San Francisco, January 16, 2026 – A significant shift has just rippled through the web development community.

The Astro Technology Company, the innovative force behind the popular Astro web framework, is officially joining Cloudflare. This is a full acquisition, with all full-time employees of The Astro Technology Company now becoming Cloudflare employees.

For a framework lauded for its performance in building content-driven websites, this move raises critical questions about the balance between open-source integrity and corporate backing.

Astro was born in 2021 out of a frustration with the performance overhead of traditional application-centric web architectures, quickly resonated with developers. Its mission was clear: design a framework specifically for building fast, beautiful, content-driven websites, distinguishing them from stateful web applications.

This approach evidently struck a chord, as Astro is now downloaded almost 1,000,000 times per week, powering major websites and developer platforms for giants like Webflow, Wix, Microsoft, and Google.

Fred Schott, the voice behind Astro, explained the motivation behind the acquisition. While The Astro Technology Company had a larger vision of building a massive developer platform around Astro with optional hosted primitives (database, storage, analytics), attempts to realize this vision “fell flat” or proved too distracting. “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.” This candid admission highlights the inherent tension for open-source projects attempting to monetize while staying true to their core mission.

The conversations between Schott and Dane (Cloudflare CTO) revealed a shared vision for the future of the web, where content remains central, and performance, scale, and reliability are paramount.

Cloudflare is known for solving challenges from the infrastructure side (global by default, fast startup, low latency, security), and Astro, tackling it from the framework side (fast by default, simple), found an “obvious” overlap. “By working together, Cloudflare gives us the backing we need to keep innovating for our users,”

Schott stated. “Now we can stop spending cycles worrying about building a business on top of Astro, and start focusing 100% on the code.”

Crucially, the announcement stressed that Astro stays open-source and MIT-licensed. It will continue to be actively maintained, support a wide set of deployment targets (not just Cloudflare), and its open governance and current roadmap remain in place.

Cloudflare has a proven track record of supporting open-source projects without trying to “capture or lock anything down,” which was a “non-negotiable requirement” for Astro.

This acquisition, therefore, is being framed as a move to enhance Astro’s open-source development by removing the pressure of monetization.

With Cloudflare’s resources, the Astro team can now return its focus fully towards building the best web framework for content-driven websites, preparing for the upcoming Astro 6 release (beta out now!) and its 2026 roadmap.

The web is changing fast, and the bar keeps rising; this partnership aims to keep Astro at the forefront.