I Need Your Help to Make 11ty Fully Independent and Sustainable in 2024
Updated September 11, 2024: As 11ty is now joining Font Awesome, we’re winding down our sustainability fundraising campaign. I’ll post more detail about this soon and I sincerely appreciate everyone that donated!
The 11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good wrapped up two short weeks ago and it was (to say the least) incredible. The speakers, the talks, and most importantly — the community.
Piggybacking from this amazing momentum, 11ty is making some bigger moves: we’re going all-in to create a fully independent and sustainable, grass-roots funded open source project in 2024.
Practically speaking this means that for the very first time in 11ty’s history, I will be working independently on 11ty full time. This means increased iteration speed, more responsive official support, more features and bug fixes, and faster releases.
The ethos of 11ty has always been to do more, with less. You see fingerprints from this idea throughout the project: in our build performance, in our HTML-first tooling philosophy, in our ecosystem of small unix-philosophy style composable utilities that work independent of Eleventy (like Image, Fetch, WebC, and is-land).
As a project we’ve seen folks happily migrate to Eleventy — away from tools with much larger budgets and investment — with rave reviews on how little app-team maintenance was required long-term. It has many folks asking the question: what is the total cost of ownership (buzzword alert) of your current tech stack?
Asking for Help
This change also means that 11ty needs your help, financially. This blog post is the first time we’ve ever done a fundraising push for 11ty in the seven years we’ve helped folks build fast and stable web sites on the Jamstack and I wouldn’t be asking if it weren’t absolutely necessary.
If you are already a supporter on our Open Collective — thank you. You have made this move possible. With the money we’ve saved through our Open Collective, we’ve unlocked a runway for this sustainability push, but we need more businesses and companies to be involved to survive long-term.
If you use 11ty at work, now is the time to get your company involved. To reinforce the stability of 11ty moving forward, we need more recurring (monthly/yearly) contributions. Individual sponsorships are also welcome — every bit helps.
- Our preferred fundraising platform is Open Collective:
opencollective.com/11ty - We are also on GitHub Sponsors, which may already be a vendor approved by your company:
github.com/sponsors/11ty(Learn more about sponsoring via GitHub sponsors)
At time of writing, we had approximately $2200 in monthly recurring contributions. Our fundraising goal is $6000 (monthly).
The above chart updates daily with live data and we are currently 70.6% to the goal: $4233.69 of $6000 USD.
If you have questions or want to have a discussion about this (very big) news, please email me directly. Let’s work together!
Partnerships
We’re also looking for corporate partners in the following spaces for more creative partnerships moving forward:
- Developer Tools
- Web Hosting (Jamstack, Static Sites, et al)
- Image Optimization (we’re about to ship a best-in-class Image Optimization plugin that would pair quite nicely with a hosted service)
- Content Management Systems
- Web Performance and Monitoring
Is this you? Contact me directly.
Here are a few examples of some lovely organizations using 11ty:
NASA
Cern
TC39
W3C
Google
Mozilla
JetBrains
web.dev
MIT
Stanford
V8
GSAP
Chrome Developers
Foursquare
WebPageTest
A11Y Project
United Kingdom (gov)
France (gov)
Stack Overflow
Lit
Glitch
Stackblitz
Open Web Docs
Greenpeace
CSIS
ESLint
Mocha
reveal.js
Panic
Set Studio
Ookla
Kandji
Khan Academy
Basecamp
Snowpack
ffconf
UX London
Nordhealth
Orange
Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison
California (gov)
Red Hat
Just Eat Takeaway
34 Comments
jenn schiffer
@zachleat @eleventy this is great to see! check out our fast forward program if any fastly services could help with this effort - https://www.fastly.com/fast-forward/. you know how to reach me if you’ve got questions Fast Forward - how we're building the open internet
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@jenn @eleventy ooh — I’ll check it out! (and thank you!)
Bryce Wray
@zachleat But still with CloudCannon, correct? The “working independently on 11ty full time” reference raised my eyebrows slightly. ????
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@BryceWrayTX no longer with CloudCannon, unfortunately. Nothing but love for all those folks though.
Bryce Wray
@zachleat ???? Yep, know what you mean. Did some work for them briefly but it came to an end. Same good feelings for the whole bunch.
Kevin Pennekamp
I've just contributed to Eleventy. Consider supporting them too — every little helps! https://opencollective.com/11ty @eleventy Eleventy - Open Collective
cthos ????
@zachleat Am I reading this correctly that you're leaving Cloud Cannon to become fully independent?
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@cthos I am no longer working at CloudCannon, yes. 11ty is now my full time job.
cthos ????
@zachleat Wooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!
uncenter
@zachleat @eleventy have you considered allowing the core team to expand beyond just you? it's been sad to see the project stagnate and i think having more frequent committers would help!
henry ✷
@zachleat I contribute monthly to @eleventy — Eleventy's active development makes both my work life and the health of the web better in a material way. I hope y'all consider contributing as well :) opencollective.com/11ty
Rik Schennink
@zachleat @eleventy will definitely keep sponsoring ????
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@rikschennink @eleventy Appreciate you Rik!!
Christian Alder
@zachleat @eleventy I have some catching up to do for sure; starting now and hope to always keep a contribution connection going forward. ???? I wish you all the best in going full time with this, it’s an amazing project that brought the joy of web dev back for me.
Eleventy ???? v3.0.0-alpha.10
@christian @zachleat appreciate you Christian!!
Tom
@zachleat @eleventy oh wow, now that's done news! Will figure out what I can do to support the project asap.
Eleventy ???? v3.0.0-alpha.10
@ttntm @zachleat thank you Tom!!
matthew
Congratulations!
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
y’all are incredible — thank you so much for boosting and sharing this. @eleventy
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@matthew thank you!
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@henry @eleventy thank you Henry!! ????
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@uncenter @eleventy I think we have different definitions of “stagnate”
Katie Sylor-Miller
@zachleat @eleventy I just doubled my monthly contribution from $11 to $22! Onward to the future, Zach!
uncenter
@zachleat @eleventy stagnate as in 481 open issues and multiple unmaintained "official" plugins?
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@ksylor @eleventy thank you Katie!! ????????????????
Adrianna Tan
@ksylor @zachleat @eleventy 2(11ty)
Jerod Santo
@zachleat let’s get you back on @jsparty to help spread the word on this
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@jerod @jsparty awesome. Sign me up
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@anarodrigues @eleventy Thank you Ana!! ????
Zach Leatherman :11ty:
@michelle @eleventy Thank you Michelle!
Eleventy ???? v3.0.0-alpha.10
@mikka thank you Mikka!
Eleventy ???? v3.0.0-alpha.10
@mxbck Thank you Max! This means a lot! ????
Eugenio Monforte
@mxbck I still love Astro for build static websites, but I'm more and more attracted to the vision behind Eleventy
Pirijan
@zachleat @Colman that’s really great thx!