Today we celebrate a big milestone: Over 5 million developers have signed up for Netlify.
It’s been incredible to watch our community grow. And the reach of what we set out to build almost ten years ago continues to increase.
So I’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who’s been part of this journey so far and to each of you among the more than 5 million developers who’ve decided to add Netlify to your tool belt.
At Netlify, our vision has always been to help build a better web, and we’ve made it our mission to enable the world’s developers to create and unlock the power of it.
So the right way for us to celebrate is on the web, with our 5 million devs celebration site!
Transforming the web
When I built the first prototype of Netlify more than 10 years ago, the ecosystem around us was massively different and the web was still seen as being in a state of peril. The first round we raised for Netlify in 2016 was by far the hardest, and again and again, we would get the question: “Why the web? Isn’t everything moving to mobile or social media? Even Google with AMP seems to be building their own walled garden?”
The standard way of building was monoliths for each vertical. Tools like WordPress, Drupal, Typo3, Magento, Sitecore, AEM, and Commerce Cloud, were dominating the space, and the experience of the web was often crashing databases, hacked sites, and slow experiences that felt far from what the walled garden-style proprietary platforms could offer.
We coined the term Jamstack and pioneered the idea of a decoupled approach to building for the web. Pulling the frontend out of the monolith, removing the need for business logic to dictate the web experience, and allowing developers to build for the web with native web technologies.
We invented the modern frontend cloud—deploying directly to the Edge from Git—introduced Deploy Previews, were the first to integrate serverless functions as a natural part of the frontend stack, launched collaborative deploy previews to make releases faster across teams, pioneered edge functions, and so much more.
Powering incredible experiences
Today Netlify powers an incredible range of experiences across any use case, vertical, and scale across the globe. From new developers launching their first portfolio, to Fortune 500 companies launching their sites, stores, and apps on our platform.
It took us 5 years to onboard the first 1 million developers and 4 years to onboard the next 4.
Today more than a billion unique visitors will hit a URL running on Netlify every month, across 50 million sites.
And yet to me, in so many ways, it feels like we’re just getting started. AI will drive a massive platform shift across our industry, and as with any platform shift, this will put the web under pressure again as emerging proprietary platforms attempt to capture users and developers.
We need to help developers and the companies they work for create the next generation of experiences that will keep the web vibrant and relevant, and provide the platform and tooling that makes the web the best place to build for and the fastest way to reach any human being with an internet connection across the world.
Here’s to new chapters and the next 5 million devs joining us!
