Gatsby Cloud Shutdown

Yup. We all got the announcement a few weeks ago. Netlify announced they are shutting down Gatsby Cloud, giving us barely 2 months to migrate our sites elsewhere. With no clear migration path provided at announcement time, panic ensued, especially for those of us relying on Gatsby Cloud for seamless Sanity preview integration.

We took it upon ourselves to investigate alternatives for our sites using incremental builds and Sanity live preview functionality.

Solution #1: Stackbit - The Official Netlify Recommendation

A few days after the shutdown announcement, Netlify revealed their solution: Use Stackbit! Conveniently coinciding with their acquisition of Stackbit. So we're losing Gatsby Cloud—an affordable service for most teams—and being directed toward Stackbit, which costs $449 monthly for their "Business" plan. Oh, and you'll need to "Contact Sales" to access this plan.

This feels like a significant betrayal from Netlify to their users and undermines trust in the static site ecosystem.

Despite our frustrations, we'll explore Stackbit in an upcoming article since many teams lack developer resources to investigate alternatives. We'll specifically examine the free plan and its limitations.

If your team is interested in seeing what the "Business" plan offers, reach out to us. With enough interest, we'll invest in it to provide comprehensive guidance.

Solution #2: Self-Hosting Gatsby on Digital Ocean

This approach involves running Gatsby in development mode on a server continuously to capture Sanity previews. Beyond infrastructure setup challenges, this solution already raises red flags. Several users in the Sanity Slack community have attempted this route but encountered problems.

Key questions remain: How many concurrent editors can the system support? How do you handle site-crashing errors efficiently? What Digital Ocean service tier is required?

We'll investigate this option for teams wanting to avoid vendor lock-in with Stackbit.

Solution #3: Custom Webhook Implementation

Technically, you can use Sanity's webhook functionality to trigger Netlify rebuilds, but documentation for this approach is sparse. We won't be exploring this solution currently.

Solution #4: Framework Migration

Though drastic, switching frameworks represents a viable long-term option for many users. While Netlify promises continued Gatsby framework development, their recent actions have made many developers skeptical about committing to Netlify-dependent projects.

If you're considering migrating from Gatsby to Next.js, check out our pricing on our home page for migration assistance.

Final Thoughts

For those using Gatsby Cloud solely for deployment, transitioning to Netlify will require some effort but shouldn't present major obstacles. However, for hundreds of developers relying on Gatsby Cloud for Sanity live previews, we have minimal time to implement alternatives. The abrupt shutdown without providing viable alternatives is frustrating, to say the least.