Launch HN: Webiny (YC W21) – Open-source serverless framework with a drop-in CMS

[SvenAl]

Hi, Sven and Pavel here - we're building a self-hosted, open-source framework for developers that want to create serverless applications and websites.

After 10 years of running a web development agency and delivering over 100 projects, we tried many different approaches to building apps and websites. When we looked at the patterns for most of the projects we delivered, it was always a combination of custom business logic and a way to manage content, like pages, news articles, and similar. Looking at the options available on the market, we either had frameworks for building the custom logic or ready-made CMS solutions for managing the content. There was no combination for when we wanted to do both. And this is one of the biggest pains we had. We would either force custom logic inside a CMS and break things or make them hard to maintain, or use a framework and take much longer to deliver a project since we'd end up building a custom CMS and making the whole thing more expensive to the client. On top of that, we were just tired of constantly spinning up servers, managing container images, worrying about uptime, network, and security issues, and paying for resources we were not utilizing 100%.

Looking for options, we discovered serverless. The premise of not having infrastructure to manage sounded really intriguing. Having fault-tolerant resources that scale automatically when you need them with consumption-based pricing that cost up to 80% less than virtual machines sounded like the ideal solution...until we tried to build something with it. It was almost impossible. All the existing frameworks and CMS options are designed for a "server environment", and couldn't be used to build solutions in a serverless environment. The only tutorials available at that time covered how to resize an image with a Lambda function. Besides that, serverless requires a cognitive change of how you approach code and infrastructure.

In all those problems we saw an opportunity. Over a course of a year, we built a framework that allows anyone to quickly build serverless applications without battling all the challenges that come with it. Things like rendering and caching pages, optimizing the cold-start times, debugging function calls, managing connections between functions and the database, CI/CD setup, and many more. The framework comes with a GraphQL API, Admin UI, ACL, CLI for deployment and scaffolding, and more.

Because our passion is also tied to content management systems, we decided to eat our own dog food and build a serverless CMS using our own framework. Webiny Serverless CMS uses Lambda functions, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch (the only non-serverless component at the moment) and S3. It scales automatically together with the demand, requires minimal maintenance, and costs a fraction when compared to solutions running on virtual machines or containers. It includes a GraphQL API, asset management, and a no-code builder for static pages and forms. It takes 2 commands to install and configure the whole thing. Today it runs only on AWS, but we plan to introduce the support for other clouds in the future. With our CMS, we hope people will be more confident in the abilities serverless brings to the market, especially when building full-stack solutions. To put some numbers behind our product, we made a benchmark to demonstrate the performance and cost of a Webiny full-stack serverless application[1].

Both the framework and the CMS are free and open-source[2] under the MIT license. We do have a paid enterprise offering for those that require support and additional features [3].

Give Webiny a spin: https://www.webiny.com/. We would love to know what you think!

Resources:

[1] Benchmark - https://docs.webiny.com/docs/webiny-overview/performance-ben...

[2] Github - https://github.com/webiny/webiny-js

[3] Pricing - https://www.webiny.com/pricing

[vz8]

Per the website FAQ [0]: Q: "Can I see a demo of Webiny in action?"

A: "We don't host a public demo at this time. You're welcome to install it yourself, or book a call with us and we'll prepare a demo for you."

Investing the time to install it ourselves or book a demo just to see the framework in action adds a lot of friction.

You might want to considering moving the 7 minute Webiny overview to a more prominent place - I didn't see the thumbnail under your navigation's Product menu until after hunting through numerous other pages, poking through getting started tutorials, and even ending up on your documentation page.

[0] https://www.webiny.com/pricing

[SvenAl]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree a demo would be more useful. We might provide a more comprehensive platform overview in a video format. Operating a hosted demo requires us to maintain it and manage it. People tend to post all sorts of things in those types of environments, and if it’s a shared install base, other users might see content that is not appropriate. We need to find a good balance here, it just something we haven’t had time to get around to. On the overview video - I’ll see what I can do, it’s a good suggestion, thank you!

[nmridul]

You could do a periodic reset / relaunch of the app so the demo starts from a clean slate after few hours / days.

I understand you sell support / hosted package. If you say you can't support a demo install, that would send a wrong message.

[SvenAl]

It’s something we’ll definitely look at we just haven’t gotten to it yet. We thought of doing periodic resets, but that tends not to provide the best experience. We’re thinking of having per-user instances, forcing users to create an account, but then delete the accounts on a periodic basis. This way, rather than having a single shared account we believe would work better. It’s just there’s a lot of things on our roadmap and we didn’t think this one being so important. Clearly we were wrong.

[SkyMarshal]

For an alternate take, as a developer I really don't have a problem with downloading and running it myself. If I were seriously evaluating it, I would 1) have to do that anyway, and 2) a hosted demo wouldn't be sufficient.

Not offering the demo may be a problem for tourists who aren't seriously considering this, but probably not for parties that are in the process of looking for something like this for a real use case.

[SvenAl]

That was my starting point when I was thinking about this. However it seems there’s a lot of users who just don’t want to do that initial investment, so having a demo would potentially help in converting them.

[Marciplan]

What about resetting it every day and put a warning that others can also use the demo/mess up the CMS?

Thats kinda what I’m used to seeing anyway :)

[paveldenisjuk]

Thats one possibility, sure. We'll evaluate the best approach when we get to setting it up. Thanks for your suggestion, appreciate it!

[jskrablin]

If you can't be bothered to provide a demo of your product why should I bother setting it up myself?

[SvenAl]

We found developers, who are our target audience, want to test the setup, as that's part of the product experience and they get to learn the stack and the requirements. We are an open-source product, we don't have a SaaS offering, so we don't have a way yet to spin up demos or trial accounts for every user. You can view the product in our overview video without installing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOGJKHXntiU

[rodolphoarruda]

Congratulations. This product is amazing and represents the future of CMS. It's all Wordpress wanted to be. IMHO.

[SvenAl]

That's kind of what lit our fire to do better :)

[martinskou]

Low target...

[SvenAl]

Agreed ... we're aiming much higher than that. I just meant that this is where things started.

[nix23]

Really? I know many people who earned their livelihood with wordpress... Did you made anything better?

[SvenAl]

Wordpress is a big success, even today, after more than 15 years in the market. I can only hope to get close to that, I'm by no means disrespecting that, nor the WP community. I started with WP myself. But if you ask me if I'm working on building a product that's better than Wordpress, I definitely am, will I succeed, that's for the market to decide.

[nix23]

>But if you ask me if I'm working on building a product that's better than Wordpress

I wish you the biggest success, it's much needed :)

BTW: My comment was for the "Low target" guy.

[chiefalchemist]

Congrats. Intriguing, obviously.

Fwiw, in the Getting Started I noticed "Our Philosophy". I'd move that to the home page. It's essential context (imho). Otherwise the home page seems too featured focus and too lite on benefits. I read that bullet list in Philosophy as benefits (in a way). That is when I sat up.

[SvenAl]

Interesting ... when I first wrote the "Our Philosophy" section I was guided by showing the reader the things that are guiding us in how we are building Webiny. Never thought of it as being a benefit, but I see what you mean. Thank you for your feedback, I'll give it more thought and see if we can push it out to the homepage somehow.

[chiefalchemist]

It's more of a benefit than features. Features too often don't answer the question:

Why should _I_ care?

The philosophy at least spoke to me as opposed to features being about you.

[SvenAl]

I see what you are saying, looking at our homepage, it's true, we talk feature-talk. We'll be addressing this.

[chiefalchemist]

Not to worry, you're not alone :)

You are, as you should be, in love with your product (read: a collection of features). You know the nooks & crannies.

Moi? I don't care. I'm selfish. We all are. I need to know what you are going to do for _me_. What pains of mine are you going to fix? Benefits is short for: Use our product and we'll make these pain - X, Y, and Z - disappear.

Make me believe in your magic :)

[SvenAl]

Amazing, thanks for this!

[40four]

Congratulations on the launch! This sounds awesome! Sounds like it could be very useful for taking some out of the complexity of orchestrating the various serverless components. I am very curious, and looking forward to trying it out!

[SvenAl]

Thank you for the support! Would love to hear what you think once you try it out, particularly the areas that we should improve.

[wyck]

The toolset looks like you made it for your own workflow and not actual users, meaning it's very rigid and tied to specifics instead of allowing for flexibility, I have a hard time actually understanding what this is for. The main feature of it being serverless isn't a selling point for me. I don't use Graphql/DynamoDB or any of the tools you describe outside Lambda. It would be simply too much work to start with all your tooling, that would be considerable technical debt especially compared to the ocean of options available with headless CMS's.

[paveldenisjuk]

Webiny is definitely not for everyone; it does have specific technologies engraved in the offering, like nodejs, React and GraphQL. That, however, doesn't mean you can't build a REST API with it. Webiny is first of all a development framework, to help you develop apps for serverless infrastructure. It's very flexible, and we're already working on more things that will make it even more adaptable to different technologies. Then on top of that we built the Headless CMS, the Page Builder, etc. to showcase the possibilities of both the framework and serverless services, as many developers are still hesitating to use them.

The features we built into our apps and framework are directly taken from our own experience (we used to run a digital agency for 10 years), user feedback and many hours of calls with other agencies and enterprises. We do love user feedback as we can't possibly foresee all the possible use-cases - and that's how we improve our platform.

If you don't use GraphQL or DynamoDB - that's perfectly fine. There will always be problems that are easier to solve without bringing a full featured framework into the mix. We also like to spawn a Lambda or two with some simple code for simple solutions. But for larger projects, we offer project organization, workflows, infrastructure organization, system of plugins, and ready-made apps which can really save you a lot of development time.

Regarding other CMS's - yes there are many. But not many that are open-source and running in a serverless environment. SaaS solutions are not acceptable for every type of customer, especially not enterprises. They want to have their data in their own private cloud.

[salimmadjd]

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. It’ll be interesting if you show some kind of a product roadmap.

Maybe there is a product already out there that does that, but it’ll be useful if google sheet can work in conjunction with your CMS.

[SvenAl]

We have this overview page for our roadmap: https://www.webiny.com/roadmap/ In case you are interested in a particular feature, I'm happy to help.

Regarding an integration between google sheets and our CMS, we don't offer one out of the box, but if you create a lambda function on Webiny that pulls data from your google sheet, you can use the GraphQL API to then sync the data into the CMS.

[nickthemagicman]

This is cool. I've been thinking this should exist for a while. Glad someone is doing this.

What's the cost from a cloud provider for this if a site has no traffic or very very small amount of traffic i.e. for a small personal site?

[SvenAl]

At the moment, the cost for a small site would pretty much be equal to the cost of the Elastisearch service, the only non-serverless component we have. At a minimum that would be ~$25/mo.

We're looking to add plugins for Elasticsearch so you can replace it with something like Algolia making the whole thing 100% serverless. In that case, the cost would be zero, as it would be 100% under the AWS free tier. Once the free tier expires, the cost would probably be in cents. Have a look at our performance benchmark reports, we've noted down the cost of each test in detail for each of the AWS services: https://docs.webiny.com/docs/webiny-overview/performance-ben...

[berns]

Please, put the prices in the pricing page or change the name.

[40four]

It’s pretty common to not show ‘Enterprise’ level pricing to the public. It’s all going to be different depending on the customer. For everyone one else, it’s free, awesome! What are you expecting to see?

[SvenAl]

That's true, and that is the angle we took here. But I also understand that people like to have at least a starting price in mind to know if it's something within their budget or not.

[berns]

It's totally ok not to publish the price, just don't name the page "pricing".

[40four]

Cool. As the pricing page clearly states, it costs $0 for everyone who doesn’t need managed enterprise support. If you are the enterprise customer, fill out the form and talk to sales. Same way every other product ever works. We all appreciate your pedantic contribution to the conversation :)

[SvenAl]

We can set a "from $50k/year" as our enterprise price is tailored to the client requirements. Thanks for the feedback, we'll include this in the next update.

[santiagobasulto]

$50k/year seems like a steep price (thinking from a "small/medium startup" perspective). I'm curious, what's the TAM for that pricing? What sort of customers could you be reaching? I work for a mid-size company, we do very well, but Idk if we'd be able to meet that price.

[SvenAl]

Thanks for sharing this feedback. We got similar feedback from a few smaller businesses this week. We're looking into introducing a package between the free open-source and the enterprise. Would you mind sharing what would be your price range where you would find Webiny affordable? I'm happy to jump on a call and discuss this more.

With the enterprise package, we're looking at companies with over 250 employees as that's where the biggest penetration of serverless adoption is happening (source: https://www.datadoghq.com/state-of-serverless/). We also estimate that with 90% cloud penetration in this segment of companies, and with over 4M companies with more than 250 employees in the world (asia mainly drives this number), and with 30% of them using serverless services, there are around 1M potential customers, bringing the total TAM to $50bn.

[santiagobasulto]

oh wow, that makes sense. And impressive market research. How do you know there are 4M companies with more than 250 employees? I'm trying to do some market research for our project (completely unrelated to yours) and I have a hard time finding stats about the market.

[SvenAl]

Check these 2 links: https://askwonder.com/research/enterprise-businesses-united-... https://askwonder.com/research/enterprise-businesses-united-...

[stunt]

Congrats!

It helps if we could see more details about the architecture.

[SvenAl]

You can find our architecture graphs under this link, make sure to checkout the subpages: https://docs.webiny.com/docs/key-topics/cloud-infrastructure...

[sekmet]

Congratulations on the launch! Amazing product!

[SvenAl]

Thank you for the support! In case of any other questions, I'm happy to help.