I love astro, it's been such a pleasure to use and totally solved my need for a flexible platform. I managed to retire a bunch of Wordpress sites and I've never looked back. Hopefully I can still run it on netlify.
Very nice to see these dev tools get an exit. e.g. I love `uv` and friends but did consider that perhaps dev tools are just a bad business and then no one will go into making that kind of stuff. Good exits means more of these tools.
I have only used Astro for toy stuff but it seemed neat. Congrats to the team.
EDIT: To put paid to the sidebar discussion below, yes I meant "for instance, consider `uv`; they might do these nice things and go nowhere but now that companies like Bun and Astro have gotten acquired, it demonstrates a future for others; therefore we will get more things like Astral's `uv` and so on". Hope that clarifies.
I don't think that's really clear. I think we could both defer to the OP clarifying.
For pedantry's sake: neither i.e. nor e.g. would be correct here. You want cf. ("conferatur") to invite a comparison; e.g. is when an example pertains to an instance. In this case uv would not pertain to the instance, because Astro is not Astral.
I agree! That's why I think it's probably just a confusion between entities. It doesn't make sense either as example or as a comparison (although IMO it makes more sense as the latter).
It's all good. Hardly matters. It was just becoming too big a discussion for something far too minor. Any frustration I had from being misunderstood (primarily self-directed) was alleviated from satvikpendem guessing correctly what I intended.
It would be good to understand what Cloudflare gets out of the deal. The article is very much just "Astro, but someone else pays the bills!" which is of course lovely for Astro.
Same reason vercel buys open source... it makes cloudflare always a great deployment option for all Astro sites, which in turn helps cloudflare's core business.
For example, Cloudflare released their vite plugin which makes it effortless for frameworks that use the vite env API to run inside workerd (meaning you get to use cloudflare service bindings in dev) back in April and only React Router had support for it. Nextjs has no support, the draft PR to add support for Sveltekit has been parked until the next major version, Astro only just added support in their beta 6.0 release 3 days ago
With this acquisition, Astro will probably be first to future updates that increase compatibility with cloudflare. It's smart, and was probably not very expensive (more of an acqui-hire)
So when folks say they want to see big companies invest in open source, this is what that looks like. CF could have kept coasting on what Astro was building, but instead they are paying for it. But in return they get a lot of control.
Well, hopefully more like Go's relationship with Google? The company that pays the bills is their first and most important customer, but as far as I can tell from the outside, the Go team makes its own plans and management doesn't pull rank.
So, cloudification: lock the customer into a complex cloud dependent solution they can't easily migrate to some other commodity infrastructure provider.
They can stay open source, but stop putting any effort into supporting deploying to cloudflare's competitors, including accepting PRs for such improvements.
Or they could add features that only work if you deploy via cloudflare.
I also take anything said in an acquisition announcement with a grain of salt. It is pretty common for companies to make changes they said they wouldn't a few years after an acquisition.
That's always been true. Perhaps even more so as Astro constantly faced an existential battle for a working business. Now they don't have to do that and Cloudflare makes their money on their infra business. Locking Astro up now or in the future gains them very little compared to how much they make with hosted upsell services. [edit: clarity]
It's a static site builder. It creates a static site. HTML, CSS, and JS. That you can then upload literally anywhere.
Once again, what lock in? There is literally nothing to lock in. Explain exactly how they are going to lock somebody in, moreso than the lazy "for now" which you seem to constantly repeat.
No? It's still the same Astro that you can move to any other provider that supports it - and it's just Javascript, so pretty much everyone supports it.
Yes, that's part of the problem, deploying nextjs to cloudflare in the first place used to be an absolute nightmare, let alone the dev experience (I think it's better now)
Definitely irrational. There are lots of logical reasons to dislike Next (like the fact that they pile new shiny bit on top of new shiny bit without caring about the regular user experience) ... but being mad that it can't run on Vite is silly.
It's like being mad that Rails can't run on Python, or that React can't run on jQuery. Next already has its own build system, so of course it doesn't work with another build system.
I have a question. Why can't Whatsapp or Meta make a markdown INFO only website for small business owners (e.g. technicians, shopkeepers, handyman, etc) using their immense reach and clout. The method of using whatsapp groups to keep users updated of the latest updates is not scalable or open.
too big to deliver simple solutions? youre making way too much sense and this would die in committee or be replaced when someone new needs to justify themselves by launching a new product to supplant an existing one.
Not sure how to feel about this! I’ve been known to use em dashes every now and then, but I am indeed a fellow human.
I’m close to the vite plugin in particular and have contributed to multiple frameworks around cf integration (simply because I use cf), that’s why I chose it as an example (and it’s one of Astro 6’s biggest features)
It does not read like marketing copy to me, what part of talking about draft PRs and framrworks sounds like marketing speak? They're right that CloudFlare having priority access to new Astro features is beneficial for them.
They get to make Astro -> Cloudflare the default publishing pipeline. Sure users may pick something else, but even if a small % stick with Cloudflare that's an overall win.
None of us have access to Cloudflare's internal data. But a reasonable guess is that enough of their current and future paying customers use Astro? I'm one of those - Astro hosted on Cloudflare.
Sometimes it is cheaper to buy a company than build the internal tool team you might have had to build from scratch anyway. Half acqui-hire, half knowing you've built something on-top of it and want it to stick around.
I also wouldn't be surprised if cloudflare wants to build this into their site-hosting capabilities.
Vercel was founded (or co-founded?) by the author of Next.js. That's a very different story. Vercel is like what some hypothetical Astro Cloud could have become if it had grown out of Astro.
It gets to be THE platform where to deploy frontends for many headless enterprise CMS and comerce stores that due to partnerships with Vercel only have Next.js based SDKs.
Additionally, I wish more serveless cloud vendors would offer a free tier like Vercel, including support for compiled languages on the backend (C, C++, Rust, Go) without asking me for a credit card upfront.
The "meltdown" where he refused to jump to the whims of Italy's football cartel and block whatever addresses they wanted without accountability or review? More meltdowns, please.
Cloudflare is bound to respect the laws of the countries it operates, and if he disagrees with the process, understandable, that was not the way to express it.
Nextjs doesn’t really work on cloudflare with the latest versions. There is an adapter but it’s buggy as hell. The direction is also likely to continue: https://omarabid.com/nextjs-vercel
Source: I use cloudflare and used to run my app there (nextjs) and had to do a migration to vite.js. So the way I see it, this is cloudflare response to vercel.
My god. Every time I touch Next.js in some project I think “hey, this actually doesn’t feel so bad to develop with, dare I say it feels nice?“ and every time I read about it I think “what the hell, this is the worst choice you can make“.
It’s wild that they’re somewhat taking the whole React ecosystem with them.
I’ve used Astro on Cloudflare for a few years for my personal website (username.com). They’ve both been absolutely fantastic, I can’t say enough good things about both of them. My website has all 100s on PageSpeed/Lighthouse, and that’s because of the performance focus of both Astro and Cloudflare. No credit to me at all. It was mainly because Astro prioritised shipping 0 JS unless it was absolutely necessary and Cloudflare is exceedingly good at serving static HTML.
But I also see the difficulty that Astro faced here. Despite being happy with the framework, I never paid for it. The paid offerings didn’t strike a chord with me. And it was partly because whatever they offered, Cloudflare already offered on a very generous free tier.
I'm glad the team have got a second life within Cloudflare,. I'm happy for the people who've given me such excellent software for free for years. Thanks folks!
Likewise! I built my personal blog with Astro and host on Cloudflare (username.dev), and feel guilty about taking advantage of such excellent software and free tier. Here’s hoping they find a way to take my money soon.
> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render.
Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server<>client" model suddenly doesn't make any sense anymore, and of course this should be rendered server-side.
Why are we doomed to repeat this, and why does it happen so quickly particularly in web development? We have each other's histories and knowledge right in front of us, what's missing for us to not continue just running around in circles like this?
IMO it's because the web has a huge diversity of behaviors (in a way that, say, native apps do not) but a monoculture on the development side.
React makes sense if you're making Gmail. It doesn't really make sense if you're making a mostly static blog. But because there are more job opportunities in the former (when you consider the wealth of internal web apps out there in the world) all the training courses folks take emphasize React and an app-centric way of thinking about the web.
And perhaps most importantly, it's good enough. It works. Users get by with it. And the developer experience is better than it was in the days of Backbone etc. So few push for change.
And they don't. Web development practices are largely driven by what developers want, not what users want. Which is why Google started doing things like measuring Core Web Vitals and having it affect SEO rankings, to force developers to care.
It gets worse, some teams would get x real estate on a website, and one team would use React, another Vue, another would use Angular because they owned that real estate on your site and that's what the team was best with. Astro lets you still do that, but turns it all into static content. Think of orgs the size of Google or YouTube, there are different teams responsible for what looks like a small thing but different pieces of a giant pie.
Whenever you think that everything old is new again and we're just retracing our steps from the past, you risk missing the lessons learned in the meantime.
> The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render.
This is wrong. Some websites are better mostly (mostly) rendered on the client (we call them "apps", like a map application) and some are better mostly rendered on the server (like blogs).
Yeah, I'm not sure I understand why "islands" isn't just "bits of JavaScript on a static page".
It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.
The key difference between islands and what we used to do back in the day (js on a static page) is that with an islands approach you architect your site with a components-driven approach where everything encapsulates the js/css/html it needs, then you mark it as an "interactive" island if you actually need client-side js to run – the code is the same, but it either runs only in the server (default) or in both server and client.
I know this sounds similar, but, compared to the more traditional approach, there is a certain simplicity to having everything just be javascript. You can often run the same libraries on both server and client depending on your needs, plus it fulfills the promise of web components in a way that is easier to work with (though WCs have also come a long way!)
I will also say encapsulating everything you just said in a single term, "islands," is a lot simpler and prettier to discuss. At least from my perspective, the naming also makes a lot of sense. Literal islands of interactivity surrounded by an ocean of static.
You can do this with just about any programming language or scripting language that can render HTML on the server + plain HTML and JS. You could do this with PHP 30 years ago.
It has been funny seeing the tide come in and out now a few times. Though I will admit that each time, the ergonomics get better. AJAX as a pattern was pretty gnarly if you wanted to do a bit more than update a notification badge or comment box.
There's a really nice pattern of using Custom Elements [0] for that sort of JS interactivity sprinkling. You can make your web application however you want, and when you want the client to run some JS, you just drop in `<my-component x="..." y="...">...</my-component>` with whatever flavour of HTML templating you have available to you. (also possibly with the is= attribute in the future [1], which will let you keep more of the HTML template out of JS)
It saves you the hassle of element targeting and lets you structure that part of your app a bit more without going overboard on "everything is a react component, even the server bits".
Want something "server side generated" in that JS? Just render it in attributes/body/a slot element/a template element, and expect to pick it up in the JS side of things. Feels like how it's supposed to be... and there's no framework required!
Custom Elements do start to feel like the dream of the Knockout-era web of "Progressive Enhancement" is finally almost entirely out of the box in the browser. Especially ignoring the Shadow DOM and using Light DOM to style your unpopulated or static rendered fallback states as close to your "live" JS-driven state can lead to some very good experiences, including and especially when JS is disabled (or erroring).
Adobe could have benefited from doing this acquisition but they can be somewhat forgiven as they are already pushing Edge Delivery Services which is based in NextJS although it's a different approach. Combined with the Universal Editor they have a solid headless authoring setup for enterprise CMS.
But I really feel like Akamai is who dropped the ball here, this was a low hanging fruit for them and they're lacking offering this capability to offer their corporate clients as they transition to full headless. Now it's going to be their competition (Cloudflare, even Fastly through Adobe & the EDS push) who will try to take a portion of their cake.
I'm a little wary of this. I'd been using Gatsby for my static websites for a long time, until it got eaten up by Netlify and then sunset; I switched over to Astro at that point, but now I'm getting a sense of déjà vu.
Gatsby was sunset because it was a bad framework build on bad decisions [1]. I tried to use it when it was new, and it was immediately obvious that "GraphQL for everything" leads to horrible DX.
It was definitely a terrible DX, I remember having trouble wrapping my head around querying for blog posts inside my blog post component instead of receiving them as props. But I was using a custom F# + asp.net blog engine I'd written for what amounted to a static site, so I just switched to that Gatsby thing I'd been hearing a lot about at the time.
I had moved out from Gatsby to Astro on my blog/site (username.com), mostly because the enormous dependency hell full of security issues, I know it's just things to generate static files, but it was causing a lot of headaches to upgrade and remove the issues. With Astro, I receive a lot less issues and the maintenance is easier! From my perspective if Cloudflare keep it that way, it'll be a win.
> I had moved out from Gatsby to Astro on my blog/site (username.com), mostly because the enormous dependency hell full of security issues, I know it's just things to generate static files, but it was causing a lot of headaches to upgrade and remove the issues.
That's exactly what made me move to Astro. I would've been happy sticking with Gatsby since it still technically does what it says on the tin, but there were so many security warnings and issues with upgrading dependencies that I gave up.
Just setup my personal blog again after a four years hiatus using Astro (loved the good docs). Kind of disappointed, but given how simple static site generators are, probably something Claude could crank out easily with parity of features I actually use then wouldn't be beholden to any project's creators.
I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there.
I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future.
For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that Astro doesn't ship any JS by default and just outputs static HTML, and when I want some page to have an interactive JS component, Svelte is an option that produces a relatively small amount of client JS.
But: Using Svelte with Astro this way for static sites has been broken since August 2025. As soon as you have a conditionally rendered child component in Svelte, Astro fails to bundle the styles for it in the static output of the site, and it does that ONLY in production, which is really devious, you could build a whole site (using astro dev) without knowing and then it breaks when you deploy it.
I don't want to be complaining about how quickly issues get addressed in an OSS project that I'm not paying for, I don't blame them for not keeping tabs on every framework integration, I just would love to build websites with the latest versions Astro and Svelte, and I unfortunately have the feeling I should have just gone with SvelteKit for a smoother experience.
It's not complaining when said OSS project has taken $10+million in VC funding, at that point it becomes a matter of priorities and by explicitly ignoring a major issue the owners are telling you exactly what they care about (capturing that bag, not helping users).
I like the concept of making frameworks pluggable with different adapters. In my experience, though, it’s dangerous to hitch your wagon to anything but the top 1 or 2 most popular adapters in a given project like this.
The JavaScript web framework ecosystem has this problem everywhere lately where frameworks try to be everything to everyone and support every use case anyone might want. It’s noble in theory but without dedicated and active maintainers for each combination there’s bound to be something left behind.
My heuristic has been to only use adapters that the core project maintainers appear to favor. The maintainers for sub-project adapters that are introduced later frequently have maintainers that come and go, with long periods where things start breaking and nobody is interested in fixing them.
Any reason you didn't use alpine for client side interactivity? When I went down the "use a framework plugin in Astro" route, I found it too jarring and reverted to alpine which I found worked well enough.
I havent had a chance to fully use it in a project yet, but it is one of my favorite projects only tinker with it, I'm glad it will receive funding to keep it going. It is definitely a solid gem of open source since its not married to one single SPA framework.
Yeah I suppose it's a tradeoff. I have had an excellent experience when not hydrating components at all, and I like their approach significantly more than other SSGs overall. My worry is just the massive scope of supporting integrations with all those frameworks AND its own .astro language / syntax AND server side rendering in addition to static generation.
To be fair, vite does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to supporting extra frameworks. If you look at the code required for astro to integrate with a new technology you'll see it's relatively straightforward.
Congrats to Fred and team! Developing and maintaining a complex framework takes lots of funding, and I’m glad Astro found a new home that provides that.
With [Mastro], we have a different approach. The name originally stood for "minimal Astro", and we’re staying true to that. At just ~700 lines of TypeScript, Mastro will always be easily maintainable – even if by just a single person. And it's amazing how much you can do if you're very deliberate in your API's design.
I love Astro - migrated my blog there (here it was a gradual improvement), migrated company website there (here a lot, to joy of everyone). In the times of vibe coding, there is much less reason to use WYSWIG website editors. In our company, a non-technical assistant, modified website with Claude Code.
I hope that this acquisition will go well. It would be sad to lose this great framework.
At the same time, we deploy on Cloudflare. So their business is to keep Astro cool so that more people will use Claudflare, it would be a win-win!
I've been using Astro for a couple years and it's delightful. I actually started using it for my docs because I saw Cloudflare was using it. I hope they are a good steward of the tech!
Surprised this isn't in the article, but Cloudflare has been moving all their docs to Astro's Starlight docs framework. I'm guessing this is a way to prioritize features for Cloudflare:
About the download stats for open source frameworks and libraries.. I keep reading claims of "millions of weekly downloads" -- surely this is a noisy metric, right?
NPM just counts GET requests. A significant number of those must be from CI/CD pipelines, mirrors, build servers, etc.
It still signals popularity, but probably to a much lesser degree than implied.
VC still use github stars as a viable metric, at some point you have to say aloud that they are basically engaging in shammanism and ritual sacrifices.
How to measure the popularity of FOSS projects though?
Number of downloads? Number of stars on GH? Number of content on social medias?
The absolute value is meaningless in itself, but there's a big difference between a library that is downloaded a thousand or millions of times each week.
That's the idea.
Meanwhile for-profit projects have actual customers or revenues to demonstrate popularity.
Why does Cloudflare need a web framework? Most obvious would be they think they can make money from hosting astro sites (like Vercel and NextJS).
I hope Cloudflare's impact on Astro will be tiny. But another great thing being swallowed by big tech...
This is overly cynical without reason. CloudFlare is hardly "big tech" even if it is a "big" "tech" company. They have no record of killing or abusing open source projects.
It's kind of past that phase, according to Gemini, it's a tax play:
The "No" (Non-GAAP & Free Cash Flow)
If you look at Non-GAAP (adjusted) figures—which many investors use to judge the actual "engine" of the business—Cloudflare is solidly profitable.
Adjusted Income: They reported a non-GAAP net income of $102.6 million for Q3 2025.
Cash Flow: Cloudflare is Free Cash Flow (FCF) positive. They are generating more cash from their operations than they are spending to keep the business running, reporting $75 million in FCF in their most recent quarter.
Why the difference?
The main reason Cloudflare still shows a "loss" on paper is Stock-Based Compensation (SBC). Like many high-growth tech companies, they pay a significant portion of employee salaries in stock rather than cash.
The GAAP view counts that stock as an expense (creating a "loss").
The Investor view often ignores it because it doesn't drain the company's bank account (showing "profit").
Astro is amazing. I've been using it for a couple of years now. Initially only for static sites but now I'm building the UI of all my web projects with it.
I wonder if there will be some sort of collab between Hono and Astro given that Yusukue also works at Cloudflare.
I have always liked Astro. It also works great with AI tools since its combination of markdown and code. Was able to vibe code a quick blog template and deploy to cloudflare in minutes with an existing headless backend - https://sleekcms-astro-blog.pages.dev/
D1 is fine when it fits the use case, but most of the time I just want Postgres that I will use for absolutely everything. It has happened often enough that I have tried to make systems work with other storage systems, and eventually just give up and revert to Postgres. Every time I just start with Postgres I don't have issues until it turns out my laziness has caused a performance problem, and those I can fix.
Hope that SSR remains first class as time goes on. I think Astro’s DX is superb overall, and am bullish on server-rendered components in MPAs with a sprinkling of hypermedia libs for better UX.
Some features of my SSR-based side project feel like I had to hack them on, such as a hook that runs only on app start (hacked in via middleware) or manually needing to set cache control headers for auth’d content.
All in all, really happy with it. And it isn’t next.js.
Oh no. This isn’t good. I’m glad that the team gets a payout but as an Astro user I don’t love it being owned by CF and that the goals of the project (at least indirectly) goes from the best way to deploy it to the best way to deploy it using CF.
I don't anticipate it changing like that. You still do a build using Vite and deploy the static assets. How could they change that to make it difficult to host elsewhere?
Let’s hope you’re right. I think vendor lock in is possible if they focus on features tightly coupled to Cloudflare. Look at Next.js. In theory you can deploy it anywhere, but in practice it is harder outside Vercel because of tight coupling around things like caching. You do not have to use those features, but if the framework is built to expect them, it pushes people into that platform. I can imagine Astro becoming very attractive to use with Cloudflare Workers and slowly locking people into that model.
Wow, these are the same people behind Pika/Skypack and Snowpack. I can remember the day when they announced the Astro project, and now it's joining Cloudflare, incredible progress.
My favorite framework, and what has brought me much deeper into the world of web development. It's what I have used for me personal page https://bryanhogan.com/ . I'm happy to see it get funding, although I hope this doesn't introduce entshittification. So far I'm hopeful though.
It's the first framework I recommend to web dev beginners, after they have built something with plain HTML and CSS.
I hope they maintain a clear path to delay separately too.
With these sort of combinations the deploy to cloudflare button gets ever bigger than over time. And then features get added that only work with CF and eventually it’s still open source but only half the stuff works standalone etc
From a developer perspecive, I was going to go "Ahh shit here we go again"
But to be really honest, thinking more about it. atleast from an "AI" bubble perspective, Cloudflare is pretty rock solid and isn't involved in the AI bubble deals whereas vercel has
If you were to use cloudflare workers say the past few months, you would've noticed some serious UI/UX improvements and its projects highlighted astro template was one of the first things (I think second was sveltekit iirc)
Anyways thinking about it now, I am sure that cloudflare must have been in talks with them for quite some time and they had the astro deployments on cloudflare workers so they must have seen its usage and other data we have no idea about to justify this purchase
That being said, I had been part of astro community almost exactly the time they had partnered up with turso (It was my holidays so I wanted to build a website from scratch, I sadly lost it but it was really cool and it had BMO from adventure time's pixel art that I lost oof :<)
So I was in their discord when they had just joined turso for astro DB and at that point, you couldn't host it locally (some tried with wasm) not sure what's the reality now though. But its interesting to see this because cloudflare offers a turso (serverless sqlite) alternative as Cloudflare D1, So we might see Astro shift to d1?
Once again, I have not been part of community for almost around 1-2 years so I don't know the current state of Astro aside from tweaking around making my own custom editor in bun for some astro templates (astro templates are really cool)
Perhaps, we are gonna see astro templates website + cloudflare workers to create an instant deployment of astro templates on cloudflare workers as a first class citizen. Honestly I would love that because cf workers/pages are free/cheapest in the whole market.
I hope that Astro still stays local first and still its serverless features can benefit everybody and not just cloudflare (looking at you vercel for nextjs)
Only mildly surprising - Astro + CF Pages/Workers have been my go-to for when I want to spin up a static site or do anything else and it does feel like they've been really working on the integration between the two.
Astro is my favorite way to build websites (at least, of the kind its great at) and I'm happy for the team; Cloudflare is a super cool place to work. Excited to see in what directions this will develop. They have a real shot at being the next Next.
This spam LLM account "MarkusAllen" (towards the very end) could be used by an adversory to discredit books / courses /"youtube channel" they link to. This is reverse psychology attack vector made possible by an LLM.
If you want some precedent look at Hono. Initially it was just for the CF Workers runtime (not developed by CF). Then CF started using Hono internally and hired the dev to work on Hono full time. Hono works on any JS runtime.
I suppose we’ll see — I’d be surprised if the whole promise of nothing will change don’t hold over the long term. I don’t love that Astro is tied to a narrow set of hosting providers either.
This is cool, I use astro when I just want to spin up a quick site without having to fight the framework (looking at you, Nextjs) and the main thing I disliked was the initiatives around paid extras they had going
Astro and Tanstack are probably the best full-stack routers these days, and Astro wins in terms of the wide support for almost any client-side tech
i'd personalloy love a quick video demo on the home screen, with someone walking through the experience of using the app; other than that, looks interesting;
It still baffles me why Netlify did that. Gatsby seemed to have already been dying, even before the acquisition; and it didn't look like Netlify was planning to invest in it.
Netlify didn't buy Gatsby for the framework. They wanted the hosting business and the GraphQL thing. They said this at the time, and it's true. It was barely resourced. Cloudflare is only interested in the framework (because Astro has nothing else).
Source/disclosure: I worked at Gatsby, Netlify, Astro and Cloudflare
Seemed a good idea at the time. The unified data layer was always the best thing about Gatsby (which is why I nicked the idea for the Astro content layer), but maybe not as a hosted product
Unironically have been migrating my static pages (from Nextjs and Eleventy) to plain HTML and love it.
Of course depends on your use case if that is feasible.
First, it doesn't have any provisions for code reuse. So, if you have multiple pages that use the same header, same footer, or same navigation menu, your options are either to copy-paste it (gross), or to build the final html out of smaller pieces, at which point you've reinvented either a static site generator or a web server.
Second, if you write long stretches of text, the html markup can get in the way, as opposed to unobtrusiveness of something like markdown.
Yea I think I’ll write my own static generator that just combines 3 templates for header/body/footer and converts markdown from the body.
Should be fun project.
I’m tired of the constant update pressure from existing solutions and I only need something dead simple.
> at which point you've reinvented either a static site generator ...
It doesn't have to be Astro though. You can build something super simple that just includes the header, footer, and nav. Leaving most of the site as plain HTML.
Same, and I was starting to feel kind of strange doing anything in html/php in 2026 but then I looked at everything else and realized I'd have to start from scratch again. Plain ol' HTML has worked great.
I recently rebuilt my site with Parcel + React Server Components. RSC are designed to solve many of the same problems that Astro does. And Parcel is “just” a bundler and not a framework, so it has less magic and gives you more control.
I experimented a lot with bootstrapping React projects this past fall, and Astro was by far the least painful to use. Notably, it was the least goofy of all of the React starter kits to use for server API development.
Disliked the templating solutions, the messy documentation, the loss in momentum, and liked a lot of the stuff (especially the tooling and principles) in astro.
Also strongly disliked how political eleventy got.
I just wanted a website, not a an internal debate about what I am potentially being absorbed into. I can vote, and spend money on donations, I don't need to enact change through my tech stack.
Well, there's this other project that recently secured funding from a company that has a proven track record of supporting great open-source projects like Astro, TanStack, and Hono without trying to capture or lock anything down.
Welp, I'm worried. I like Astro, but maybe it's time to make my own SSG, to not ever end up in the hand of a few big-sharks that consolidate and enshittify everything.
I don't think it's really targeted at building apps, as far as I can tell its whole pitch has always been that that most websites are not apps and therefore most websites do not need a full JS framework like Next.js.
They even say it in this blog:
"Our mission to design a web framework specifically for building websites — what we call content-driven websites, to better distinguish from data-driven, stateful web applications — resonated"
On inter-island communication, I actually think less is more – I find a lot of the recent big features like this they have added unnecessarily constrain you to doing things a certain way, while the reason I liked Astro in the first place was the simplicity.
You can easily add any global store library to your project to communicate between islands from the very simple (nanostores) to more complex stuff (are people still using mobx, redux, etc?)
I actually would prefer if Astro kept the core more simple, I never understood the point of Astro components for example; always thought their game plan would be to build their own client-side framework like what remix v3 is doing, but currently their components are too limited to make them worth using over just doing everything in react, svelte, or whatever floats your boat.
Astro component is your page's entry point. It's similar to React server component. The typical flow is to fetch data in it, and pass the data to client component written in React or whatever. You can also have pages that are Astro only, without any front-end framework.
Yeah, I know, but since by default the front-end islands are server-rendered with no hydration the lines are blurred between what you would use an .astro component for, and just using for example react.
Personally I only ever use .astro components if I'm 100% sure I will never need any client side interactivity, otherwise it's just easier to ignore them.
I mean, you have to have an .astro file if you want your route to be picked up, and then import and use React components in that file. IIRC, you cannot just directly use React.
Oh right, yeah I get what you're saying now. Indeed I think .astro templates make sense at the page level say to define a layout, and I actually like the syntax of stuffing the server js into a frontmatter style block, it's pretty nice.
You become beholden to these platforms and they're inherently not portable. There is risk here, and given the track record of Internet companies I think it's fair to say the risk is not worth it for many people.
Your costs could explode, or worse, the business could go under and you lose all your shit.
Meta response: This account’s recent comment history is almost exclusively self promotion for their content, YouTube channel, and school. Much of the comment text appears LLM generated with classic signs such as the em dash, bullet point lists, and this-not-that comparisons that are common to LLM generated output.
It’s noteworthy because this comment is currently the top voted comment, probably because it hits all the notes of what you’d get if you asked an LLM to generate some content to tap into anger in a Hacker News comment section. It’s scary that this type of LLM powered engagement bait is so successfully being used to advertise on HN.
The criticism is also not very pointed. Like, I don't understand what the core message is. There is disdain for VC money and an implication that Astro could have gone without monetization. Both of which don't seem very well argued. But even if we grant those points ... so what? What is our take away supposed to be? It's a bunch of negative observations that don't funnel into some concrete conclusion.
It seems like the takeaway is supposed to be to look favorably on the commenter. "This is bad. I am good."
The top comment doesn't even make sense. Sqlite actually had to get funding to continue operating! They weren't immune from worries like paying rent or buying groceries.
It's just an ad that people are upvoting uncritically.
I did notice after seeing all the em-dashes. Shame because in a sense I could've agreed with them or atleast have a good discussion but if they didn't even take time to write their posts then oof
If the purpose of this was to promote their academy or school or whatever, what was the point? Because at this point, they have lost all credibility and respect and HN isn't a gullible audience so I don't understand the point of why they did this
> If the purpose of this was to promote their academy or school or whatever, what was the point? Because at this point, they have lost all credibility and respect and HN isn't a gullible audience so I don't understand the point of why they did this
It’s the top voted comment right now. Their comment history has similar comments with links to their products and content.
I think they’re doing it because it was working for them. I bet they’re happy with the additional traffic they’re picking up for a minute or two of promoting an LLM and then appending a link at the end.
I thought this was a cheap shot, but then I checked the account’s comment history. Not all of the comments look like LLM output but a lot of the comments from this account are definitely in LLM style. It even has an em dash. With the plug attached at the end I think this is their advertising strategy: Plug into outrage threads with LLM generated content and then guide people toward their program after the hook.
This is 100% an AI generated post. Incredibly disappointing to see this stuff making its way to HN. If you want to promote your school, at least write a post yourself.
> Linux: 33 years old, runs the internet, community-funded
Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM.
GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money.
It's still the community when the community is via corporations.
Corporations are just groups of people. Pure grass roots "We collect the money, anonymously in cash shaking a bucket at our annual fundraiser" does not work at this scale. Even Zig, which I'm guessing is about as far away from "It's all just owned by an inhuman corporation" as you could ask for, does have big ticket corporate donors. So does ISRG (Let's Encrypt) or the EFF.
Venture Capital is a bad fit, that's the conjecture here. VC funding for infrastructure is a mistake because that big pay day won't happen if you did it correctly. That doesn't make VC inherently bad, or projects like Linux inherently defective, the claim was that it's just a bad match, like how an Irish Stout doesn't pair well with a subtle tomato and angel hair pasta dish.
The tone of OP was more like the "community of peace and love without money from the man".
Gathering around projects, talking over USENET, Gopher, phpBB forums, sharing code over email, Sourceforge, Savannah , living the FOSS dream, the whole mantra of when the GNU manifesto came to be.
All a matter of if the project dies when the money fountain runs dry, and developers have to find another way to pay bills other than a few meagre donations.
Not sure it's dreams to say "community-funded". Depends on terminology.
The funding assertion leverages the re-definition of “community” in “community funded” and relates to why all those big projects offer CE or Community Editions instead of calling it free or open source editions.
Enterprises are willing to take a look at free, but "community editions" are clearly for peons, not the big boys, so they license the commercial edition. It also productizes a subset of licensing rights in contrast with the commercial licensing rights.
In any case, in today's common parlance, community doesn't mean ICs and IC donations. It can, but it's been mostly co-opted by corp donations, which are still donations and not VC.
SQLite made and makes a lot of money from a lot of the people who use them. It's free for us to use, but it wasn't free for Motorola and AOL and Nokia (and later Google, Apple and Adobe) who contracted the team to build it out, add features, fix bugs on it. This wasn't FOSS funded by a few people's free time. It was a commercial business that made money by finding product market fit - the best embedded database in the world. Their scale then allowed them to find more bugs, fix them and become more reliable than anything else.
> I scrambled around and came up with some pricing strategy. [Motorola] wanted some enhancements to it so it could go in their phones, and I gave them a quote and at the time, I thought this was a quote for all the money in the world. It was just huge. ($80k)
> [Nokia] flew me over and said, “Hey, yeah, this is great. We want this but we need some enhancements.” I [Richard Hipp] said, “Great,” and we cut a contract to do some development work for them.
> We were going around boasting to everybody naively that SQLite didn’t have any bugs in it, or no serious bugs, but Android definitely proved us wrong. Look, I used to think that I could write software with no bugs in it. It’s amazing how many bugs will crop up when your software suddenly gets shipped on millions of devices.
If you can find paying customers that can fund your development, then it's fantastic. It's even better if those contracts give you scale that none of your competitors have. You don't need VC money if that's the case. But let's not pretend that Astro were in that situation. No one was paying for a web framework.
> If you can find paying customers that can fund your development, then it's fantastic. It's even better if those contracts give you scale that none of your competitors have. You don't need VC money if that's the case. But let's not pretend that Astro were in that situation. No one was paying for a web framework.
Didn't this just happen right now that Astro got acquired by Cloudflare? I am sure that Cloudflare has bot tons of money right now so Astro got an offer to good to refuse but worst case scenario they could've still partnered up with cloudflare,netlify,vercel etc. but also companies who deploy astro (even google deploys astro pages)
Plus, Astro has a very strong focus on being performant/fast (getting 100 lightscore) so they could've definitely focused on consultance as well to actually have the people who work in the craft who can take a look and help you get score who literally know the inside out of Astro
That being said, the Question is, could they have survived long enough to be in a position of sustainability without VC money or could they have gotten sustainability from the start, if so what could be the path that they could've taken so that they didn't need VC money or could be (day-1 profitable ie?)
Problem is, it was possible to get there with minimal effort. The default config of Astro was 100. I know absolutely nothing about web dev and my personal website was all 100s.
And in any case, consultancy doesn't scale. Interestingly Tailwind has that kind of model - free software, pay for beautifully crafted components. And their business isn't doing well.
We don't know what would have happened in an alternate universe. But it's hard out there building businesses on FOSS. Can't blame anyone for trying - VC or otherwise.
European Commission issues call for evidence on open source
The EU is looking for facts like this as it figures out how to use OS to begin to extend its digital sovereignty. I don't think it's as simple as, "get funding from a giant continental government instead of VCs!" but what I hope is that there is a structure the EU and Open Source can forge together that gives OS software the funding it needs to build more Nginxes and SQLites in a way that fosters the independence of those projects along with the independence of the entities that use it.
The VC funding model is broken in general - it's not only bad for open source projects, it's bad for most projects.
Modern expectations that a VC pumps in millions (or billions) of dollars and then extracts 10s of billions a few years later is an unrealistic expectation for most companies, and forcing everything into that model is killing off a lot of projects that could be successful on a smaller scale. The pressure forces small companies to sell out to bigger corporations, consolidating the industry into a few huge players who gate keep and limit competition and choice.
SQLite probably never took VC money, yes. People pay them for work.
Many, many people working on Linux work for companies that pay them to work on Linux. Linux is not, and I don't believe has ever claimed to be, community-funded.
Nginx was bought, a couple of times maybe, so they have had cash injections of some sort.
> We need more ways to fund infrastructure that don't require artificial monetization timelines.
Funding infrastructure isn't the problem, exactly. VC is for a specific type of funding: risky businesses that need scale to make money. We have found the answer: VCs, who are willing to lose all their money on your project.
Not really an apples to apples comparison. You are comparing it to core technologies that millions of things sit on. There will always be money for that.
I have only used Astro for toy stuff but it seemed neat. Congrats to the team.
EDIT: To put paid to the sidebar discussion below, yes I meant "for instance, consider `uv`; they might do these nice things and go nowhere but now that companies like Bun and Astro have gotten acquired, it demonstrates a future for others; therefore we will get more things like Astral's `uv` and so on". Hope that clarifies.
Edit: OP clarified what they meant, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding on my part!
It's possible you are right, but it isn't clear from the content of the comment.
e.g. is latin for "exempli gratia" = for example i.e. is latin for "id est" = that is
e.g. - example given
i.e. - in effect
For pedantry's sake: neither i.e. nor e.g. would be correct here. You want cf. ("conferatur") to invite a comparison; e.g. is when an example pertains to an instance. In this case uv would not pertain to the instance, because Astro is not Astral.
(For the OP: I'm sorry if I misinterpreted you.)
if dev tools can only be "monetized" by being bought out, it does not feel sustainable on any level
we will see companies attempt to do things like close source these projects, go subscription based, or just straight up drop support
there is no incentives for cloudflare to make astro better, or even keep it around
same goes with bun, svelte, and i'm sure countless others
Used this for a portfolio site and and not sure if this news is good or bad for its future.
For example, Cloudflare released their vite plugin which makes it effortless for frameworks that use the vite env API to run inside workerd (meaning you get to use cloudflare service bindings in dev) back in April and only React Router had support for it. Nextjs has no support, the draft PR to add support for Sveltekit has been parked until the next major version, Astro only just added support in their beta 6.0 release 3 days ago
With this acquisition, Astro will probably be first to future updates that increase compatibility with cloudflare. It's smart, and was probably not very expensive (more of an acqui-hire)
> Staying open to all was a non-negotiable requirement for both us and for Cloudflare.
They have deployment guides for practically every provider out there: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/deploy/
And at the end of the day, most of the deployment is just deploying a static site... Which you can do practically anywhere.
Or they could add features that only work if you deploy via cloudflare.
I also take anything said in an acquisition announcement with a grain of salt. It is pretty common for companies to make changes they said they wouldn't a few years after an acquisition.
Once again, what lock in? There is literally nothing to lock in. Explain exactly how they are going to lock somebody in, moreso than the lazy "for now" which you seem to constantly repeat.
From what I remember, you can't even run a NextJS app through vite?
https://opennext.js.org/cloudflare
It's like being mad that Rails can't run on Python, or that React can't run on jQuery. Next already has its own build system, so of course it doesn't work with another build system.
I was impressed since I got interactive compilation and state tracking of how many exercises the user completed.
https://jjmarr.com/blog/structured-bindings-structs/
I’m close to the vite plugin in particular and have contributed to multiple frameworks around cf integration (simply because I use cf), that’s why I chose it as an example (and it’s one of Astro 6’s biggest features)
I think every deployment pipeline having it's own preferred UI framework (and CMS, and cloud-DB solution) makes a lot of sense.
I also wouldn't be surprised if cloudflare wants to build this into their site-hosting capabilities.
Additionally, I wish more serveless cloud vendors would offer a free tier like Vercel, including support for compiled languages on the backend (C, C++, Rust, Go) without asking me for a credit card upfront.
Cloudflare is bound to respect the laws of the countries it operates, and if he disagrees with the process, understandable, that was not the way to express it.
This is probably just an acquihire.
Its quite a nice DX actually.
I could see Cloudflare just wanting to push for a bit more vertical integration in the space to give themselves some more options.
Source: I use cloudflare and used to run my app there (nextjs) and had to do a migration to vite.js. So the way I see it, this is cloudflare response to vercel.
It’s wild that they’re somewhat taking the whole React ecosystem with them.
But I also see the difficulty that Astro faced here. Despite being happy with the framework, I never paid for it. The paid offerings didn’t strike a chord with me. And it was partly because whatever they offered, Cloudflare already offered on a very generous free tier.
I'm glad the team have got a second life within Cloudflare,. I'm happy for the people who've given me such excellent software for free for years. Thanks folks!
Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server<>client" model suddenly doesn't make any sense anymore, and of course this should be rendered server-side.
Why are we doomed to repeat this, and why does it happen so quickly particularly in web development? We have each other's histories and knowledge right in front of us, what's missing for us to not continue just running around in circles like this?
React makes sense if you're making Gmail. It doesn't really make sense if you're making a mostly static blog. But because there are more job opportunities in the former (when you consider the wealth of internal web apps out there in the world) all the training courses folks take emphasize React and an app-centric way of thinking about the web.
And perhaps most importantly, it's good enough. It works. Users get by with it. And the developer experience is better than it was in the days of Backbone etc. So few push for change.
Except the old Gmail used to be so much faster…
They would not if they had choice.
This is wrong. Some websites are better mostly (mostly) rendered on the client (we call them "apps", like a map application) and some are better mostly rendered on the server (like blogs).
It was and will be.
It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.
I know this sounds similar, but, compared to the more traditional approach, there is a certain simplicity to having everything just be javascript. You can often run the same libraries on both server and client depending on your needs, plus it fulfills the promise of web components in a way that is easier to work with (though WCs have also come a long way!)
Should be astro lakes or something.
There's a really nice pattern of using Custom Elements [0] for that sort of JS interactivity sprinkling. You can make your web application however you want, and when you want the client to run some JS, you just drop in `<my-component x="..." y="...">...</my-component>` with whatever flavour of HTML templating you have available to you. (also possibly with the is= attribute in the future [1], which will let you keep more of the HTML template out of JS)
It saves you the hassle of element targeting and lets you structure that part of your app a bit more without going overboard on "everything is a react component, even the server bits".
Want something "server side generated" in that JS? Just render it in attributes/body/a slot element/a template element, and expect to pick it up in the JS side of things. Feels like how it's supposed to be... and there's no framework required!
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
But I really feel like Akamai is who dropped the ball here, this was a low hanging fruit for them and they're lacking offering this capability to offer their corporate clients as they transition to full headless. Now it's going to be their competition (Cloudflare, even Fastly through Adobe & the EDS push) who will try to take a portion of their cake.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39619110
That's exactly what made me move to Astro. I would've been happy sticking with Gatsby since it still technically does what it says on the tin, but there were so many security warnings and issues with upgrading dependencies that I gave up.
For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that Astro doesn't ship any JS by default and just outputs static HTML, and when I want some page to have an interactive JS component, Svelte is an option that produces a relatively small amount of client JS.
But: Using Svelte with Astro this way for static sites has been broken since August 2025. As soon as you have a conditionally rendered child component in Svelte, Astro fails to bundle the styles for it in the static output of the site, and it does that ONLY in production, which is really devious, you could build a whole site (using astro dev) without knowing and then it breaks when you deploy it.
The issue is here: https://github.com/withastro/astro/issues/14252
I don't want to be complaining about how quickly issues get addressed in an OSS project that I'm not paying for, I don't blame them for not keeping tabs on every framework integration, I just would love to build websites with the latest versions Astro and Svelte, and I unfortunately have the feeling I should have just gone with SvelteKit for a smoother experience.
The JavaScript web framework ecosystem has this problem everywhere lately where frameworks try to be everything to everyone and support every use case anyone might want. It’s noble in theory but without dedicated and active maintainers for each combination there’s bound to be something left behind.
My heuristic has been to only use adapters that the core project maintainers appear to favor. The maintainers for sub-project adapters that are introduced later frequently have maintainers that come and go, with long periods where things start breaking and nobody is interested in fixing them.
When the client side interactivity is very contained and small in scope I also quite like just using plain JavaScript without a framework.
https://github.com/withastro/astro/pull/15227
For example, here's all the code in the svelte integration: https://github.com/withastro/astro/tree/main/packages/integr...
With [Mastro], we have a different approach. The name originally stood for "minimal Astro", and we’re staying true to that. At just ~700 lines of TypeScript, Mastro will always be easily maintainable – even if by just a single person. And it's amazing how much you can do if you're very deliberate in your API's design.
[Mastro]: https://mastrojs.github.io/
I hope that this acquisition will go well. It would be sad to lose this great framework. At the same time, we deploy on Cloudflare. So their business is to keep Astro cool so that more people will use Claudflare, it would be a win-win!
> https://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-all-the-way-down-upg...
"At Cloudflare, we use Astro, too — for our developer docs, website, landing pages, and more"
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/
About the download stats for open source frameworks and libraries.. I keep reading claims of "millions of weekly downloads" -- surely this is a noisy metric, right?
NPM just counts GET requests. A significant number of those must be from CI/CD pipelines, mirrors, build servers, etc.
It still signals popularity, but probably to a much lesser degree than implied.
Number of downloads? Number of stars on GH? Number of content on social medias?
The absolute value is meaningless in itself, but there's a big difference between a library that is downloaded a thousand or millions of times each week. That's the idea.
Meanwhile for-profit projects have actual customers or revenues to demonstrate popularity.
yeah, it's still losing money
The "No" (Non-GAAP & Free Cash Flow)
If you look at Non-GAAP (adjusted) figures—which many investors use to judge the actual "engine" of the business—Cloudflare is solidly profitable.
Adjusted Income: They reported a non-GAAP net income of $102.6 million for Q3 2025.
Cash Flow: Cloudflare is Free Cash Flow (FCF) positive. They are generating more cash from their operations than they are spending to keep the business running, reporting $75 million in FCF in their most recent quarter.
Why the difference?
The main reason Cloudflare still shows a "loss" on paper is Stock-Based Compensation (SBC). Like many high-growth tech companies, they pay a significant portion of employee salaries in stock rather than cash.
The GAAP view counts that stock as an expense (creating a "loss"). The Investor view often ignores it because it doesn't drain the company's bank account (showing "profit").
thanks for the unrequested slop!
you know what GAAP stands for?
"generally accepted accounting practices"
so what does non-gaap mean?
"non-generally accepted accounting practices"
aka: bullshit
I will never use Cloudflare if I can help it, but this outcome is preferable to Astro becoming abandonware.
I wonder if there will be some sort of collab between Hono and Astro given that Yusukue also works at Cloudflare.
Now we just need Cloudflare to buy one of the DBaaS companies so they have a solid relational offering.
But do such acquihires usually result in higher salaries for regular (non-leadership) employees or? Also, what about NSOs?
Some features of my SSR-based side project feel like I had to hack them on, such as a hook that runs only on app start (hacked in via middleware) or manually needing to set cache control headers for auth’d content.
All in all, really happy with it. And it isn’t next.js.
It's the first framework I recommend to web dev beginners, after they have built something with plain HTML and CSS.
My apologies friends, I could not resist!
Congrats Astro team!
With these sort of combinations the deploy to cloudflare button gets ever bigger than over time. And then features get added that only work with CF and eventually it’s still open source but only half the stuff works standalone etc
That said - good for them.
But to be really honest, thinking more about it. atleast from an "AI" bubble perspective, Cloudflare is pretty rock solid and isn't involved in the AI bubble deals whereas vercel has
If you were to use cloudflare workers say the past few months, you would've noticed some serious UI/UX improvements and its projects highlighted astro template was one of the first things (I think second was sveltekit iirc)
Anyways thinking about it now, I am sure that cloudflare must have been in talks with them for quite some time and they had the astro deployments on cloudflare workers so they must have seen its usage and other data we have no idea about to justify this purchase
That being said, I had been part of astro community almost exactly the time they had partnered up with turso (It was my holidays so I wanted to build a website from scratch, I sadly lost it but it was really cool and it had BMO from adventure time's pixel art that I lost oof :<)
So I was in their discord when they had just joined turso for astro DB and at that point, you couldn't host it locally (some tried with wasm) not sure what's the reality now though. But its interesting to see this because cloudflare offers a turso (serverless sqlite) alternative as Cloudflare D1, So we might see Astro shift to d1?
Once again, I have not been part of community for almost around 1-2 years so I don't know the current state of Astro aside from tweaking around making my own custom editor in bun for some astro templates (astro templates are really cool)
Perhaps, we are gonna see astro templates website + cloudflare workers to create an instant deployment of astro templates on cloudflare workers as a first class citizen. Honestly I would love that because cf workers/pages are free/cheapest in the whole market.
I hope that Astro still stays local first and still its serverless features can benefit everybody and not just cloudflare (looking at you vercel for nextjs)
If you want some precedent look at Hono. Initially it was just for the CF Workers runtime (not developed by CF). Then CF started using Hono internally and hired the dev to work on Hono full time. Hono works on any JS runtime.
https://hono.dev/docs/concepts/web-standard
Astro and Tanstack are probably the best full-stack routers these days, and Astro wins in terms of the wide support for almost any client-side tech
[1] https://cto4.ai
Given what agents can do, I feel a lot of the sites built on Webflow, Framer and so on will move to code and Astro is a great framework for this.
Source/disclosure: I worked at Gatsby, Netlify, Astro and Cloudflare
Unironically have been migrating my static pages (from Nextjs and Eleventy) to plain HTML and love it. Of course depends on your use case if that is feasible.
First, it doesn't have any provisions for code reuse. So, if you have multiple pages that use the same header, same footer, or same navigation menu, your options are either to copy-paste it (gross), or to build the final html out of smaller pieces, at which point you've reinvented either a static site generator or a web server.
Second, if you write long stretches of text, the html markup can get in the way, as opposed to unobtrusiveness of something like markdown.
I’m tired of the constant update pressure from existing solutions and I only need something dead simple.
It doesn't have to be Astro though. You can build something super simple that just includes the header, footer, and nav. Leaving most of the site as plain HTML.
https://micahcantor.com/blog/rsc-rewrite.html
Then one is pretty much safe from framework tides.
There's one other I've seen recently that looked good but I have misplaced the link
But why are you looking for alternatives already?
Disliked the templating solutions, the messy documentation, the loss in momentum, and liked a lot of the stuff (especially the tooling and principles) in astro.
Also strongly disliked how political eleventy got.
I just wanted a website, not a an internal debate about what I am potentially being absorbed into. I can vote, and spend money on donations, I don't need to enact change through my tech stack.
There's even an article about it somewhere.
Are these numbers supposed to provide any sense of the popularity if you're not often looking at npm trends?
Congratulations!
I think donating to the Apache Foundation is preferable.
Who is this framework for?
It's been years, and they still don't support unit testing Astro Actions. They still don't support inter-island communication.
"Astro v6 is around the corner" - and the only changes are 1. refactored CLI (why? it's perfectly fine) 2. bumped zod to v4
It's great if you want to build a blog or something, but it's definitely far from great for building apps.
Don't know what they are thinking.
They even say it in this blog:
"Our mission to design a web framework specifically for building websites — what we call content-driven websites, to better distinguish from data-driven, stateful web applications — resonated"
Not an Astro expert, but the massive headline at the top of the homepage may provide a clue as to their intended audience:
> The web framework for content-driven websites
The docs show how to use nanostores but you can use other libs like vue refs, etc.
https://docs.astro.build/en/recipes/sharing-state-islands/
You can easily add any global store library to your project to communicate between islands from the very simple (nanostores) to more complex stuff (are people still using mobx, redux, etc?)
I actually would prefer if Astro kept the core more simple, I never understood the point of Astro components for example; always thought their game plan would be to build their own client-side framework like what remix v3 is doing, but currently their components are too limited to make them worth using over just doing everything in react, svelte, or whatever floats your boat.
Personally I only ever use .astro components if I'm 100% sure I will never need any client side interactivity, otherwise it's just easier to ignore them.
Your costs could explode, or worse, the business could go under and you lose all your shit.
And you get to keep your data in markdown easily portable
It’s noteworthy because this comment is currently the top voted comment, probably because it hits all the notes of what you’d get if you asked an LLM to generate some content to tap into anger in a Hacker News comment section. It’s scary that this type of LLM powered engagement bait is so successfully being used to advertise on HN.
The criticism is also not very pointed. Like, I don't understand what the core message is. There is disdain for VC money and an implication that Astro could have gone without monetization. Both of which don't seem very well argued. But even if we grant those points ... so what? What is our take away supposed to be? It's a bunch of negative observations that don't funnel into some concrete conclusion.
It seems like the takeaway is supposed to be to look favorably on the commenter. "This is bad. I am good."
It's just an ad that people are upvoting uncritically.
If the purpose of this was to promote their academy or school or whatever, what was the point? Because at this point, they have lost all credibility and respect and HN isn't a gullible audience so I don't understand the point of why they did this
It’s the top voted comment right now. Their comment history has similar comments with links to their products and content.
I think they’re doing it because it was working for them. I bet they’re happy with the additional traffic they’re picking up for a minute or two of promoting an LLM and then appending a link at the end.
Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM.
GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
"1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux."
Corporations are just groups of people. Pure grass roots "We collect the money, anonymously in cash shaking a bucket at our annual fundraiser" does not work at this scale. Even Zig, which I'm guessing is about as far away from "It's all just owned by an inhuman corporation" as you could ask for, does have big ticket corporate donors. So does ISRG (Let's Encrypt) or the EFF.
Venture Capital is a bad fit, that's the conjecture here. VC funding for infrastructure is a mistake because that big pay day won't happen if you did it correctly. That doesn't make VC inherently bad, or projects like Linux inherently defective, the claim was that it's just a bad match, like how an Irish Stout doesn't pair well with a subtle tomato and angel hair pasta dish.
Gathering around projects, talking over USENET, Gopher, phpBB forums, sharing code over email, Sourceforge, Savannah , living the FOSS dream, the whole mantra of when the GNU manifesto came to be.
The funding assertion leverages the re-definition of “community” in “community funded” and relates to why all those big projects offer CE or Community Editions instead of calling it free or open source editions.
Enterprises are willing to take a look at free, but "community editions" are clearly for peons, not the big boys, so they license the commercial edition. It also productizes a subset of licensing rights in contrast with the commercial licensing rights.
In any case, in today's common parlance, community doesn't mean ICs and IC donations. It can, but it's been mostly co-opted by corp donations, which are still donations and not VC.
The whole story (https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/) is fascinating, but here are a couple of interesting excerpts:
> I scrambled around and came up with some pricing strategy. [Motorola] wanted some enhancements to it so it could go in their phones, and I gave them a quote and at the time, I thought this was a quote for all the money in the world. It was just huge. ($80k)
> [Nokia] flew me over and said, “Hey, yeah, this is great. We want this but we need some enhancements.” I [Richard Hipp] said, “Great,” and we cut a contract to do some development work for them.
> We were going around boasting to everybody naively that SQLite didn’t have any bugs in it, or no serious bugs, but Android definitely proved us wrong. Look, I used to think that I could write software with no bugs in it. It’s amazing how many bugs will crop up when your software suddenly gets shipped on millions of devices.
If you can find paying customers that can fund your development, then it's fantastic. It's even better if those contracts give you scale that none of your competitors have. You don't need VC money if that's the case. But let's not pretend that Astro were in that situation. No one was paying for a web framework.
Didn't this just happen right now that Astro got acquired by Cloudflare? I am sure that Cloudflare has bot tons of money right now so Astro got an offer to good to refuse but worst case scenario they could've still partnered up with cloudflare,netlify,vercel etc. but also companies who deploy astro (even google deploys astro pages)
Plus, Astro has a very strong focus on being performant/fast (getting 100 lightscore) so they could've definitely focused on consultance as well to actually have the people who work in the craft who can take a look and help you get score who literally know the inside out of Astro
That being said, the Question is, could they have survived long enough to be in a position of sustainability without VC money or could they have gotten sustainability from the start, if so what could be the path that they could've taken so that they didn't need VC money or could be (day-1 profitable ie?)
What makes you think they aren't? https://docs.astro.build/en/getting-started/ says on the bottom left: Sponsored by Cloudflare, Netlify, Webflow, MUX.
> consulting to get to 100 Lightscore
Problem is, it was possible to get there with minimal effort. The default config of Astro was 100. I know absolutely nothing about web dev and my personal website was all 100s.
And in any case, consultancy doesn't scale. Interestingly Tailwind has that kind of model - free software, pay for beautifully crafted components. And their business isn't doing well.
We don't know what would have happened in an alternate universe. But it's hard out there building businesses on FOSS. Can't blame anyone for trying - VC or otherwise.
European Commission issues call for evidence on open source
The EU is looking for facts like this as it figures out how to use OS to begin to extend its digital sovereignty. I don't think it's as simple as, "get funding from a giant continental government instead of VCs!" but what I hope is that there is a structure the EU and Open Source can forge together that gives OS software the funding it needs to build more Nginxes and SQLites in a way that fosters the independence of those projects along with the independence of the entities that use it.
Modern expectations that a VC pumps in millions (or billions) of dollars and then extracts 10s of billions a few years later is an unrealistic expectation for most companies, and forcing everything into that model is killing off a lot of projects that could be successful on a smaller scale. The pressure forces small companies to sell out to bigger corporations, consolidating the industry into a few huge players who gate keep and limit competition and choice.
Many, many people working on Linux work for companies that pay them to work on Linux. Linux is not, and I don't believe has ever claimed to be, community-funded.
Nginx was bought, a couple of times maybe, so they have had cash injections of some sort.
> We need more ways to fund infrastructure that don't require artificial monetization timelines.
Funding infrastructure isn't the problem, exactly. VC is for a specific type of funding: risky businesses that need scale to make money. We have found the answer: VCs, who are willing to lose all their money on your project.
We all lose while they all tell us we're winning.