The main value proposition of static site generators COMPARED TO 1st generation CMS like Wordpress is that they don't require a database and are lightweight and portable.
It is common sense that not everyone will want to run their own database and a server, so a wordpress.com makes sense.
But static sites can be deployed anywhere and there already is a huge ecosystem of vendor independent and free static site hosting sites like Github (which is subsidized by Microsoft), Gitlab, etc.
For Gatsby to survive and thrive in this ecosystem that is completely different from the wordpress ecosystem, they will probably need to do a lot of things to create a lockin, in which case there is no point in using Gatsby. After all, all Gatsby does is just compile some files into static site. Nothing magic in there.
[1] https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/issues/15080#issuecomment...
Those things (particularly the CI) are incredibly trivial to setup for someone who is technically proficient. It might be a hurdle for someone who is primarily a designer with a bit of HTML/CSS knowledge and a "copy and paste heavy" understanding of JS.
I think a large proportion of static sites are built by people in the second category, so the offering makes sense to me. If my reasoning is sound, that just leaves the major issue that this offering is incredibly easy to duplicate, and everyone from Github to CircleCI to Netlify could put in a week of dev time to roll out their own matching offering (if they don't already have this).
I think that looks like a pretty hard problem, i wouldn’t call their CI simple.
There's indeed little magic involved so Gatsby has to do a really good job to keep customers both integration and speed wise.
To me this is the "emperor has no clothes" about the whole ecosystem. The actual users don't care if it's a static file, a database CMS, or a herd of cats running around frantically typing up HTTP responses. So it's odd to me that the big selling point is "we did something neat in how we made our product!". Right, but what does it do to make your users life better than using ghost or wordpress, or whatever?
I know that some devs see it as a rails like thing to combine with graphql, but if I was going that route I personally wouldn't start with something that's ostensibly a static site generator.
Basically, the hosting can be unbundled from generating the site. And this is the territory which big companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are already good at.
of course, Gatsby cloud won't want that, and the only way to solve that problem is to create artificial lockins. And when they do so (because they need to justify their valuation), people will leave.
My thinking here is heavily influenced by this documentary I just watched:
I've just been triggered by your smiley face.
"Silicon Valley Scale" is an error for humanity, in my opinion.
But I also think that 28mill is outrageously lot of money for what the service is. True SV scale :)