The Astro Technology Company — the company behind the Astro web framework — is joining Cloudflare! Adoption of the Astro web framework continues to double every year, and Astro 6 is right around the corner. With Cloudflare’s support, we’ll have more resources and fewer distractions to continue our mission to build the best framework for content-driven websites.

What this means for Astro:

• Astro stays open-source and MIT-licensed
• Astro continues to be actively maintained
• Astro continues to support a wide set of deployment targets, not just Cloudflare
• Astro’s open governance and current roadmap remain in place.
• All full-time employees of The Astro Technology Company are now employees of Cloudflare, and will continue to work on Astro full-time.

How Astro started

In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render. This was not very performant, and we’ve spent the last decade coming up with more and more complex solutions to solve for that performance problem. SSR, ISR, RSC, PPR, TTI optimizations via code-splitting, tree-shaking, lazy-loading, all to generate a blocking double-data hydration payload from a pre-warmed server running halfway around the world.

Our mission to design a web framework specifically for building websites — what we call content-driven websites, to better distinguish from data-driven, stateful web applications — resonated. Now Astro is downloaded almost 1,000,000 times per week, and has been used by 100,000s of developers to build fast, beautiful websites. Today you’ll find Astro all over the web, powering major websites and even entire developer platforms for companies like Webflow, Wix, Microsoft, and Google.

Along the way, we also tried to grow a business. In 2021 we raised some money and formed The Astro Technology Company. Our larger vision was that a well-designed framework like Astro could sit at the center of a massive developer platform, with optional hosted primitives (database, storage, analytics) designed in lockstep with the framework.

We were never able to realize this vision. Attempts to introduce paid, hosted primitives into our ecosystem fell flat, and rarely justified their own existence. We considered going more directly after first-class hosting or content management for Astro, but knew we’d spend much of our time playing catchup to well-funded, savvy competitors. We kept exploring different ideas, but nothing clicked with users the same way Astro did.

It wasn’t all bad. Astro DB (our attempt to build a hosted database product for Astro projects) eventually evolved into the open, built-in Astro database client that still lives in core today. Our exploration into building an e-commerce layer with Astro was eventually open-sourced. It was rewarding work, but over the years the distraction took its toll. Each attempt at a new paid product or offering took myself and others on the project away from working on the Astro framework that developers were using and loving every day.

Returning to Focus

Last year, Dane (Cloudflare CTO) and I began to talk more seriously about the future of the web. Those conversations quickly grew into something bigger: What does the next decade look like? How do frameworks adapt to a world of AI coding and agents?

It became clear that even as web technologies evolve, content remains at the center. We realized that we’ve each been working toward this same vision from different angles:

• Cloudflare has been solving it from the infrastructure side: betting on a platform that is global by default, with fast startup, low latency, and security built-in.
• Astro has been solving it from the framework side: betting on a web framework that makes it easy to build sites that are fast by default, without overcomplicating things.

The overlap is obvious. By working together, Cloudflare gives us the backing we need to keep innovating for our users. Now we can stop spending cycles worrying about building a business on top of Astro, and start focusing 100% on the code, with a shared vision to move the web forward.

Cloudflare ❤️ Astro

Cloudflare has been a long-time sponsor and champion of Astro. They have a proven track record of supporting great open-source projects like Astro, TanStack, and Hono without trying to capture or lock anything down. Staying open to all was a non-negotiable requirement for both us and for Cloudflare.

That is why Astro will remain free, open-source, and MIT-licensed. We will continue to run our project in the open, with an open governance model for contributors and an open community roadmap that anyone can participate in. We remain fully committed to maintaining Astro as a platform-agnostic framework, meaning we will continue to support and improve deployments for all targets—not just Cloudflare.

With Cloudflare’s resources and support, we can now return our focus fully towards building the best web framework for content-driven websites. The web is changing fast, and the bar keeps rising: performance, scale, reliability, and a better experience for the teams shipping content on the web.

You’ll see that focus reflected across our roadmap, as we prepare for the upcoming Astro 6 release (beta out now!) and our 2026 roadmap. Stay tuned!

Thank you

I want to extend a huge thank you to the agencies, companies, sponsors, partners, and theme authors who chose to work with us over the years. Thank you to our initial investors — Haystack, Gradient, Uncorrelated, Lightspeed — without whom Astro likely wouldn’t exist. Thank you to everyone in our open source community who continues to help make Astro better every day. And finally, thank you to everyone who uses Astro and puts their trust in us to help them build for the web.