alt Hacker NewsCloudflare acquires Astro
Comments
Great for Astro..
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.
It would be good to understand what Cloudflare gets out of the deal. The article is very much just "Astro, but someone else pays the bills!" which is of course lovely for Astro.
I’ve used Astro on Cloudflare for a few years for my personal website (username.com). They’ve both been absolutely fantastic, I can’t say enough good things about both of them. My website has all 100s on PageSpeed/Lighthouse, and that’s because of the performance focus of both Astro and Cloudflare. No credit to me at all. It was mainly because Astro prioritised shipping 0 JS unless it was absolutely necessary and Cloudflare is exceedingly good at serving static HTML.
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!
> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render.
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?
I'm a little wary of this. I'd been using Gatsby for my static websites for a long time, until it got eaten up by Netlify and then sunset; I switched over to Astro at that point, but now I'm getting a sense of déjà vu.
I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there. I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future.
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.
I love Astro - migrated my blog there (here it was a gradual improvement), migrated company website there (here a lot, to joy of everyone). In the times of vibe coding, there is much less reason to use WYSWIG website editors. In our company, a non-technical assistant, modified website with Claude Code.
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!
This spam LLM account "MarkusAllen" (towards the very end) could be used by an adversory to discredit books / courses /"youtube channel" they link to. This is reverse psychology attack vector made possible by an LLM.
Surprised this isn't in the article, but Cloudflare has been moving all their docs to Astro's Starlight docs framework. I'm guessing this is a way to prioritize features for Cloudflare:
> https://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-all-the-way-down-upg...
i'd personalloy love a quick video demo on the home screen, with someone walking through the experience of using the app; other than that, looks interesting;
Hope that SSR remains first class as time goes on. I think Astro’s DX is superb overall, and am bullish on server-rendered components in MPAs with a sprinkling of hypermedia libs for better UX.
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.
Why does Cloudflare need a web framework? Most obvious would be they think they can make money from hosting astro sites (like Vercel and NextJS). I hope Cloudflare's impact on Astro will be tiny. But another great thing being swallowed by big tech...
Astro is amazing. I've been using it for a couple of years now. Initially only for static sites but now I'm building the UI of all my web projects with it.
I wonder if there will be some sort of collab between Hono and Astro given that Yusukue also works at Cloudflare.
Astro on Cloudflare workers has been my goto stack for multiple years now. I am very happy with it, and hope this makes the integration stronger.
Now we just need Cloudflare to buy one of the DBaaS companies so they have a solid relational offering.
I'm incredibly relieved they didn't join Vercel (which everyone else seems to be doing these days).
I hope they've got rewarded astro...nomically well lol!
My apologies friends, I could not resist!
Congrats Astro team!
Refreshing to see an acquisition (acquihire?) that just plainly says they were not able to monetize.
Oh no. This isn’t good. I’m glad that the team gets a payout but as an Astro user I don’t love it being owned by CF and that the goals of the project (at least indirectly) goes from the best way to deploy it to the best way to deploy it using CF.
Wow, these are the same people behind Pika/Skypack and Snowpack. I can remember the day when they announced the Astro project, and now it's joining Cloudflare, incredible progress.
My favorite framework, and what has brought me much deeper into the world of web development. It's what I have used for me personal page https://bryanhogan.com/ . I'm happy to see it get funding, although I hope this doesn't introduce entshittification. So far I'm hopeful though.
It's the first framework I recommend to web dev beginners, after they have built something with plain HTML and CSS.
I hope they maintain a clear path to delay separately too.
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.
Very unexpected but it's a great match. I have been using Astro with Cloudflare Pages and the dev UX is fantastic
From a developer perspecive, I was going to go "Ahh shit here we go again"
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)
Only mildly surprising - Astro + CF Pages/Workers have been my go-to for when I want to spin up a static site or do anything else and it does feel like they've been really working on the integration between the two.
I don’t want a framework that’s coupled to a hosting provider.
Astro is my favorite way to build websites (at least, of the kind its great at) and I'm happy for the team; Cloudflare is a super cool place to work. Excited to see in what directions this will develop. They have a real shot at being the next Next.
This is cool, I use astro when I just want to spin up a quick site without having to fight the framework (looking at you, Nextjs) and the main thing I disliked was the initiatives around paid extras they had going
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
I use Astro deployed on Cloudflare, blog-newsletter kind of site [1], moved over from Hugo. If this keeps Astro viable then it seems like a net win.
[1] https://cto4.ai
Astro is great and I hope they keep improving after the acquisition.
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.
I hope CLoudflare or another tech company buy deno. Deno is great, its lacking a big brand sponsorship.
After Netlify acquired GatsbyJS, I am not very hopeful about the future of Astro. I hope to be wrong because Astro is a great framework.
Perfect direction! Astro has been incredible for small static pages. CF workers are also really easy to impl
Welp, I'm worried. I like Astro, but maybe it's time to make my own SSG, to not ever end up in the hand of a few big-sharks that consolidate and enshittify everything.
Astro is great. It checks all of my checkboxes. I hope this is not the beginning of the end.
I knew it was too good to last hah
Congratulations!
Cloudflare: Astro Vercel: NuxtLabs, Next. All open source. What a strange competition.
Nice. I love astro and I love cloudflare. Most of my static pages are that stack.
Another open source framework likely be dead soon, what are the alternatives ?
Vercel 2.0
So this is what happens to open source now? It runs out of money and one of the big corpos gobbles it up. Lovely.
I think donating to the Apache Foundation is preferable.
This sucks
Did they just break Cloudflare?
I am very disappointed with Astro.
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.
Vercel buys frameworks. Cloudflare does the same.
We all lose while they all tell us we're winning.
Tried Astro after being utterly confused with Hugo templating and found it rather over-engineered. Went with 11tty instead and don't regret it.
Very nice to see these dev tools get an exit. e.g. I love `uv` and friends but did consider that perhaps dev tools are just a bad business and then no one will go into making that kind of stuff. Good exits means more of these tools.
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.