VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
Evidently Evan You was an Art History + Studio Art and major and at Parsons School he had to pick up javascript to quickly show his work. During a stint at Creativelab5 at Google, he was so inspired to improve on AngularJS experience that he came up with Vue and the rest is history.
I have no idea what this Cloudflare acquisition will ultimately mean but I know I am so very grateful for the beautiful frameworks/tooling Evan and his team have cranked out over the years.
Totally worth the listen.
I wonder how the initial investors feel about the aqui-hire path... Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it, or they saw that the path to any revenue was near impossible/non-existant
Indeed, so as a library/framework/engine/runtime user, for the last decade or so, I've basically avoided anything that touched VC-investments, as eventually the tool will either degrade, get too expensive or straight up disappear, and I got so tired of having to refactor and move stuff around just because new owner did something shitty.
[0] https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-series-a [1] https://voidzero.dev/about
But it's also possible they haven't spent much of that money.
The investors don't need to be happy. They just need to be made whole (assuming they have a minority control).
It could literally be that only $2m ever got spent and that's been paid back.
It could also be that when literally nobody said they would pay for Vite+ the investors and team in general lost confidence and were actually very happy just to get their money back and pivot into this acquisition.
The value to the investors also includes the outcome of dealflow resulting from the relationships and network built up along the way.
1. Product 2. Talent 3. Business/growth
In the AI era, some of acquisition happening in the space is for talent and product.
In this case, it looks like it was that. Vite is a great product they were able to build a great team.
You would be surprised how much of a premium companies can pay for talent.
Recent history shows that an idealized view only focusing on fiduciary duty does not capture the whole picture of business in the USA.
To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets.
To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.
No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.
Acquihiring the tool/team is entirely downstream from creating a foundational product.
There were several different hammers there, bearing different branding and having different manufacturers.
I don't quite get the distinction...
A foundational tool in an open ecosystem doesn't mean a monetisable product. I struggle to think of even a single example of a foundational tool with a business model.
And of course, not everything needs a business model. But if you're getting VC funding, you kind of need one.
I’m seeing zero significant investor overlap between VoidZero and Cloudflare.
> VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios
Very few VCs do this. Andreessen stands out as the exception.
Not necessarily: if the investors don't agree to a reasonable amount, the wanna-be acquirer will simply hire the entire team with generous sign-on bonuses, and the investors will be left with a shell of a company.
In this case, the core product is MIT-licensed, the team can quit on a Friday and pick up exactly where they left off under a new org on Monday.
IANAL, but at-will employment cuts both ways- thr best an employer can do on behalf of investors, are golden handcuffs - and people can be bought out of those.
The laws governing employment are a subset of the laws governing M&A.
This is an extreme measure not usually taken, but it's a nuclear option that sets a ceiling on how much investors may play hardball.
Not in M&A.
https://www.freshfields.com/en/our-thinking/blogs/a-fresh-ta...
(c) all of the ownership interest of any subsidiary, may agree with the buyer to refrain from carrying on a similar business within a specified geographic area in which the business so sold... has been carried on, so long as the buyer... carries on a like business therein.
and it prohibits competition "on a similar business". The Vite team would be blocked from competing against VoidZero, but Cloudfare isn't a similar business IMO, and they would be free to work on a private "Pronto" fork within Cloudflare (which is unlike the real-life Cloudflare/Vite scenario where they will continue public releases)
It's more fun to just build the fun bits, get acquired, walk away with a lot of money, and start over again doing the fun bits (if you want to keep working).
As an aside, I have to use Cloudlare at work and it’s a pretty awful experience for the medium sized org I’m at. “Hostile UX” is a common complaint. Maybe they should invest money in competing with Vercel on UX/DX instead of acquiring open source projects.
sadly "hostile ux" is a phrase i've heard more than once and we're working hard to improve. if you're open to it, would love to hear more about the issues you've be running into
For example, I had to recently change an env var we had on a handful of apps and opened them all into new tabs and made the changes and about half way through I started getting rate limited. This has happened to me many times and I've reported it to support and in Discord but it still happens.
One other big complaint is support is non-existent. We sent many support emails (on business plans) and I'm pretty sure we've never gotten a reply. Same for posting in Discord. It's pretty disheartening to build your business on Cloudflare and have no confidence support will help you when you need it.
as far as support, i know there is a huge effort going on right now to improve response time and support in general, also I'm not as active in discord as I ought to be there's just so much noise, feel free to ping me on there directly if I can help brandon/@ygwyg. can't promise it'll be an instant response but I will respond
Thanks Brandon!
The worst one I saw is the load balancer config UX/DX. I use CF's load balancer product for clients and so have to do a lot of setup and teardown back-and-forth. Everything related to setting up load balancers is split across multiple screens and/or "wizards" that are extremely confusing.
A lot of the error messages you get are generic at best and so you waste a ton of time clicking between pages and tabs just to set up some pools and attach them to a load balancer.
There's also some inconsistency between how things are labeled, so one thing can have two names and you have to hold that in your head while you move around the UI.
Email in profile if you'd like to chat further.
I was really glad when they fixed the old one that had a big "X" that would delete your load balancer without a warning dialog. But I was not happy that the load balancers got increasingly complex, with settings hidden at multiple layers that you had to independently configure.
Load balancing IS complex, but this is their core business, and in many other places such as DNS, Cloudflare put a lot more thought into making it simple and intuitive to use.
Getting this stuff right takes lots of strong leadership and long-term decision making with determination and wisdom to provide the best experience for customers. Unfortunately I am not confident that is how the business is operating, especially with strong talent being let go or leaving due to lack of fostering of a healthy working environment.
But who will take their place?
Let's see, first menu item Compute. Hrm, HTML isn't compute, oh it's there ok. Add Application, HTML isn't an application but ok. 95% of the page and on top are fields for adding a worker. The static page option is a little link at the bottom. Linked it to my repo. Oops wrong repo can I change it, oh, no. Ok delete and set it up all over again. Zero trust. Asked for some field, couldn't determine if it was a root domain, subdomain, URL. Ask the built in AI. It says hrm it's not in the docs, idk. Figure out how to add Cloudflare as an auth provider, link it to the static page. Team member says they can't login even though they're a Super Admin. Ah, I have to add their email manually or say all users of the account, otherwise by default Super Admins are locked out of authenticating via Zero Trust CF.
At one point I asked the AI for a copy of my email related DNS records it froze for 15 min while it output in a single textarea line char by char an extremely long key. Maybe that one's on me, but since the AI was frozen and couldn't be interrupted maybe not.
These are just the parts I remember off the top of my head. Most of us work in this field and should be sympathetic to the fact that designing a dashboard for this much data density isn't trivial. But that's tempered by CF deciding it's the gatekeeper for a web that’s supposed to be decentralized and spending a zillion dollars on engineering.
The reason everyone came running when Cloudflare first started was obviously the "burn VC money to gain marketshare" but it was also the sheer simplicity. They had one product and a handful of features.
Until someone on the business side takes a step back and says "when I mouse over 'Products' on the homepage, why the fuck is there a 'See All Products' link" it will be impossible to have a usable customer experience. Start killing things and making them features.
That's exactly what they are doing.
Most of the time, it doesn’t. But it can.
I think Voidzero was already adrift without a plan and this acquihire is literally just that, new employment for the people behind it.
Maybe Cloudflare will allow them to maintain oxc, but expect them to writing features for Cloudflare Workers from now on.
This news does not make me happy.
Same with the news about Astro earlier this year.
I know it must be good for the people how have made the projects (why else would they chose to do it?) but there is something in those acquisitions that makes me uneasy.
Same, kind of conflicting. Happy for the individuals involved, they've probably more than earned it. Slightly sad about what comes next, as I'm guessing both you and me seen this happen so many times before, and we've learned to read past the always-reiterated "Nothing will change, everything keeps on being great forever".
I don't even need TS and can get away with js doc annotations + a functional LSP allows me to be slightly more dangerous (think running with scissors in chain mail).
Maybe if you need a specific web app you can reach for the complex tooling but even then I still wonder if it's necessary? The most popular political tool I've shared was a simple HTML page that just fetched the census API for specific codes in a tabular format. Sure I could have used react which would have enabled me to unlock some future value I couldn't foresee at the time but the working alternative is that I have a single html page with minimal JS (around ~2k LOC) that a surprising amount of nontypical devs (think carpenter that is interested in cybersecurity or union negotiators) are able to extend by themselves for their own needs (think adding census codes about snap or public transit).
There is a tremendous amount of value in telling my users how they can modify the source code and see the immediate impact of doing as much.
If this was a project that would have necessitated vite the first thing I would tell them is to install nodeJS and that's where I would lose 99.9999999999% of my users being able.
These projects will never go beyond 500,000 visitors and a CDN is more than sufficient for 90% of the work I do. So that obviously plays a major role but if this is a solo project there are much better choices to make if you want it to be sustainable + low upkeep. Those two qualities are something we as an industry should always value as it makes all our jobs collectively easier.
What kind of things?
I think people just don't want to bother. They don't want to read the docs, or maybe watch a video or two (back when webpack was popular, Sean Larkin, webpack evangelist, made a number of popular courses about setting it up). Also, webpack config became easier compared to 2014/2015; I think they got to practically a zero-config by default.
I can understand that people don't want to care; but "impossible to reason about" is not it. It isn't rust, for crying out loud; nor lisp; nor haskell.
Configuring webpack, mostly. :-D
That’s not a dig at webpack: Those tools are super complex, and hiding complexity from the user is not easy. But it seems that with Vite we finally got there.
I too am a bit uneasy. It's not always the case but, corporate ingestion is often where cool projects go to die. The good news about open source is that we have enough Terraform->OpenTofu & Redis->Valkey stories out there.
and slow
It shouldn't. Big corpo buying small companies harms us all long term.
I don't know what to feel about this news, especially since migrating to from vite 7 to vite 8 broke my project in ways that were not documented, but I'm remaining cautiously optimistic.
Happy for Evan regardless.
If Vite, Bun and uv were just "make builds faster" projects, then maybe the returns are diminishing. But the acquisitions by Cloudflare, Anthropic and OpenAI suggest this layer is becoming more strategic, not less.
These tools sit in the software supply chain: dependency resolution, project structure, tests, builds, runtimes, deployment paths and increasingly AI-agent execution loops. They define the default path for building software, and they are where AI-generated code gets tested against real dependencies, builds, tests and deployment constraints.
So I don’t think they’ve achieved all they meaningfully can. The value is shifting from raw build speed to control over the workflow layer where software is assembled.
there's plenty of places for these tools to go, but none of them have any appetite to go there. likely because people already have something that's so "good enough" that they don't even bother looking for what "could be better". obviously exacerbated by the management class of development outfits deciding that developers shouldn't actually touch the codebase anymore, in lieu of LLMs doing the actual lifting, so they're building out all kinds of chicanerous nonsense to satisfy "agents". and that doesn't necessarily make things more difficult for devs, but that seems to be the trend. forcing your LLM to comply with tortured and arcane concatenations of character-perfect strings is so much easier than having it navigate anything like a filthy human. so the practical result is less accommodating stuff for humans and more accommodating stuff for robots.
all of which is to say: I disagree. I think there's things they could meaningfully achieve for humans. And I think they are deeply uninterested in doing those things.
... are these not the same thing? I suppose from a technical standpoint they'd differ, but they achieve the same result: reusable, modular building blocks for creating interfaces.
The agents already reach for Vite. When they reach for Vite it's very logical they will default to CloudFlare after. (Much like they will guide users to setup Vercel for NextJS).
This could be a $20m acquisition which will generate $billions from the increase in the agent equivalent of SEO.
I do agree with your underlying argument, though. It will likely help them gain market share for hosting web applications, which is increasing with LLM usage.
Certainly if you compare it to another likely scenario where Vercel buys them and fast forward 2 years, it's plausible that a huge number of projects went one way or the other because of what the AIs defaulted to.
It's one of those things that always stopped me from building cool tools - you have to make a living somehow.
So I am happy for the team of builders that they were able to receive the deserved payout and sustainability.
NPM -> Microsoft
Vite -> Cloudflare
Bun -> Anthropic
Turbopack -> Vercel
Remix -> Shopify (I barely remember this one)
Biome (formerly Rome) -> Indie but largely supported by Depot
SWC -> Indie
esBuild -> Indie
I use RsBuild/RsPack which is ByteDance supported.
Uv -> OpenAI
Appreciate them putting that so clearly. I am highly skeptical of acquisitions now because we've been burned so many times in the past. Time will tell if this stays true, but at least it's clearly on the record. Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition.
Cloudflare would be insane to allow that provision in the contract or acquisition documents.
So I would take that promise as "will stay open source, blah blah blah, for now...."
It entirely depends on how much the seller cared to ensure continuity. It’s not like VoidZero didn’t have plenty of leverage; they weren’t a dying open source project.
This is completely different?
That is my understanding.
The monetization story never really made sense to me. It seems really hard to carve out a space in the managed hosting world. Are the Vercel and Laravel teams the only ones to make Private Equity work?
Real life isn't 60's hippies community farms.
There are bills to pay in capitalist societies.
Now they are surprised to see that acquisitions like this are happening and "open source" has given this entitlement on developers to believe that it is "free" when someone always ends up paying.
Cloudflare has some big misses in it's history, like deciding to takedown a social media site for sex workers while defending a decision to provide services to Nazis at length, but in comparison to the alternatives it makes more decentralization practical than might be otherwise.
How by taking out 25% of the internet when they go down?
Absolutely, makes blocking stuff so much easier!
This shows the risks of centralizing internet access
You and I have no idea how often perfectly legal things we rely enjoy or rely on would go offline during football matches because it doesn't happen to us.
Cloudflare and co offer some of the only real solutions to that.
If you snap your fingers and Cloudflare disappears, you aren't left with a decentralized wonderland but rather the status quo where $5 of booter time can take most websites offline for the lulz, and all of your human users have to compete with infinite automated AI traffic (basically an amplification attack every time someone prompts an agent and it does a web search).
So, there's a third option where you like Cloudflare's services as a solution to flaws in the internet that led to the need for these services.
I had access to an Enterprise license in my last job, which was my introduction to Cloudflare — something like 7 years ago — and I just kind of fell in love with the DX and their offerings. It's only improved since then. Like, Cloudflare Workers is actually fucking insane. It's insane how good it is for free. It has a secret vault, dude, for free — with API and CLI. It has cron jobs. You can just assign domains to sites from your DNS zones. It's got blue/green deployments built in. I don't have to SSH into anything. It's just there and it works.
Now everything I do there is free, even for my contract projects, and I can't believe it's free. I actually keep expecting an enshittification phase to begin but it just doesn't ever begin. When it does, I'll bail — same as it ever was. It would take a lot, though.
- The workers platform is quite pleasant to work with compared to competitors. - Globally deploying edge workers which have access to their many services (D1, R2, DO, etc) - Having the ability to assemble globally distributed workers using bindings is dead simple - Their CI pipeline, while limited, is easy to setup and run and keeps improving - Their pricing is extremely competitive
For your second:
- That's my biggest conflict with using any service (Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, etc). Don't have a good answer with what to do about it considering for many projects I don't have the time/energy to fully self host everything.
"VoidZero is joining Cloudflare"
As if they chose to do that. Yes, they agreed to it, but in the end it was just a huge financial transaction.
But i guess "Cloudflare buys VoidZero" just sounds less friendly. Even though that is exactly what happened.
With all that said, I don't think we can extrapolate that their business wasn't doing well or that they couldn't have raised more money. Cloudflare probably just offered a good enough deal that it didn't make sense to try to grind it out.
What I really mean is that when M&A happens, it seems like a lot of people think the acquirer is the only one with any agency, and that's not true at all.
That is the definition of making a choice.
This is some incredible mental backflipping to suggest that their choice wasn’t their choice.
I personally think the owners should get to decide, but it's an interesting duality.
(assuming it's not like everyone has a share or something, in which case they would've all had to agree I guess)
The owners of a business get to decide what to do with their business.
> (assuming it's not like everyone has a share or something, in which case they would've all had to agree I guess)
Unanimous agreement among shareholders is not necessary to sell a company.
The employees might have had some shares in the company, but not all share classes have equal voting rights. It’s also unlikely that employees in aggregate would have had enough shares to override everyone else anyway. Once shares are split among investors, founders, and employees the individual ownership of any one person or group becomes small.
I wouldn’t assume that the employees wanted to avoid acquisition. They likely benefited significantly from their shares being acquired and their new compensation packages. Imagining that the employees resisted this is projecting some other story on to them
Wow. Bold opinion. The owners of a company get to decide what to do with it?
Explain how thats not a clear indication of this being a choice and something they agreed to.
However the poor guys also have to legally accept being bought.
Lets not pretend they aren't putting money into the bank.
I’m confident that things will be well maintained for an open ecosystem. Evan is smart enough to know that tying the core technology too much to one platform will create more problems than it solves in the long term.
That said, I’m excited to see if Evan can delivery another massive win for web developers everywhere now that he has access to more funding.
To be clear, I don't think this is bad. Vue 3 seems feature complete at this point and nobody needs another Vue 2 situation.
I pay for independent software, point is, only big money can afford to hire employees to work on free software, because they don’t make money from selling software but from being a monopoly. Free software will always win, which is not a bad thing of itself, but it also means that Big Tech control over the software world is inevitable.
The entire free software ethos indirectly opened the door to the Big Tech monopoly. There is no FAANG without open source, there is no open source without FAANG.
use vite to build apps your business needs and move on
focus on what matters or just be a w2 somewhere and do endless bikeshedding
Thank god i did not use vite for anything serious.
Esbuild is still my goto even after many years.
Such a wasted amount of capital doing fuck all when there can be real value and economic gain if we supported open source without the influence of VC + big tech that seem to want a return to feudalism, exacerbate the climate crisis, and hoard as much wealth as possible.
A better world is possible.
I don't understand, the existing licenses say that, and courts uphold them to say that. If a company has given code to you under an OSS license, that code is yours under that license forever. There'd be no point in trying to bind a person to give you all their future creative output for free just because they had given some of it to you for free. That'd be awful! And anyway we don't need courts to fix this because people can fix it just by helping each other maintain open software
That said, I completely agree that there’s a better solution.
For the record that my suspicion is that bug fixes to open code are very likely not copyrightable due to the principle of convergence, though I am not a lawyer and to my knowledge this issue has never been tested in court. New features would very much be copyrightable.
The Linux kernel is GPL with likely at least hundreds of copyright holders and no CLA, that means there is no way for someone to say "I am the legal owner and the new development will be under a proprietary license".
- In the earliest days (literally go read their blog posts and GitHub repos), they only ever really did dinky little demo's.
- After and for the longest time, they tried to claim they went "Full Stack" with SSR-able abilities, but they were so terrible back then and not even well integrated into their Worker platform tools.
- This was oddly gray mixed (sometimes?) with Pages messaging which definitely was not full-stack in the sense developers wanted.
- Then getting any of this to work in a dev environment was super difficult as "wrangler dev" was very limited (wrangler is so good now FYI).
- Vercel just kind of ate Cloudflare's lunch here. No shame in it. They just couldn't get it right for developers period.
- Then very quietly "Adapters" came around and basically changed the game. Your code base finally felt portable to Workers with essentially full CF platform support.
- Now we live in AI-age and they bought Astro (?), tried to launch WP clone (?), and vibe-coded Next (?)
Big and long time coming for all of this. It is a super breath of fresh air to see even more improvements will likely come to Workers. Icing on cake is Evan is a legend who has a proven track record of delivering tools people love.
I do believe though that these tools (formatting, linting etc.) should be built into the language like Go, and I really hope the Node team can just absorb the best ideas and make solid primitives that can be built on top of as the ecosystem evolves (think golang's http interfaces, or test interfaces)
I'm all for building things into the language when there's only one way to do it though.
Go is the best example of this; it's boring but incredible stable and consistent
I don’t get the complaining about OS developers behind these incredible pieces of software like uv, bun, etc is a bad thing. If anything, it’ll continue to incentivize great developers to fill in the blanks and continue to push things forward. It’s a win for everyone.
I'm sad to see these tools go. Vite was a godsend after a zoo of webpack/grunt/etc.
But what will happen is that new sane tool will come up once vite dissolves and that's the never ending cycle.
Given how every single acquisition like this has gone, especially lately, I look forward to seeing how quickly these products get left behind and unmaintained as their entire team move onto things at CF.
It's going to come down to "can I afford to keep doing this for nothing"?
So for all you high and mighty people calling them sell outs and what not, I would love to see how much you've been contributing to the project in order for it to keep going.
I think what CloudFlare is doing is a good thing. They get a tremendous team that they can have help work on their infrastructure while keeping the open source projects alive.
(Fwiw SDM ended up being a better alternative anyways... not looking forward to their eventual acquisition and shutdown :/ )
Original blog post of the acquisition of BastionZero: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-acquires-bastionzero/
> The BastionZero team will be focused on integrating their infrastructure access controls directly into Cloudflare One. During the third and fourth quarters of this year, we will be announcing a number of new features to facilitate Zero Trust infrastructure access via Cloudflare One. All functionality delivered this year will be included in the Cloudflare One free tier for organizations with less than 50 users. We believe that everyone should have access to world-class security controls.
Did you expect them to continue running their own service when it was pretty evident their work would be integrated into CF's zero trust suite?
The article didn't mention what happens to paying Vite+ users. Is that because there basically aren't any?
It also came at a time when expectations for the project were starting to increase.
Already at this point, I start thinking that they're turning Vite into a foundation, or donating it to the Linux Foundation, or something like that. "foundation" is mentioned 10 times in total in various ways, but then some actual foundation creation/handover never came up. Even when they themselves state how important it is developers have choice and everything shouldn't centralized around a single vendor. Deeply ironic.
Not for the aquire-ee(?), I'm not going to be a hypocrite and claim I wouldn't take the payout if I were in that position. But that companies can build massive moats by just buying up as many other companies as possible.
I don't even feel like I can make a "good" argument for it either. Massive companies becoming more massive through acquisitions just feels wrong, like the end game won't work out well for the commons.
I assume the point here is that now Cloudflare can try and push more Vite users into their ecosystem? Nudge the development to integrate better with their products? They say they are moving towards Vite, not Vite moving towards Cloudflare, but ultimately <tool> moves in the direction <owner> decides - even if it's "developed openly."
I appreciate Cloudflare's loud positive proclamation here wrt the OS future; I know scepticism is warranted with some takeovers but although there might be a trend towards Cloudflare fit over the long term that's very different from closing down or abandonment so this generally seems positive to me - best wishes to all parties.
Just like Bun, Astral and Astro, did VoidZero ever make any money?
If not then this is why open source alone is unsustainable, especially in the age of AI.
It has nothing to do with sustainability and everything to do with cashing out a huge payday, which seems to be the end goal of everything nowadays.
I think major projects that are core to the infrastructure should get financing and donations from the major tech companies benefitting.
I'm not saying my solution would work, maybe I'm being naive and unaware of the realities of most of these projects.
"We just ported Vite to ActionScript in 11 minutes, we swear for legit technical reasons"
Vite vs Next
bun, astro, uv ... all acquired.
Ok, what are the alternatives to vite/vitest?
The class of open source developers that thanklessly maintained the underlying packages driving this industry are heading for the exits, and they're being replaced by people who want to build businesses from the get-go. Who's to say this is right or wrong, but I think this is where it's all headed.
Flutter hardly matters.
Flutter is the only reason Dart still exists, and in what concerns the Android team, writing cross mobile application, is to be done with Kotlin.
Which contrary to Dart, has a few use cases, besides Android.