After only a couple days, Build Awesome's Kickstarter has been cancelled and rescheduled for a few months from now due to "launch emails reach[ing] maybe 5-10% of the people they were supposed to" which ended up ruining the project's "momentum" despite the fact they had reached their funding goal in a single day.

Here's what my fellow 11ty devs had to say:

"lol. lmao. and no update on 11ty's blog, or zach's blog which feels really weird."

— 🌸 melanie kat 👻

"@zicklepop (🌸 melanie kat 👻) it really does I have soo many questions"

— Adam DJ Brett

"@brennan that's really strange..."

— David Bushell ☕

"@brennan There's definitely some other kind of shenanigans going on, then. Because that makes absolutely no sense."

— HisVirusness

"@brennan Hm, that's sketchy AF. They already reached the goal, just fix the emails."

— James Huff

"@brennan That sounds like whoever is running the Kickstarter is trying to optimize profit over actually funding a project. Given that I was suspicious before, now I'm convinced that 'Font Awesome' is driven purely by avarice."

— Ben Overmyer

Now, I want to clear some things up from my original article: My criticism is not with the fact Build Awesome exists, or even that it is replacing 11ty. Rather, it was with how the Font Awesome team plans to monetize Build Awesome. The case studies of GatsbyJS, StackBit, and NetlifyCMS that I provided demonstrate that the following isn't a viable business model for static site generators:

• Collaborative visual editing (another way to say "headless CMS")
• Build-in-a-browser (no local dev setup, no terminal needed)
• Premium built-in templates and hosted import tools

I do wish that the Font Awesome team would have more community advocacy in place for their own benefit.

If it isn't obvious, I love 11ty. I think it's one of the best software systems out there. I have built my site and plenty more with it. I donate to their OpenCollective and backed their Kickstarter before it was cancelled (albeit just for the cute stickers) but I believe there are foundational issues that I wanted to be vocal about, as someone who's been JAMstack developer for years.

Regardless, though, this is the end of Eleventy. 11ty is dead. Font Awesome is rebranding the project and did not ask for input from the community beforehand on that, and that was their choice.

I know that open-source projects need maintainers, and massive projects like 11ty require funding models for any sort of realistic sustainability. I'm not against this.

I do believe that there are ways for static site generators to have sustainable business models. I think an excellent example of this is the composable framework Vike which only charges teams which have more "than 10 employees, though organizations in lower-income countries can have more employees."

Alternative Choices

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that there are many static site generators out there. Astro is one of the most popular recommendations nowadays because of its agnostic support for dynamic frameworks. But they, too, have been bought out. Cloudflare owns the Astro Technology Company.

Do not fret, though, there are plenty of other alternatives that haven't been acquired. If you enjoy working in Python, there's Pelican, or if you prefer Rust, there's Zola. If you want something simple and in Bash, there's bashblog. Jamstack.org has an extensive list of many different SSGs.

The biggest difference between 11ty and alternatives is the community and ecosystem. It is rare and difficult for a piece of software to develop a community and identity the way Eleventy has, and Zach Leatherman has done amazing work at steering this ship for so long. Bob Monsour runs the excellent 11tyBundle which is filled to the brim with 11ty creators, websites, and resources. Up until just a few days ago, there was THE Eleventy Meetup.

I think that we as devs need to diversify, try out, and contribute to smaller projects. Projects that aren't listed often or that pop up in search results.

Let me give a few shout-outs for example. Just in the past few days after writing my last article, I was introduced to the framework Mastro. Jan Miksovsky reached out personally to introduce me to his functional, expressive software system/SSG Web Origami

VGA256 wrote to me about the simple, delightful Kiki homepage building kit. Denis created his own static site generator, Nanoc.

The Internet is amazing. We can create whatever we want on it, including the infrastructure itself. That's powerful and under-discussed. This is not a competitive, zero-sum game. There's enough room in the open-source world for all of these projects to co-exist and even help each other grow and develop. There are good people building right now, and they aren't asking for tens of thousands of dollars, and they could maybe even use your help. Yes, you.