Elevator Pitch

• Font Awesome’s “Build Awesome” rebrand and monetization attempt marks “the end of Eleventy,” repeating a pattern where trying to productize static-site generators into CMS-like businesses alienates the very developers who sustain them.

Key Takeaways

• Eleventy (11ty) rose as a flexible “anti-framework” static site generator, widely adopted because it stays lightweight and avoids dictating client-side JavaScript.
• The Jamstack era showed that companies often monetize hosting/infrastructure, leaving core open-source SSGs dependent on corporate alignment—and prior attempts to monetize SSGs directly (e.g., Gatsby Cloud, Stackbit) collapsed or were sunset.
• Build Awesome’s “pro” direction (visual editing, browser-based building, premium templates) is framed as solving sustainability, but the author argues it targets non-SSG audiences and risks neglecting the existing community.

Most Memorable Quotes

• “What is Build Awesome? Simply put, it's a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy. Or rather, it is the end of Eleventy.”
• “The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.”
• “My point of writing this is that any attempt to monetize the open-source free space of static site generators has failed in the past, and is inherently paradoxical and antithetical.”