In 2015, Gatsby promised to build websites 1000x faster. By 2024, its own growth had stalled. This is the story of how a React-based framework captured the hearts of developers but struggled to capture the enterprise market it needed to survive.

"Gatsby built the fastest websites on the internet, but couldn't outrun the market shift toward server-side rendering."

Gatsby's tech stack tells the story of a company that bet everything on the Jamstack revolution. PWA support, lazy loading, Contentful integration—all best-in-class features. But when Next.js shipped incremental static regeneration and Vercel scaled to $250M+ ARR, Gatsby's static-first architecture became a liability, not an advantage.

• Peak Gatsby (2020) was defined by 'build times vs runtime performance' debates
• The Netlify partnership (1000x faster deployment) became a single point of failure
• 46% direct traffic suggests brand strength, but 8.1% from undefined country signals data tracking issues