alt Hacker News> 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?)
> they could've still partnered up with cloudflare,netlify,vercel etc.
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.