Well, I'd love to know what Netlify does, but...
#1. I could not find pricing anywhere.
#2. The "ROI calculator" steered me to enter in my name, e-mail, and phone number. I don't want to sign up to get spam from a salesman just to find out the basics about some tool or platform.
#3. Wikipedia's page for Netlify has a content warning that the content appears to be an ad brochure, but at least it said this:
"Netlify is a remote-first cloud computing company that offers a development platform that includes build, deploy, and serverless backend services for web applications and dynamic websites.
The company enables building, deploying, and scaling websites whose source files are stored in the version control system Git and then generated into static web content files served via a content delivery network."
Still have no idea what Netlify does (beyond what I can already do with git with a few clicks), or if it's right for our team, or if we can even afford it.
The Marble game was quite fun, however...
#4. The main thing that stuck in my mind from the little "milestones" about Netlify was that they changed their logo. This may seem significant to the Netlify team, but is completely irrelevant to the rest of us.
#5. The second thing was that they "bought Squirrel, an open source"... it is rather dystopian to hear that someone "bought" an open source platform.
Since we have a few Netlify people posting here, please feel free to correct my ignorance or point me in the right direction.
Used Netlify back in the day (prior to Cloudflare pages / workers sites). The experience was largely smooth. HOWEVER, pricing was both opaque and prone to explode without warning, with little to no way of setting billing limits. Ultimately, that was too risky for the kind of small-ish projects I'm running. They had the Netlify CMS for a while, which I quite liked. But that's gone now. Be interesting to know what their USP is over CF Pages.
Just in case you haven't seen it, there's a new free plan with no overages for small projects that you don't want to worry about overages for: https://www.netlify.com/blog/introducing-netlify-free-plan/
Netlify is Vercel before Vercel.
Netlify being related to Gatsby and Vercel being related to Next.js.
Not exactly. More that Netlify started as a no-devops-needed static website hosting platform, and gradually branched off into value props that naturally fit into that starting point.
Vercel (formerly ZEIT) basically did the same thing.
Since founding, both companies have raised an insane amount of VC money, making them both unicorns by valuation a few times over. Though imo it remains to be seen if this was actually a good investment. Neither company seems to have fully made good on their business model, which is quite similar in both cases: encourage and allow devs (or non devs) to do the absolute bare minimum of work in exchange for hosting/bandwidth/etc prices that many consider exorbitant.
> The company enables building, deploying, and scaling websites whose source files are stored in the version control system Git and then generated into static web content files served via a content delivery network.
That’s the meat of it. It’s Heroku for statically generated websites or websites that can run as lambdas. Pretty limited but very fast for those purposes cause everything is handled by edge servers rather than primary data center servers.