / language-based redirects (on their Enterprise Plan for
$1,000/month)

\- Form submissions [4]

\- Analytics snippet injection [5] (albeit a little unnecessary for most
developers)

\- Atomic deploys [6]

\- Prerending [7] (one of the most important and useful features)

Please, correct anything that's wrong.

Netlify's killer feature, for me, looks like prerending: rendering JS pages
with a headless browser to help with SEO, with no work on the developer's end,
is awesome! However, Netlify strikes me as far too expensive at
$9/$49/$399/$1k per month. Especially with developers as their target market.
That's too much for what little extra features it does offer.

Here's to hoping they can continue to differentiate themselves more.

[1]:
[https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website](https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website)

[2]:
[https://github.com/dlapiduz/letsencrypt-s3front](https://github.com/dlapiduz/letsencrypt-s3front)

[3]: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-
page-r...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-
redirect.html)

[4]: [https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-
handling](https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-handling)

[5]: [https://www.netlify.com/docs/inject-analytics-
snippets](https://www.netlify.com/docs/inject-analytics-snippets)

[6]: [https://www.netlify.com/docs/versioning-and-
rollbacks](https://www.netlify.com/docs/versioning-and-rollbacks)

[7]:
[https://www.netlify.com/docs/prerendering](https://www.netlify.com/docs/prerendering)

EDIT: formatting

~~~
bobfunk
We have a pretty extensive comparison here of S3 vs Netlify:

[https://www.netlify.com/blog/2015/03/06/comparing-netlify-
an...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2015/03/06/comparing-netlify-and-s3)

You're completely forgetting Continuous deployment in your comparison, which
is a pretty big part of the modern static workflow. This includes things like
pushing branches to different URLs, having a way to previewing pull requests,
caching dependencies between runs, etc, etc... It's a huge part of our
service.

Apart from that, if you ever work with static publishing and a CDN, and
actually tried making the CDN cache your HTML assets, you'll instantly run
into problems with instant cache invalidation and atomic deploys. You'll never
run into these issues with netlify.

Rollbacks are possible with git, but previewing any version you've any
deployed at any time are not something you can do.

Even basic things, like getting both your naked domain and the wwww domain to
work correctly will often take developer time on that platform (how much do
you bill your time at? Hopefully more than $49/month).

As for cost - our free plan is super generous and cover pretty much every
thing you'll get with the alternative setup you mention. And for personal
projects or open source projects we even give away our Pro plan for free!

The people that pay for our plans are typically not developers but their
clients or employers who care about the best performance, highest uptime, and
fastest speed of development.

~~~
Denzel
Appreciate you taking the time to respond. It seems like you're targeting two
different markets (developers & their clients/employers), and having to
construct two different product stories. Of course, what appeals to the
developer market doesn't necessarily appeal to their client/employers and vice
versa.

I'm speaking as a freelance developer that's firmly in your target market,
charging well in excess of $49/month, and delivering three static websites in
the past month for clients, one being the University of Leiden. I understand
very well what you're trying to solve, and pointed out the places where your
product is superior.

Right now, it feels like your product is heavily slanted towards developers.
And it feels like that's who you're asking to pay for the service. My clients
couldn't careless about API proxying, deeper Git integration, or auto-building
any branch to unique deploy URLs, even if that makes sense to me as a
developer. They're not going to be working with those things. They wouldn't
accept me saddling a $49/month charge upon them AFTER I've delivered the
project and all they want to do is run a one-off script to deploy the website
for minor updates to content over the next 3-5 years.

What I'm saying is, yes, Netlify makes it easier and eliminates servers for
pre-rendering and form submissions. That fits the SaaS model. But I think
you're missing out on another part of the market: the people willing to pay a
one-off license per site for your deployment software, i.e., setup
S3/CloudFront, SSL with Let's Encrypt, domain handling, a nice deployment pre-
processing pipeline, preview past versions locally in browser, etc. in an
automated fashion and then allow them to push updates with one command. That's
what my clients want, and that's what I deliver to them. They'd be willing to
pay $49, once, for that script (folded into their invoice).

~~~
bobfunk
If you don't need the features on the $49 dollar plan - why not just set them
up with the free plan or the basic plan?

The people that pay for the $49/$349 or $1000 are typically clients with
projects that are not simple "static sites". Typically these sites includes
content management and requires a build to run everytime and editor triggers a
change. They're often .com's for companies that always ends up needing
proxying because they have legacy apps behind different URL

Other clients have in-house dev teams and run their main web application on
Netlify with constant updates in different branches and pull requests, and
Netlify lets them collabarote across these.

Again others just have large global presences and care about having someone to
escalate to if there's a problem with a launch, any uptime, certificate,
configuration issue or the like.

Those are the one that needs and use our Pro/Global/Enterprise tiers.

