Gatsby Cloud is Shutting Down

Wait what?

Yup. We all got the announcement a few weeks ago. Netlify announced they are shutting down Gatsby Cloud, and that we have about 2 months or less to migrate all of our sites over to something else. There was no clear migration plan at the time of announcement, causing a lot of panic. For those of us who used Gatsby Cloud as an easy way to provide Sanity previews, this is extra frustrating.

We took it upon ourselves to figure out what we were going to do for all of our sites that use incremental builds and Sanity live preview functionality.

Solution #1: Use Stackbit (Netlify Official Answer)

A few days later, Netlify announced their solution. Use Stackbit! Conveniently, they also just announced that they acquired Stackbit. We had a shutdown of Gatsby cloud, a service that was very affordable for most teams, and were told to use Stackbit instead, a service that costs $449 a month for "Business". Oh and now you can go ahead and "Contact Sales" to get on this plan.

This feels like a pretty big "go fuck yourself" from Netlify to users and a big step back towards adoption of static sites and building trust in this community.

That being said, Stackbit is still something we are going to explore in an upcoming article - because some teams do not have the dev resources to explore other solutions. Specifically, we will be exploring the free plan and its limitations.

If there is interest from teams to explore what the "Business" plan would look like, please reach out to us. If we have enough interest we are going to go ahead and pay for this so we can guide teams through this.

Solution #2: Deploy Gatsby on Digital Ocean

This essentially means running Gatsby on dev mode on a server at all times, and picking up previews from Sanity. Infrastructure implementation aside, this already sounds like its not going to work well. There have been quite a few users in the Sanity slack channel that have went with this approach, but have run into issues.

How many concurrent users can make edits? How do you quickly handle errors that crash your site? What kind of DO service do you need to spin up?

We will be exploring this as it sounds like a potential alternate solution for those who do not want to get vendor locked in with Stackbit.

Solution #3: Roll Your Own Solution

There is technically a way to use changes webhook functionality from Sanity to rebuild a netlify site, but very little docs about how to do this type of setup. This is not something we will be exploring as of now.

Solution #4: Migrate to a new Framework

This is heavy handed, but this is a possible long term option for quite a few users. Right now Netlify is promising to continue to develop the Gatsby framework, but you can see why a lot of people would be a bit skeptical about using Netlify for their projects again.

If you are someone who is looking to migrate away from Gatsby to Next, check out our pricing on our home page.

Final Thoughts

For users who use Gatsby Cloud to simply deploy their site, migrating to Netlify will take a bit of time, but overall will not be a major blocker. For the hundreds of other people who use Gatsby Cloud to run their live previews from Sanity, we have about two months to figure this out. The sudden shut down of Gatsby Cloud with no real alternatives is... frustrating to say the least.