[ksajadi]

Netlify for me is a prime example of a great company gone wrong by raising too much VC money. The basic product of Netlify is a great one: build and host static sites without the need to mess with any of the tech stack. For us developer folk, this should be easy: run the build command of any static site generator and stick the results into an S3 bucket. And yet, something as simple as this became so popular with even developer companies (see Hashicorp’s quotes on Netlify).

This could have been a great story but then tons and tons of VC money came in and now you’d have to think of ways to make the valuation worth it and make the product sticky: so now we have edge Deno powered functions, lambda-esq applications, form embedded HTML and so much other features that are used by the long tail of their customer base while they changed their price to charge by git committees and have daily short downtimes of 1 to 5 mins for the past month (monitored by external services, as they wouldn’t reflect that in their status page).

Soon, they’ll sell the company to some corp like Akamai or similar “enterprise” outfit leaving us high and dry.

There is a lot of money in building businesses that do boring stuff that just makes peoples lives easier. But when you take VC money, you’d need to build a moat to fend off cloud providers from the bottom, capture the value for the top from developers and everything in between.

[bradgessler]

I’d be interested in building the bootstrapped “git push and we build and publish”, aka “heroku for static site compilers”

Chime in if you’d like to be one of the first few customers. If there’s enough interest here’s how I’d play it:

1. I won’t raise VC money. I know how to build a SaaS business without it—I bootstrapped Poll Everywhere from $0 to $10m+.

2. My motivations these days are to build low complexity products. Ideally they’re “evergreen”, meaning I can ship a core feature set that I know will be the same in 10 years. The feature I’m selling their is stability.

3. I like to price things in a way that makes them accessible to as many people as possible while being sustainable for the business so it can operate for a long time with the support it needs for customers.

[pdyc]

I built something that will take care of the publish part but not the static site generation part here https://github.com/newbeelearn/sserver. Right now it only has one user i.e. me :-)

[dbbk]

How would you convince people to go with you over Cloudflare Sites, Vercel, Netlify etc? Is the pitch "we do what they do, but less" compelling?

[bradgessler]

I’d position it as “we do exactly what needs to be done: push, build, deploy” and talk to the benefits of deploying static websites without all the complexity of edge functions and the complicated pricing that goes with it.

I’d also speak to the idea that the service is shooting for longevity and stability by not adding a bunch of whiz bang stuff needed to justify PM salaries or impress VCs that will be sunset later.

[ericholscher]

FWIW, we've been building this exact thing over at Read the Docs for the past 11 years :)

* https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about.html * https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/story.html

Historically we've only supported Sphinx & Mkdocs, but we're looking to expand into serving all docs tooling with a versioned URL scheme, and search indexing & backend API's that are docs specific.

[madeofpalk]

I think this is a natural and fine extension of the Netlify platform. They've had various "serverless functions" for a few years that's mostly been out of the way if you don't need it.

It fits within their goal of a 'heroku for frontend websites', for easily deploying sites.

[throwthere]

I guess Netlify still offers the basic static site hosting, which can be anything from drag-drop to easy to set up automated github deployments. I mean, it's not like Netlify offers a worse static hosting service post-funding, right? With VC funding they've just built out more features. Not to mention I think they've always aimed to build out the "JAM" stack and support as many frameworks as possible.

[3np]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025183

No experience from the Netlify of old to compare with, though.