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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

I don't think enough people are thinking about what will happen when these companies do eventually run out of money (both Next.js and Gatsby). Not just to their hosting services, but to the open source tech driving the platform itself. Meteor never gained much traction but it sat in a similar parallel of hoping to provide hosting services and just burnt money away. Next.js* however has gained a lot of traction, but it's worrying to monetize these open source style tools that a lot of companies are building fundamental infrastructure on. I don't know if this kind of open source > paid hosting business model has paid off in other similar spaces. Are there examples?

* Edit: Excuse me, Vercel!

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Next.js is used by enough big companies that I’m not too worried about it. If Vercel the company were to close shop, there are plenty of large teams with a vested interest in keeping the next.js project alive. Also, at some point, improvements are nice but not strictly necessary. It would be fine if next.js went into maintenance mode and just optimized speed or kept up with new react / browser features.

According to Next.js:

> Today, Next.js powers over 35,000 sites at companies like Uber, Nike, and Starbucks.

open source => paid hosting model makes sense when the tech is heavy and not easily portable anyway. For example, confluence develops kafka and makes money with kafka cloud. Mongodb develops mongodb and makes money with their cloud, etc.

None of these are portable systems.

On the other hand, the whole reason for static site generators is its lightweightness. So by design it's hard for these vendors to have lockin....unless, they deliberately create lockins. Which is why i think this model is not really a good model. They created something that's valuable exactly because it frees people from getting locked in, but they will probably need to make money by trying their best to lock in users.

The only endgame I can see from this is these people using up all the VC money to give out freebies to attract as many users as possible, and then selling to Microsoft.

The Gatsby model is Wordpress. Be the default choice, be open source, run a thriving hosting business and empower a huge economy around theming and extending your main product.

The question is whether that model is repeatable.

The actual question is whether that model is the same as the wordpress model.

I dont know if you read my comment to which you replied, but my point is that if you look closely they are completely different games. If the VCs thought they were getting into Wordpress2.0, they will find that they were terribly wrong. It's a completely different market with completely different market dynamics.

I agree with you. My comment was meant as a reflection of what I imagine Gatsby's thinking to be. I am really impressed with the technology but quite baffled by the business model at a $200M valuation.

wordpress crushed a lot of proprietary and far more difficult to use options - is that still the case for Gatsby? With 50+ million in VC capital is this a billion dollar market segment today?

WordPress seems to have worked out well. If the company (wordpress.com) goes under, the platform (wordpress.org) will stay alive and well. The companies that relied on wordpress.com can just migrate to any other premium WP service, such as WP Engine.

For Gatsby.js users the alternatives in a Gatsby-the-company-goes-under scenario would be limited to just Netlify and DIY (and maybe Vercel?). If the demand for managed-Gatsby grows then so will the supply, thus giving people more options in a worst-case scenario.

Isn't Wordpress a perfect example of that model?

Wordpress requires some degree of setup, with the end users simply accessing the installed web application. With Gatsby, if you're at the point where you're ready to deploy, you've already done most of the technical work yourself, so the value add is far diminished vs managed Wordpress hosting.

this is true in some sense; the value of JAM-stack apps is that they are portable and deployment is vastly simplified and requires limited resources (web-accessible file storage). How much value-add is there to be captured?

Netlify already gives me everything I need for free at this scale. Once I move into their enterprise features the competition heats up.

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