
Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform - ukyrgf
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/26/gatsby-raises-15m-series-a-for-its-modern-web-development-platform/
======
csande17
I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their
business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step
approach:

1\. Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over, both by touting
the genuine benefits of static sites (security, scalability, TTFB performance,
etc.) and by riding the Cool Kid Front-End Stack hype train.

2\. Lock them in with an overly-complicated framework and build pipeline that
requires organizations invest a lot of resources into switching. (Gatsby gets
most of this for free by building on top of the Cool Kid Stack's nine-
thousand-package NPM lasagna.)

3\. Sell their captive audience expensive solutions to problems they wouldn't
have with other frameworks. (See e.g. another commentor's discussion of
incremental builds.)

This strategy might not contribute much to society, but neither do a lot of
other startups--what matters to investors is that it'll probably make them a
lot of money, assuming they execute it correctly.

~~~
lsalvatore
Did you mean "overly-complicated" as in for people who don't work in the
industry and just speculate on trends?

~~~
tomc1985
Not OP but the mess that is node and its ecosystem is indeed overly-
complicated

~~~
Cthulhu_
It's hidden away behind layers of stuff for the most part, but, I agree (and
this is coming from someone who works with Gatsby every day); I recently added
Typescript support as well so now, with the handful of packages we have in our
monorepo, it's becoming a convoluted mess of webpack, babel, typescript, and
the tooling in between like gatsby and storybook, which do configuration
sliiightly different.

Honestly I got so frustrated with dealing with dependency hell the other day
that I only half-jokingly said I was going to go back to writing vanilla ES5,
whichever the last version that still works on IE is. It's just too much of an
obscure headache, too much tooling and intermediary steps.

I can't get our error reporting tool to work properly because the source maps
are a confusing jumble either.

Mind you this is aimed at the JS ecosystem in its current state; Gatsby itself
has been great.

~~~
vorpalhex
I've been writing my side project in vanilla es5. I use rollup for bundling,
and nothing else. Life is great.

------
c0ffe
I would not recommend to use Gatsby in a project if it requires a frontend
with complexity beyond static-scrollable content.

Some problems that I found after some months of integrating it with an
existing CMS:

* Development complexity: depending if Gatsby is run on development or production mode, React's `render` methods are called in the browser or inside NodeJS. Having this code executed in a Node process is expected because Gatsby is a static site generator, but this big split between the environment of development and production builds, paired with a growing codebase that keeps evolving, catches new developers on our team with multiple and surprising bugs.

* Debug complexity: JSX code is hard to debug, because the code that is really executed is generated at runtime, so it is not possible for example, to put a breakpoint in a JSX file from your text editor and start a build with Node running in debug mode.

* Runtime requirements: as far as I remember, executing `gatsby build` on my development machine uses ~3.4 GiB of private RAM for the main node process, and it takes around 5 minutes if the local cache is cleared (it ends in around a minute with cache). Its important to remember this when choosing in which server the build runs.

* Integration: Gatsby does not provide out of the box integration with CMS for content authoring (like for example, page drafts).

Now to be honest, the global idea seems good (static websites built with
React), but I would wait a few more years until it becomes more mature to use
it again for any future project.

~~~
Scarbutt
_Now to be honest, the global idea seems good (static websites built with
React)_

Out of interest, what's good about building static websites with React?

~~~
Cthulhu_
If you're looking at purely static websites, then it's just a way to structure
your application; matter of taste, I reckon, and there's plenty of
alternatives on the market that go back twenty years if need be. That said,
personally I'm quite fond of the component based approach to building websites
- and React isn't the only player there.

But the strengths show when you combine it with e.g. Gatsby which turns it
into a hybrid website + app. For first time visitors, search engines, and
people with JS disabled it's just static HTML, simple. But for most visitors
(browsers, JS enabled etc), after the first load it turns into a webapp and
any pageview only requires a single .json file to be pulled in, which can be
prefetched (on link hover for example) as well. This gives it the performance
characteristics of a single-page app.

------
tyingq
A static page framework that shoves content into a client side graphql store
and then extracts bits out to render a page?

It's popular, so I can't say it was a bad idea.

I guess I'll just say I must be old because it sounds like satire.

~~~
azangru
Let me offer a real-world example.

We were once tasked to build a website for a small publishing house. The site
would have pages of books and of authors. Each book page would link to the
page(s) of the book's author(s). Each author's page would have thumbnail(s) of
this author's book(s). There was also to be an index page, which would contain
various books, with names of respective authors, and links to each book's and
author's page. It was almost like describing a simple relational database.

Except we wanted the site to be static, and the data about books and authors
to be stored in yaml files on github. So book page, author page and index page
needed to learn about each other at build time by reading the frontmatter of
the yaml files.

With Gatsby's graphql data layer doing so would be trivial, and the whole
developer experience would have been highly satisfying. But we weren't allowed
to use Gatsby, because the size of the main javascript file that Gatsby
(coupled with Netlify CMS) would output was approximately 100 kB, and our tech
lead had a strong aversion to large javascript files and to what he considered
an overengineered framework. So we had to use Hugo instead. Which we did.
Hugo, bless it, also allowed building relationships between data files at
build time; but the way it did so was so unintuitive and its Go-based
templating language was so cumbersome that I hated almost every moment of
working with Hugo. Besides, barebones Hugo did not have a flexible enough
static assets pipeline, so we had to write our own (gulp) scripts for bundling
static assets. With Gatsby, that would have come out of the box.

Gatsby may not be the technology for building lightest-weight sites (no matter
how much the Gatsby team emphasises their commitment to performance), but the
developer experience when working with Gatsby is unsurpassable.

~~~
danpalmer
I've had a lot of good experiences with Jekyll, and I'm fairly sure that the
problem you've described would have worked nicely with it. Extending it is
also really straightforward, you just put a few lines of Ruby in a file in the
right place.

I've moved my site from Jekyll to Gatsby, and while there are some nice
things, it's not been a clear win. My site is very significantly slower for
first load, but slightly faster for all subsequent loads. The build is far
less stable with Gatsby, there are ~5 dependency updates per day, things like
Sass don't "just work" anymore, but on the other hand, there are a few more
packages that do useful things that I didn't get in the Jekyll community.

------
calcsam
Gatsby co-founder here. We're super excited for this so we can make Gatsby
even more awesome. Happy to answer any Qs!

~~~
pfraze
You're getting questions about target market, and I'm pretty sure the answer
is web development agencies, right? Any shop with a high volume of projects
will need a development pipeline, stack, and ops story that is straight
forward and fast to work with.

~~~
calcsam
Yep! Right now we're seeing a mix of customers that's roughly 1/3 web
development agencies, 1/3 e-commerce websites, and 1/3 B2C lead generation
websites.

The value proposition of Gatsby to website agencies is working with modern
tech & completing projects faster, and for e-commerce it's higher conversion
rates which add $$ to the bottom line.

------
ukyrgf
This is extremely surprising, right? I clicked the headline thinking it was a
shame some tech company chose the same name as a fairly popular static site
generator. I guess when I see things like $50/mo for them to host a site, I
just assume it's an extremely small team with a couple clients.

~~~
ordinaryradical
I'm very surprised that a static site generator can raise this much capital,
but it suggests to me that 1) the security dilemmas of non-static but content
driven sites are still big enough to warrant adoption of this methodology 2)
potentially, there is something they are doing _right_ in this space.

I'd really like to know what 2 is as there's a lot of other options in this
space that are also free, open source, and seem to accomplish the same thing.
What is the Gatsby sauce?

~~~
hogFeast
Raising capital isn't success. Profitability is success.

I think the main value of Gatsby is the community-generated recipes to plug
and play...but is there value here?

If you have one very generic application, then maybe you save time upfront.
But you are tied into this heavy wrapper around React that will probably cause
you problems down the line. And you probably still need a backend. So I am not
sure what value is being created?

If you specifically need to generate lots of sites, or you have some
performance requirement (and data that doesn't change often) then maybe. But I
wouldn't use it to build anything complex (i.e. that would tie me into their
product) because building an app isn't that much harder. I am sure there is a
niche use but I think most people aren't doing anything complicated with it (I
use it that way).

I also don't really see how this could be a Wordpress killer (which is the
intent of the fundraising presumably). Wordpress is totally end-to-end, it
abstracts away all the right parts. This doesn't. $15m won't change that.

In theory, I think applications like Prismic or Contentful (I think it is)
actually break up these tasks better. From your app, you have a (usually)
simple API. And it reflects the division of labour in most companies i.e. that
code and content are separate (before anyone says it: they aren't offering a
different product to Gatsby, if it seems that way then that is the point).

~~~
graphememes
It doesn't look like Gatsby itself is what is the main selling point, and I'd
argue, the VC doesn't think Gatsby itself is either.

Gatsby Preview / Gatsby Content Mesh is most likely the horse being bet on.

------
mattkevan
Big fan of static site generators and the whole JAMStack idea in general - I
use Jekyll extensively - but after building a site with Gatsby, I found it too
over-engineered.

React is great, and definitely has its place, but to set up React, GraphQL and
all the surrounding tooling just to assemble some text files into a template
seems like complexity for the sake of it.

For me, the fun of static sites - after years of building sites with CMSs like
Wordpress and Drupal - is that they’re as close as possible to plain HTML,
lightning-fast and very simple.

~~~
guitarnick
Another advantage of developing close to plain HTML is that you’re free from
the js next-shiny-thing hamster wheel.

For example, I had thought Gatsby was the hip way to create static sites in
2019. Then another comment here mentioned it’s Next.js now.

~~~
manigandham
Gatsby and Next.js are both site frameworks powered by React. They can both be
used for static and dynamic sites with different conventions and features
around routing, data management, and general app architecture.

Both are "hip" and will likely remain as the top 2 javascript based site
frameworks for now, although whether you need either of them is an entirely
different question.

~~~
graphememes
VuePress / Gridsome are taking over.

~~~
innocentoldguy
Which, in the JavaScript community, means they’ll be irrelevant in 3, 2, 1.

------
merqurio
I evaluated Gatsby, among other solutions, for our company's website. We use
React in production for a large application, nothing new there, but for a
static site, I thought it had an overly-complicated build pipeline. In the
end, we went with Hugo[1], never regretted, huge fan of static site generators
and Netlify CMS[2].

About raising that series A, I hope they have a bigger plan in mind than
hosting sites or yet another CMS. If the vision is the "reinvent" the way we
work on static sites, I respect that, but I don't see a business case there.

[1]: [https://gohugo.io](https://gohugo.io) [2]:
[https://www.netlifycms.org/](https://www.netlifycms.org/)

------
bbx
I really love Gatsby. It combines the best of both worlds: static sites and
React.

For a very long time, I've been fond of Jekyll. It's mostly because my open
source projects are hosted on GitHub and Jekyll is their go-to framework.
There's nothing wrong per se with Jekyll. I was simply missing some features
from React.

When I was working on React apps, the main benefits for me were: (i) component
encapsulation and (ii) CSS Modules. It's easy to understand what a component
does just by looking at it. If it gets too complicated, you can simply split
it into another component. And CSS Modules are a life saver. The two hardest
things in CSS are floats and naming things. That second part is solved now.

My issue with React however is the whole Webpack setup, and the fact that JS
is required to run the website.

So when Gatsby appeared, I was pleasantly surprised to see it solved these
issues. I ended up rebuilding my website with Gatsby, and I'm currently using
it for 2 client projects.

My only issue with Gatsby is its reliance on GraphQL. I tried understanding
the GraphQL concepts and purpose, especially with its weird syntax, but it
feels over-engineered. Or at least, it doesn't feel like Gatsby _needs_
GraphQL. So I'm not sure why it's so tightly tied to it. What I end up doing
for fetching/storing data is using some static JSON files. It's easy to read,
to port, and to parse.

I only use GatsbyJS.org the open source project, not GatsbyJS.com the service.
But it seems to be similar to WordPress.org/WordPress.com, or what Ghost does.
Even if the open source project somehow died, I wouldn't feel stuck with the
framework ; since most of the codebase are React components, it'd be easy to
port to another platform. That's another benefit.

~~~
sings
Honest question, but why is React unique in offering component encapsulation?
I see this more of a structural paradigm than something a framework allows for
or limits against.

~~~
bbx
It’s probably not unique in that aspect. I just happen to have quite a bit of
experience in React. And that “componentization” only made sense to me when I
started using React.

------
justinmeiners
> which promises that it allows these companies to do away with their old LAMP
> stack and move to a more modern stack, based on modern open-source tools and
> engineering practices.

LAMP stack is open source...

~~~
applecrazy
The implication in the sentence is that LAMP is an old open-source stack,
whereas Gatsby is new open-source

~~~
MuffinFlavored
Linux - Gatsby doesn't run on Linux?

Apache - Gatsby doesn't run behind a load balancer (apache/nginx) with
proxy_pass?

MySql - Gatsby doesn't persist data into a database (MySql/Postgres)?

PHP - I'll give you that PHP is out and node.js is in for backend development.

~~~
realityking
Linux - probably

Apache/Nginx - some web server will be used, though much as likely something
more lightweight than Apache. No proxy_pass needed since Gatsby just generates
a bunch of files you need to serve

MySQL - probably not unless married with a very complex backend

PHP - yeah that’s out

To understand Gatsby it’s crucial to understand that it’s using a
significantly different architecture than traditional LAMP applications and
monolithic CMSes

~~~
manigandham
Just about every production Gatsby instance is either using static data source
(list of markdown/json files) or a monolithic CMS on the backend via API. It's
more of a modern frontend site framework rather than a true self-contained
app.

------
mmanfrin
Question tangential to Gatsby for those of you who use such static site
builders as blogs: are there any good tools for writing/composing posts or are
you all doing it by hand?

I have set up the same blog maybe 3 times and I always stop posting because I
need to be in my coding environment to do so (and if I'm there, I might as
well be working on code). I'd really like to find something that I could use
to make a post on my gaming pc, for example, where I can add images easily
(and have them resized properly). I feel like I should probably just set up a
wordpress site, but wanted to know if I had other options.

~~~
realityking
Full disclosure: I‘m a Developer Evangelist for Contentful

A “Headless CMS” is one way to achieve what you’re looking to do. Contentful
is one, there are others. Gatsby’s has source plugins for all popular ones.

They have a nice getting started guide for Gatsby + Contentful:
[https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/sourcing-from-
contentful/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/sourcing-from-contentful/)

~~~
ronaldl93
I'm using Ghost + Gatsby for my personal website / blog [1].

[1] [https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com](https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com)

------
fiatjaf
In a dozen of hours I wrote Sitio[1]. Sitio generates static pages with React
templates and if wanted they also become alive React components at the client.
It has a simple imperative API, no GraphQL, no Webpack, any kind of datasource
can be easily plugged (in fact I did plug many).

It turns out Gatsby also exposes an imperative API that runs behind its fancy
declarative API, and it's very similar to mine.

However, I wrote mine in 12 hours. Gatsby has a big team and millions of
dollars and it's been in the works for many many years.

And still some weeks ago I tried to use Gatsby to generate a site with data
from Trello and Instagram and couldn't, hit some bugs, but mainly hit an
opaque and very complex API.

Why?

[1]: [https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio](https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio)

~~~
dplgk
No webpack is a big win. Thinking Gatsby is this fun & easy thing and then
realizing you're going all-in on the current npm/JS insanity is not a good
feature.

~~~
fiatjaf
I have this great badge at the repository: [Webpack free]

[https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fdcb107fde40edb15afb7e80f...](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fdcb107fde40edb15afb7e80f64349fa4fe7c11b/68747470733a2f2f696d672e736869656c64732e696f2f62616467652f7765627061636b2d667265652d6f72616e67652e737667)

------
p45please
Congrats to Kyle and the team. Been using Gatsby in prod for nearly a year now
(v1 then migrated to v2), the team is super helpful and responsive to feedback
and issues.

(DTC e-commerce)

------
arcturus17
I’ve been playing with Gatsby on toy projects, and recently I’ve considered
using it in prod in an eCommerce site.

Then I saw that the content preview feature was $50 / month - and it’s not
even integrated yet with my CMS of choice.

How can teams accept to let go of such fundamental features? I love the React
dev experience as much as the next guy, but I certainly can’t find a way to
justify this to my clients...

~~~
arcturus17
Apologies for the double comment but another flaw I’ve seen with Gatsby in
eCommerce has to do with fetching the product listings...

You basically have two options: (a) fetch them dynamically (b) trigger a
rebuild on product update

With (a) you have spinners and potentially worse SEO. With (b) you have to
deal with a delay from hitting “Publish” to seeing the changes deployed in
prod...

Again, these are all solved problems in just about every other eCommerce
framework!

If you look at some of the Gatsby eCommerce prod examples you will see a few
gorgeous sites (the Flamingo one for example) but they all have very few
product references and features (no user accounts, etc)

All this is to say the possible use cases for Gatsby in eCommerce seem very
narrow, though I would love to be proven wrong.

~~~
joking
I don't see a good fit between and ecommerce site and gatsby, on an ecoomerce
site you may have to change your pages depending on the stock, and disable the
buy button when there's no stock for an item. What are you going to do?
redeploy the site on every purchase?

Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available
come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of
gatsby.

~~~
arcturus17
Yea, essentially what I'm saying in my a vs b scenario.

> Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available
> come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of
> gatsby.

And you still haven't solved the issue of delays between content changes and
deployment... What if someone has made a bad mistake in content editing and
you need to revert it? You're exposed to the whims of your build processes and
infrastructure... There's no way I can sell to anyone who's played with
Wordpress or Shopify "well, your changes might take anywhere from 3 to 15
minutes to be live..."

That's why I'm asking, how can product and engineering teams justify this kind
of thing? I'm not being facetious, I'd love to hear their perspective.

------
tylermenezes
I have no idea how well the hosted service works, but Gatsby has been one of
my favorite frameworks for a while, and I'm happy they're throwing some extra
talent into making it awesome.

~~~
calcsam
Thanks! We're really excited to be able to invest even more in open source. If
there are particular features that would be helpful for you please open an
issue on the repo!

------
johncozen
Kudos to the Gatsby.js team. Gatsby is developer experience nirvana, I really
enjoy building with it.

~~~
calcsam
Thanks! That's really great to hear!

------
satvikpendem
For those who like React static sites but dislike the complexity of Gatsby and
GraphQL, check out react-static.

[https://github.com/react-static/react-static](https://github.com/react-
static/react-static)

YouTube example:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=OqbJ5swVpDQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=OqbJ5swVpDQ)

------
wiradikusuma
I checked their website and I still don't get what it actually is. I'm
familiar with Hugo (compiles .md files to static site), Forestry (CMS for Hugo
and other static site generators) and Netlify (to deploy that static site).
Where does it sit, and how is it different?

------
jpincheira
I love Gatsby. We are about to release a new landing version of
[https://Standups.io](https://Standups.io) entirely with it. Blog and help
center. We got rid of intercom guide :)

Parse.ly also just released their new landing page all done with Gatsby.

------
muglug
I wonder who the market for Gatsby is.

I considered signing up for them for a somewhat simple markdown-powered blog,
but ultimately ended up writing my own solution because I couldn’t justify the
cost. The documentation for the self-hosted solution seems designed to put you
off doing it yourself.

~~~
andrewingram
My personal site is running Gatsby on Netlify, I haven't paid for anything
except my domain. I'm not the biggest fan of Gatsby, but it's pretty decent
for some projects.

------
shay_ker
So, a Wordpress competitor? I'm curious to hear more.

~~~
joshmn
No. More closely compared to Jekyll.

------
greggman2
Reading through the comments I get the impression there is a mis-understanding
of what gatsby is. It might be my misunderstanding but ...

"Static Site generator" seems to be the confusion. If I'm reading correctly
gatsby is more a replacement for webpack than for jekyll or ghost. You use it
as scaffolding to help build your front end. The docs show it compiling react,
jsx, using various plugins like emotion etc. It all looks like it's supposed
to be a better webpack.

Am I wrong?

~~~
lhorie
I think "static site generator" is a more apt description than "webpack
replacement". The React code in Gatsby is SSR'ed only (in production mode,
anyways) making writing idiomatic dynamic client-side React code _very_
awkward.

Also, Gatsby uses Webpack[1] and it doesn't expose compilation options in any
meaningful way like webpack itself does (and it doesn't have a plug-and-play
philosophy like Parcel either). I'm not a huge fan of webpack config API
personally, but I certainly would never consider using Gatsby as an
alternative generic purpose bundler!

[1]
[https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/561d33e2e491d3971cb2...](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/561d33e2e491d3971cb2a404eec9705a5a493602/packages/gatsby/package.json#L135-L140)

------
ben_jones
The real play must be to take a chunk out of medium right? “Companies that
don’t like medium or Wordpress are rolling their own costly solutions, so here
we are with the smooth transition”.

The problem is if they want to be profitable they will eventually have to
incorporate the bad parts of medium and/or the bad parts of Wordpress and then
we’re back to square one with some new minimal open source static site
builder. This wheel is exhausting.

------
EGreg
_“Matthews says Gatsby (the company) is now contributing about $3 million per
year to open-source projects that include the core Gatsby tools and the plugin
ecosystem around it.”_

Who should we reach out to about this funding for our open source project to
integrate with Gatsby ecosystem? We have an open-source platform with tons of
components like videoconferencing, events, rides etc. hosted for free on
github.com .

------
bartq
I don't really know what Gatsby is good at because I've never been target
customer of it. But judging on website and docs I think its power lies in
simplicity: people want to get shit together and call a day. This tool allows
that. It probably won't live long, but that's not a problem, right? Most
websites built with it are short lived: promotion www, sales, register forms
etc.

------
chrshawkes
I have tutorials on Gatsby and have used it quite a bit. I don't recommend it.
I can't understand why this is getting funding? People are so much better off
with a CMS like Django or Wordpress. Hell, they could use static HTML, Apache
and Quill.JS and nothing else is needed. Maybe sub Quill with TinyMCE or
CKEditor. There is nothing overly special about Gatsby.

------
langitbiru
The history of Gatsby is interesting. If my memory serves me well, it was
started as an open source project. Then the developers of this open source
project got funded by VC.

So the pattern is like this: open source project -> get funded by VC.

The other similar case is IPFS (open source project) -> Filecoin (get funded
by VC).

Anyway, congratulation to the Gatsby team! :)

------
bb88
If history is any judge, four years from now, it will no longer be modern. And
those people who have spent time and money investing into gatsby will be
looking to leave for something else.

It's one of my biggest issues with software is that software is never done.
It's always being torn down and replaced with something else.

------
fareesh
What's a good, mature headless CMS that "just works" and is compatible with
Gatsby/GraphQL?

~~~
gpxl
Contentful

------
miguelmota
Gatsby is great; we use it for all our marketing sites because it doesn't hide
content behind JavaScript like plain React so it's better for SEO. Gatsby
would be great to compete with Netlify for static React app hosting.

~~~
hkai
Don't search engine crawlers render React properly?

~~~
csande17
Google kinda sorta sometimes executes JavaScript on pages it crawls, but much
less frequently and less reliably than regular HTML indexing.

------
nwmcsween
So alternatively why not a less coupled system? Hasura + hyperapp, etc + ...?

~~~
fiatjaf
Doesn't generate static pages.

~~~
nwmcsween
Sarcasm? If not there is nothing stopping you from generating static files
using build time queries.

~~~
fiatjaf
Are you serious? Then why are you suggesting libraries? Or even languages?
There's nothing stopping you from generating static files using machine
instructions directly.

------
morcutt
I've enjoyed using Gatsby in a hybrid approach to combine marketing and a web
app for MVPs. It's allowed me to get up and running quickly and haven't run
into any major issues so far.

------
lloydatkinson
I recommend people checkout Gridsome. It’s a similar product but for Vue.

------
vicbun
And we at [https://simulify.com](https://simulify.com) are making a UI for
react based static sites. Pls join our alpha.

------
dvcrn
I thought this was about gatsby, the hair product company

~~~
rhokstar
Their hair paste work really well.

And Gatsby JS work really well, as well.

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iamwil
calcsam: How do you think about defensibility? One might think that because
the underlying tech is open source, someone else can also spring up a hosting
service. Is that not an issue because agencies would want the official hosting
for the open source project because they want the reassurance?

Or is it for another reason this isn't an issue?

~~~
calcsam
Interestingly, a lot of open-source companies have built defensible businesses
-- a list is over at [http://oss.cash](http://oss.cash). Recent IPOs include
Mulesoft, Elastic, Mongo, Fastly...

More specifically to Gatsby, we don't actually see ourselves in the hosting
business, more in the "collaboration" business -- most websites have teams of
nontechnical folks that are reviewing sites before they go live, creating and
editing content, and so on. We're building Gatsby-specific collaboration
tooling, starting with CMS Preview.

A good comparison here would be Github -- nobody thinks of Github as "Git
hosting", they think of Github as the place where developers collaborate
together on projects.

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nhooyr
Does anyone know why Gatsby uses GraphQL? I don't understand how a static site
benefits from GraphQL.

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spotlmnop
Congratulations, now build some great things with that funding .

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darepublic
Gatsby is popular among frontend React devs although I kind of balk at end to
end solutions like this. Nice alternatives to Gatsby are React-static and
next.js

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bdcravens
Gatsby is about 3 years old. I wonder how it would have worked out if in 2007
DHH and co had pivoted from Basecamp to Rails Inc and raised funding?

Of course, to be fair, Meteor is still in business after taking the same path
(though it seems most efforts are directed at Apollo?)

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nickpinkston
Congrats guys!

