Fastly acquires Glitch, the web coding service formerly called Fog Creek Software; Glitch CEO Anil Dash will join Fastly as its VP of developer experience
The coding platform will continue under the new owner — Fastly, a major provider of cloud services, announced today that it's acquiring Glitch …
Context & Ripple Effects
Fastly, the CDN and cloud-services provider behind clients like Reddit, GitHub, and Stripe, is buying Glitch — the collaborative web coding platform that began as Fog Creek Software and reported a community of 2.5M+ built web apps alongside its $30M Series A. Glitch CEO Anil Dash moves to Fastly as VP of developer experience, and the platform continues under the new owner.
The deal slots Fastly into the same consolidation wave that saw Netlify acquire its competitor Gatsby in 2023: infrastructure companies absorbing developer-facing app platforms. The arc closes three years later, when Dash announces Glitch will stop hosting projects and close user profiles — making this acquisition a case study in what infrastructure buyers actually want from developer communities.
First-order effects
- Glitch's community of app builders gains a much larger infrastructure owner, while Anil Dash shifts from running an independent platform to shaping developer experience strategy across Fastly's product line.
- Fastly gets a developer brand and community funnel it did not have to build itself, attaching a coding platform to its CDN and edge-services business.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in the developer-platform space — most visibly Netlify, which had just consolidated by buying Gatsby — face a competitor that now bundles community coding tools with delivery infrastructure, pressuring them to deepen their own platform lock-in.
- Glitch's independent positioning as a neutral collaboration and code-sharing home erodes, pushing some of its community toward standalone alternatives rather than infrastructure-tied platforms.
Third-order effects
- The pattern — infrastructure companies acquiring beloved developer communities and eventually winding down the product — points toward developer platforms surviving mainly as on-ramps to cloud services rather than as independent destinations, with community goodwill absorbed into the acquirer's brand.
- If the Netlify-Gatsby and Fastly-Glitch deals are the template, the web development tooling layer keeps consolidating under a handful of delivery and cloud providers, narrowing where independent developers can host and share work.
The trend: Cloud infrastructure providers are acquiring independent developer coding platforms to own the community-to-deployment funnel, with the acquired products often subordinated to the acquirer's core business over time.