I have only used Astro for toy stuff but it seemed neat. Congrats to the team.
EDIT: To put paid to the sidebar discussion below, yes I meant "for instance, consider `uv`; they might do these nice things and go nowhere but now that companies like Bun and Astro have gotten acquired, it demonstrates a future for others; therefore we will get more things like Astral's `uv` and so on". Hope that clarifies.
It'll be interesting to see where Astral ends up landing on that; afaik they have a small team and have only raised seed money, but who knows.
I suppose they might disagree, of course :)
Edit: OP clarified what they meant, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding on my part!
It's possible you are right, but it isn't clear from the content of the comment.
For pedantry's sake: neither i.e. nor e.g. would be correct here. You want cf. ("conferatur") to invite a comparison; e.g. is when an example pertains to an instance. In this case uv would not pertain to the instance, because Astro is not Astral.
(For the OP: I'm sorry if I misinterpreted you.)
if dev tools can only be "monetized" by being bought out, it does not feel sustainable on any level
we will see companies attempt to do things like close source these projects, go subscription based, or just straight up drop support
there is no incentives for cloudflare to make astro better, or even keep it around
same goes with bun, svelte, and i'm sure countless others
But I also see the difficulty that Astro faced here. Despite being happy with the framework, I never paid for it. The paid offerings didn’t strike a chord with me. And it was partly because whatever they offered, Cloudflare already offered on a very generous free tier.
I'm glad the team have got a second life within Cloudflare,. I'm happy for the people who've given me such excellent software for free for years. Thanks folks!
For example, Cloudflare released their vite plugin which makes it effortless for frameworks that use the vite env API to run inside workerd (meaning you get to use cloudflare service bindings in dev) back in April and only React Router had support for it. Nextjs has no support, the draft PR to add support for Sveltekit has been parked until the next major version, Astro only just added support in their beta 6.0 release 3 days ago
With this acquisition, Astro will probably be first to future updates that increase compatibility with cloudflare. It's smart, and was probably not very expensive (more of an acqui-hire)
Supabase pioneered the modern implementation of this model. Probably, RedHat before it? Google also tend to "acquihire" maintainers of popular FOSS projects, like Ben Goodger (Firefox), Scott Remnant (Upstart), Junio Hamano (Git), Guido von Rossum (Python).
> Staying open to all was a non-negotiable requirement for both us and for Cloudflare.
They have deployment guides for practically every provider out there: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/deploy/
And at the end of the day, most of the deployment is just deploying a static site... Which you can do practically anywhere.
Or they could add features that only work if you deploy via cloudflare.
I also take anything said in an acquisition announcement with a grain of salt. It is pretty common for companies to make changes they said they wouldn't a few years after an acquisition.
What Vercel really did was make Next.js work well in serverless environments, which involves a lot of custom infrastructure [0]. Cloudflare wanted that same behavior on CF Workers, but Vercel never open-sourced how they do it, and that is not really their responsibility.
Next.js is not locked to Vercel. The friction shows up when trying to run it in a serverless model without building the same kind of platform Vercel has.
Once again, what lock in? There is literally nothing to lock in. Explain exactly how they are going to lock somebody in, moreso than the lazy "for now" which you seem to constantly repeat.
From what I remember, you can't even run a NextJS app through vite?
It's like being mad that Rails can't run on Python, or that React can't run on jQuery. Next already has its own build system, so of course it doesn't work with another build system.
It's also wise to use monorepo orchestration with build caching like Turborepo.
They did well on the turbo stuff, no doubt about it.
The main bottleneck with big projects in my experience is Typescript. Looking forward to the Go rewrite. :)
I was impressed since I got interactive compilation and state tracking of how many exercises the user completed.
I’m close to the vite plugin in particular and have contributed to multiple frameworks around cf integration (simply because I use cf), that’s why I chose it as an example (and it’s one of Astro 6’s biggest features)
I think every deployment pipeline having it's own preferred UI framework (and CMS, and cloud-DB solution) makes a lot of sense.
Additionally, I wish more serveless cloud vendors would offer a free tier like Vercel, including support for compiled languages on the backend (C, C++, Rust, Go) without asking me for a credit card upfront.
I also wouldn't be surprised if cloudflare wants to build this into their site-hosting capabilities.
This is probably just an acquihire.
Cloudflare is bound to respect the laws of the countries it operates, and if he disagrees with the process, understandable, that was not the way to express it.
Its quite a nice DX actually.
I could see Cloudflare just wanting to push for a bit more vertical integration in the space to give themselves some more options.
Source: I use cloudflare and used to run my app there (nextjs) and had to do a migration to vite.js. So the way I see it, this is cloudflare response to vercel.
It’s wild that they’re somewhat taking the whole React ecosystem with them.
Cross fingers that CloudFlare never try similar lock-in games, now that they control Astro?
The Astro claim is that astro developers will all continue full-time on it. So why acquire it instead of supporting it?
The reason given in complementarity (content and infrastructure), but doesn't that mean that Cloudflare is moving into content? Perhaps it's fair to say some content fits better with Cloudflare, or making it easier to just have static sites is beneficial to Cloudflare?
Is there a convention about announcements, for the acquired to announce happily first to bring customers, and then the acquirer to confirm their benign intentions? When can we expect Cloudflare's take?
In defense? Someone else can acquire it.
For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that Astro doesn't ship any JS by default and just outputs static HTML, and when I want some page to have an interactive JS component, Svelte is an option that produces a relatively small amount of client JS.
But: Using Svelte with Astro this way for static sites has been broken since August 2025. As soon as you have a conditionally rendered child component in Svelte, Astro fails to bundle the styles for it in the static output of the site, and it does that ONLY in production, which is really devious, you could build a whole site (using astro dev) without knowing and then it breaks when you deploy it.
The issue is here: https://github.com/withastro/astro/issues/14252
I don't want to be complaining about how quickly issues get addressed in an OSS project that I'm not paying for, I don't blame them for not keeping tabs on every framework integration, I just would love to build websites with the latest versions Astro and Svelte, and I unfortunately have the feeling I should have just gone with SvelteKit for a smoother experience.
The JavaScript web framework ecosystem has this problem everywhere lately where frameworks try to be everything to everyone and support every use case anyone might want. It’s noble in theory but without dedicated and active maintainers for each combination there’s bound to be something left behind.
My heuristic has been to only use adapters that the core project maintainers appear to favor. The maintainers for sub-project adapters that are introduced later frequently have maintainers that come and go, with long periods where things start breaking and nobody is interested in fixing them.
For example, here's all the code in the svelte integration: https://github.com/withastro/astro/tree/main/packages/integr...
When the client side interactivity is very contained and small in scope I also quite like just using plain JavaScript without a framework.
I hope that this acquisition will go well. It would be sad to lose this great framework. At the same time, we deploy on Cloudflare. So their business is to keep Astro cool so that more people will use Claudflare, it would be a win-win!
Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server<>client" model suddenly doesn't make any sense anymore, and of course this should be rendered server-side.
Why are we doomed to repeat this, and why does it happen so quickly particularly in web development? We have each other's histories and knowledge right in front of us, what's missing for us to not continue just running around in circles like this?
React makes sense if you're making Gmail. It doesn't really make sense if you're making a mostly static blog. But because there are more job opportunities in the former (when you consider the wealth of internal web apps out there in the world) all the training courses folks take emphasize React and an app-centric way of thinking about the web.
And perhaps most importantly, it's good enough. It works. Users get by with it. And the developer experience is better than it was in the days of Backbone etc. So few push for change.
They would not if they had choice.
This is wrong. Some websites are better mostly (mostly) rendered on the client (we call them "apps", like a map application) and some are better mostly rendered on the server (like blogs).
It was and will be.
It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.
The other nice thing is that you can throw all kinds of preexisting components from React/whatever into your site, and it will ship zero JS to the client until you explicitly flag a specific JS resource as an "island".
The only special thing about "islands" is that they're an escape hatch from the default behavior of JS being strictly build-time-evaluated. I found the terminology and description a little confusing at first too, because it makes it sound more special than it is. But the concept makes sense when you understand the context of Astro's intentional default behavior.
I know this sounds similar, but, compared to the more traditional approach, there is a certain simplicity to having everything just be javascript. You can often run the same libraries on both server and client depending on your needs, plus it fulfills the promise of web components in a way that is easier to work with (though WCs have also come a long way!)
Should be astro lakes or something.
Then “sub-component level hydration” would be resumability like in qwik where only events and their dependencies get serialised as client js.
Then along came libraries like mootools, knockout, etc all the precursors of react, then react changed the game around encapsulation of markup and code into one place, and straightforward data flow.
SPAs were inefficient so server side rendering of js became ubiquitous, islands are a further optimisation of ssr.
This hasn’t happened in a vacuum, if you look at modern php frameworks like inertia they have a lot more in common with Astro than they do the good old 90s php
You need to give credit to a project like Astro that takes a pattern, popularizes it and makes it straightforward to adopt via a framework.
There's a really nice pattern of using Custom Elements [0] for that sort of JS interactivity sprinkling. You can make your web application however you want, and when you want the client to run some JS, you just drop in `<my-component x="..." y="...">...</my-component>` with whatever flavour of HTML templating you have available to you. (also possibly with the is= attribute in the future [1], which will let you keep more of the HTML template out of JS)
It saves you the hassle of element targeting and lets you structure that part of your app a bit more without going overboard on "everything is a react component, even the server bits".
Want something "server side generated" in that JS? Just render it in attributes/body/a slot element/a template element, and expect to pick it up in the JS side of things. Feels like how it's supposed to be... and there's no framework required!
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
That's exactly what made me move to Astro. I would've been happy sticking with Gatsby since it still technically does what it says on the tin, but there were so many security warnings and issues with upgrading dependencies that I gave up.
> https://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-all-the-way-down-upg...
"At Cloudflare, we use Astro, too — for our developer docs, website, landing pages, and more"
yeah, it's still losing money
The "No" (Non-GAAP & Free Cash Flow)
If you look at Non-GAAP (adjusted) figures—which many investors use to judge the actual "engine" of the business—Cloudflare is solidly profitable.
Adjusted Income: They reported a non-GAAP net income of $102.6 million for Q3 2025.
Cash Flow: Cloudflare is Free Cash Flow (FCF) positive. They are generating more cash from their operations than they are spending to keep the business running, reporting $75 million in FCF in their most recent quarter.
Why the difference?
The main reason Cloudflare still shows a "loss" on paper is Stock-Based Compensation (SBC). Like many high-growth tech companies, they pay a significant portion of employee salaries in stock rather than cash.
The GAAP view counts that stock as an expense (creating a "loss"). The Investor view often ignores it because it doesn't drain the company's bank account (showing "profit").
thanks for the unrequested slop!
you know what GAAP stands for?
"generally accepted accounting practices"
so what does non-gaap mean?
"non-generally accepted accounting practices"
aka: bullshit
I will never use Cloudflare if I can help it, but this outcome is preferable to Astro becoming abandonware.
I wonder if there will be some sort of collab between Hono and Astro given that Yusukue also works at Cloudflare.
I've been skeptical about trying Astro because it seems to have unnecessary complexity. Also, I don't see any evidence that Cloudflare is going to prioritize making Astro easier to use.
Generative AI is not suitable for building content-driven websites because it lacks context to understand subjective user preferences.
Also, having .astro files to implement island functionality is unnecessary. Interactivity can be implemented with Javascript using web components.
Websites should not be vibe coded.
But I really feel like Akamai is who dropped the ball here, this was a low hanging fruit for them and they're lacking offering this capability to offer their corporate clients as they transition to full headless. Now it's going to be their competition (Cloudflare, even Fastly through Adobe & the EDS push) who will try to take a portion of their cake.
Now we just need Cloudflare to buy one of the DBaaS companies so they have a solid relational offering.
About the download stats for open source frameworks and libraries.. I keep reading claims of "millions of weekly downloads" -- surely this is a noisy metric, right?
NPM just counts GET requests. A significant number of those must be from CI/CD pipelines, mirrors, build servers, etc.
It still signals popularity, but probably to a much lesser degree than implied.
Number of downloads? Number of stars on GH? Number of content on social medias?
The absolute value is meaningless in itself, but there's a big difference between a library that is downloaded a thousand or millions of times each week. That's the idea.
Meanwhile for-profit projects have actual customers or revenues to demonstrate popularity.
With [Mastro], we have a different approach. The name originally stood for "minimal Astro", and we’re staying true to that. At just ~700 lines of TypeScript, Mastro will always be easily maintainable – even if by just a single person. And it's amazing how much you can do if you're very deliberate in your API's design.
[Mastro]: https://mastrojs.github.io/
Used this for a portfolio site and and not sure if this news is good or bad for its future.
Some features of my SSR-based side project feel like I had to hack them on, such as a hook that runs only on app start (hacked in via middleware) or manually needing to set cache control headers for auth’d content.
All in all, really happy with it. And it isn’t next.js.
It's the first framework I recommend to web dev beginners, after they have built something with plain HTML and CSS.
But do such acquihires usually result in higher salaries for regular (non-leadership) employees or? Also, what about NSOs?
But to be really honest, thinking more about it. atleast from an "AI" bubble perspective, Cloudflare is pretty rock solid and isn't involved in the AI bubble deals whereas vercel has
If you were to use cloudflare workers say the past few months, you would've noticed some serious UI/UX improvements and its projects highlighted astro template was one of the first things (I think second was sveltekit iirc)
Anyways thinking about it now, I am sure that cloudflare must have been in talks with them for quite some time and they had the astro deployments on cloudflare workers so they must have seen its usage and other data we have no idea about to justify this purchase
That being said, I had been part of astro community almost exactly the time they had partnered up with turso (It was my holidays so I wanted to build a website from scratch, I sadly lost it but it was really cool and it had BMO from adventure time's pixel art that I lost oof :<)
So I was in their discord when they had just joined turso for astro DB and at that point, you couldn't host it locally (some tried with wasm) not sure what's the reality now though. But its interesting to see this because cloudflare offers a turso (serverless sqlite) alternative as Cloudflare D1, So we might see Astro shift to d1?
Once again, I have not been part of community for almost around 1-2 years so I don't know the current state of Astro aside from tweaking around making my own custom editor in bun for some astro templates (astro templates are really cool)
Perhaps, we are gonna see astro templates website + cloudflare workers to create an instant deployment of astro templates on cloudflare workers as a first class citizen. Honestly I would love that because cf workers/pages are free/cheapest in the whole market.
I hope that Astro still stays local first and still its serverless features can benefit everybody and not just cloudflare (looking at you vercel for nextjs)
My apologies friends, I could not resist!
Congrats Astro team!
With these sort of combinations the deploy to cloudflare button gets ever bigger than over time. And then features get added that only work with CF and eventually it’s still open source but only half the stuff works standalone etc
That said - good for them.
Astro and Tanstack are probably the best full-stack routers these days, and Astro wins in terms of the wide support for almost any client-side tech
If you want some precedent look at Hono. Initially it was just for the CF Workers runtime (not developed by CF). Then CF started using Hono internally and hired the dev to work on Hono full time. Hono works on any JS runtime.
[1] https://cto4.ai
Given what agents can do, I feel a lot of the sites built on Webflow, Framer and so on will move to code and Astro is a great framework for this.
Source/disclosure: I worked at Gatsby, Netlify, Astro and Cloudflare
Unironically have been migrating my static pages (from Nextjs and Eleventy) to plain HTML and love it. Of course depends on your use case if that is feasible.
First, it doesn't have any provisions for code reuse. So, if you have multiple pages that use the same header, same footer, or same navigation menu, your options are either to copy-paste it (gross), or to build the final html out of smaller pieces, at which point you've reinvented either a static site generator or a web server.
Second, if you write long stretches of text, the html markup can get in the way, as opposed to unobtrusiveness of something like markdown.
I’m tired of the constant update pressure from existing solutions and I only need something dead simple.
It doesn't have to be Astro though. You can build something super simple that just includes the header, footer, and nav. Leaving most of the site as plain HTML.
There's one other I've seen recently that looked good but I have misplaced the link
But why are you looking for alternatives already?
Disliked the templating solutions, the messy documentation, the loss in momentum, and liked a lot of the stuff (especially the tooling and principles) in astro.
Also strongly disliked how political eleventy got.
I just wanted a website, not a an internal debate about what I am potentially being absorbed into. I can vote, and spend money on donations, I don't need to enact change through my tech stack.
There's even an article about it somewhere.
I think donating to the Apache Foundation is preferable.
Who is this framework for?
It's been years, and they still don't support unit testing Astro Actions. They still don't support inter-island communication.
"Astro v6 is around the corner" - and the only changes are 1. refactored CLI (why? it's perfectly fine) 2. bumped zod to v4
It's great if you want to build a blog or something, but it's definitely far from great for building apps.
Don't know what they are thinking.
They even say it in this blog:
"Our mission to design a web framework specifically for building websites — what we call content-driven websites, to better distinguish from data-driven, stateful web applications — resonated"
Not an Astro expert, but the massive headline at the top of the homepage may provide a clue as to their intended audience:
> The web framework for content-driven websites
You can easily add any global store library to your project to communicate between islands from the very simple (nanostores) to more complex stuff (are people still using mobx, redux, etc?)
I actually would prefer if Astro kept the core more simple, I never understood the point of Astro components for example; always thought their game plan would be to build their own client-side framework like what remix v3 is doing, but currently their components are too limited to make them worth using over just doing everything in react, svelte, or whatever floats your boat.
Personally I only ever use .astro components if I'm 100% sure I will never need any client side interactivity, otherwise it's just easier to ignore them.
The docs show how to use nanostores but you can use other libs like vue refs, etc.
> They still don't support inter-island communication
Your costs could explode, or worse, the business could go under and you lose all your shit.
And you get to keep your data in markdown easily portable
Are these numbers supposed to provide any sense of the popularity if you're not often looking at npm trends?
It’s noteworthy because this comment is currently the top voted comment, probably because it hits all the notes of what you’d get if you asked an LLM to generate some content to tap into anger in a Hacker News comment section. It’s scary that this type of LLM powered engagement bait is so successfully being used to advertise on HN.
The criticism is also not very pointed. Like, I don't understand what the core message is. There is disdain for VC money and an implication that Astro could have gone without monetization. Both of which don't seem very well argued. But even if we grant those points ... so what? What is our take away supposed to be? It's a bunch of negative observations that don't funnel into some concrete conclusion.
It seems like the takeaway is supposed to be to look favorably on the commenter. "This is bad. I am good."
It's just an ad that people are upvoting uncritically.
If the purpose of this was to promote their academy or school or whatever, what was the point? Because at this point, they have lost all credibility and respect and HN isn't a gullible audience so I don't understand the point of why they did this
It’s the top voted comment right now. Their comment history has similar comments with links to their products and content.
I think they’re doing it because it was working for them. I bet they’re happy with the additional traffic they’re picking up for a minute or two of promoting an LLM and then appending a link at the end.
Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM.
GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
"1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux."
Corporations are just groups of people. Pure grass roots "We collect the money, anonymously in cash shaking a bucket at our annual fundraiser" does not work at this scale. Even Zig, which I'm guessing is about as far away from "It's all just owned by an inhuman corporation" as you could ask for, does have big ticket corporate donors. So does ISRG (Let's Encrypt) or the EFF.
Venture Capital is a bad fit, that's the conjecture here. VC funding for infrastructure is a mistake because that big pay day won't happen if you did it correctly. That doesn't make VC inherently bad, or projects like Linux inherently defective, the claim was that it's just a bad match, like how an Irish Stout doesn't pair well with a subtle tomato and angel hair pasta dish.
Gathering around projects, talking over USENET, Gopher, phpBB forums, sharing code over email, Sourceforge, Savannah , living the FOSS dream, the whole mantra of when the GNU manifesto came to be.
The funding assertion leverages the re-definition of “community” in “community funded” and relates to why all those big projects offer CE or Community Editions instead of calling it free or open source editions.
Enterprises are willing to take a look at free, but "community editions" are clearly for peons, not the big boys, so they license the commercial edition. It also productizes a subset of licensing rights in contrast with the commercial licensing rights.
In any case, in today's common parlance, community doesn't mean ICs and IC donations. It can, but it's been mostly co-opted by corp donations, which are still donations and not VC.
The whole story (https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/) is fascinating, but here are a couple of interesting excerpts:
> I scrambled around and came up with some pricing strategy. [Motorola] wanted some enhancements to it so it could go in their phones, and I gave them a quote and at the time, I thought this was a quote for all the money in the world. It was just huge. ($80k)
> [Nokia] flew me over and said, “Hey, yeah, this is great. We want this but we need some enhancements.” I [Richard Hipp] said, “Great,” and we cut a contract to do some development work for them.
> We were going around boasting to everybody naively that SQLite didn’t have any bugs in it, or no serious bugs, but Android definitely proved us wrong. Look, I used to think that I could write software with no bugs in it. It’s amazing how many bugs will crop up when your software suddenly gets shipped on millions of devices.
If you can find paying customers that can fund your development, then it's fantastic. It's even better if those contracts give you scale that none of your competitors have. You don't need VC money if that's the case. But let's not pretend that Astro were in that situation. No one was paying for a web framework.
Didn't this just happen right now that Astro got acquired by Cloudflare? I am sure that Cloudflare has bot tons of money right now so Astro got an offer to good to refuse but worst case scenario they could've still partnered up with cloudflare,netlify,vercel etc. but also companies who deploy astro (even google deploys astro pages)
Plus, Astro has a very strong focus on being performant/fast (getting 100 lightscore) so they could've definitely focused on consultance as well to actually have the people who work in the craft who can take a look and help you get score who literally know the inside out of Astro
That being said, the Question is, could they have survived long enough to be in a position of sustainability without VC money or could they have gotten sustainability from the start, if so what could be the path that they could've taken so that they didn't need VC money or could be (day-1 profitable ie?)
What makes you think they aren't? https://docs.astro.build/en/getting-started/ says on the bottom left: Sponsored by Cloudflare, Netlify, Webflow, MUX.
> consulting to get to 100 Lightscore
Problem is, it was possible to get there with minimal effort. The default config of Astro was 100. I know absolutely nothing about web dev and my personal website was all 100s.
And in any case, consultancy doesn't scale. Interestingly Tailwind has that kind of model - free software, pay for beautifully crafted components. And their business isn't doing well.
We don't know what would have happened in an alternate universe. But it's hard out there building businesses on FOSS. Can't blame anyone for trying - VC or otherwise.
European Commission issues call for evidence on open source
The EU is looking for facts like this as it figures out how to use OS to begin to extend its digital sovereignty. I don't think it's as simple as, "get funding from a giant continental government instead of VCs!" but what I hope is that there is a structure the EU and Open Source can forge together that gives OS software the funding it needs to build more Nginxes and SQLites in a way that fosters the independence of those projects along with the independence of the entities that use it.
Modern expectations that a VC pumps in millions (or billions) of dollars and then extracts 10s of billions a few years later is an unrealistic expectation for most companies, and forcing everything into that model is killing off a lot of projects that could be successful on a smaller scale. The pressure forces small companies to sell out to bigger corporations, consolidating the industry into a few huge players who gate keep and limit competition and choice.
Many, many people working on Linux work for companies that pay them to work on Linux. Linux is not, and I don't believe has ever claimed to be, community-funded.
Nginx was bought, a couple of times maybe, so they have had cash injections of some sort.
> We need more ways to fund infrastructure that don't require artificial monetization timelines.
Funding infrastructure isn't the problem, exactly. VC is for a specific type of funding: risky businesses that need scale to make money. We have found the answer: VCs, who are willing to lose all their money on your project.
We all lose while they all tell us we're winning.