The End of Eleventy

UPDATE: The Kickstarter has been cancelled and rescheduled for a few months from now due to emails not being sent, ruining the project's "momentum" despite reaching their goal in a single day.

Yesterday, the Font Awesome team launched a Kickstarter for a new project called Build Awesome and Build Awesome Pro, looking to raise $40,000 USD. And it has already reached that funding goal.

What is Build Awesome? Simply put, it's a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy. Or rather, it is the end of Eleventy.

I have personal stakes in this. 11ty is what my site, and thousands of others, are built and powered with. I support 11ty on Open Collective and have created themes for the framework. So how do I feel about this?

But before I get into why I (and many other 11ty devs) are not celebrating this hugely successful Kickstarter, let's first answer the question: What the hell is 11ty? Well, it's a static site generator.

Okay, but what the hell is a static site generator, and why does it matter for the literal future of the Internet so much? I'm so glad you asked.

Part One: A Brief History of the Non-Dynamic

Static websites predate dynamic content management systems with their fancy backends and databases. In the early days of the Internet, all websites were mere collections of static HTML files.

Dynamic sites started with the advent of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and later server-side scripting languages like PHP, ASP, and Ruby on Rails, along with database-driven CMS frameworks such as WordPress, which powers roughly 43% of the entire Internet.

Thankfully, the pendulum began to swing back towards static approaches with the rise of modern static-site generators. More secure, simpler hosting, and so much faster. Essentially, all you need to do is build a folder with some template languages and Markdown files and you end up with a fully-rendered website. Here's the timeline:

Jekyll (2008) was created by GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, dubbed "blogging for hackers" and repopularized SSGs, particularly with its integration into GitHub Pages, meaning any dev on GH could make a website instantly.

Hugo (2013), five years later and written in Go, gained traction for its much faster build speed, making it suitable for large-scale static sites unlike the Ruby-on-Rails dependent Jekyll.

Gatsby (2015) was a React-based SSG introducing the "content mesh" and leveraged GraphQL for data sourcing, aiming to be a modern, performant web development experience.

Eleventy (2017), finally, positioned as an "anti-framework" SSG, offering a lightweight, flexible alternative to more opinionated tools.

Part Two: 11ty: Origins

Eleventy was created by Zach Leatherman, drawing direct inspiration from Jekyll. But he wanted an alternative that leveraged the burgeoning Node.js ecosystem without imposing a rigid client-side JavaScript framework.

11ty does three things well: flexibility, leveraging JavaScript, and avoiding being a JavaScript framework. It supports multiple templating engines, allowing webdevs to migrate easily, and mix and match. Liquid, Nunjucks, Markdown, Handlebars, and EJS all within a single project. While Eleventy can use the vast npm ecosystem for the build process, it deliberately avoids dictating client-side JavaScript.

Who uses 11ty? NASA, CERN, the TC39 committee, W3C, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apache, freeCodeCamp, to name a few. The A11y Project launched with Eleventy 1.0 and its lead developer Eric Bailey noted that nearly three years later, the site could still install and run from a cold start with no complications.

Leatherman was initially hired by Netlify to work on Eleventy full-time, but in September 2024, 11ty moved to Font Awesome, with Leatherman joining their team. Now, in 2026, Eleventy is "Build Awesome", angled as the all-in-one site builder for Font Awesome and Web Awesome.

Part Three: ...How the fuck do we make money off of this?

By 2015, a term was being codified: the Jamstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup). The concept, popularized heavily by Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann, argued that decoupling the frontend from the backend, pre-rendering static HTML at build time and connecting to services via APIs, was the correct architecture for the modern web.

The Jamstack framing opened a commercial opportunity. If static sites were the future, who would build the tools, the hosting, and the workflows to support them at scale? Gatsby became the darling of the VC-funded startup world. By 2019, Gatsby had raised $15 million in Series A funding; by 2020, a $28 million Series B followed.

Next.js, from Vercel, emerged as a full-stack React framework that blurred the line between static and server-rendered, competing directly with Gatsby. The company reached a valuation of $9.3 billion in part due to this framework. The market was crowded with well-funded, well-marketed options.

Gatsby Inc. raised over a total $46 million in venture capital, attempting to monetize through the "Gatsby Cloud" platform. Despite huge investment, Gatsby Cloud failed to get the Silicon Valley "hockey-stick" growth and was ultimately acquired by Netlify in February 2023. Following the acquisition, Netlify announced the shutdown of Gatsby Cloud, and as of writing, Gatsby itself is dead and no longer maintained.

Companies like Netlify and Vercel have built businesses around hosting and deployment services for JAMstack applications. Their strategy is to support popular open-source SSGs as "loss leaders" to attract users to their paid hosting and infrastructure platforms. This model monetizes the infrastructure rather than the SSG itself, and the open-source projects remain dependent on the goodwill of these larger platforms.

Part Four: Leatherman's Open Source Dread

Leatherman, as the creator and lead maintainer of Eleventy, has been a vocal advocate for sustainable open-source development. He recently spoke of the inherent struggle of maintaining a project that becomes too-widely adopted and critical infrastructure, with limited resources and significant personal sacrifice.

Maintainers face burnout and boundaries need to be put in place for any of this to actually be sustainable. Leatherman joined Font Awesome because he believed the company shared his commitment to reliable and stable technology and sustainable development. It's clear that he recorded this podcast while actively planning the hopeful money-maker, Build Awesome.

Part Five: We've Seen This Movie Before

With that, we've ended up exactly here. With Font Awesome deciding to attempt to monetize the static-site generator by rebranding it as an accessory to their paid ecosystem.