I Watched Deno Grow and Fade. Here’s What It Taught Me About Open Source

Today the Deno team joins Cloudflare. Congrats to the team, by the way!

I’ve used Deno since its earliest versions, I have open issues in the repo, and I really loved Deno Deploy. But when it comes to building and maintaining a company, an entire team, paying salaries and so on, you need to be realistic and look at the situation the way it really is.

I don’t believe Cloudflare bought Deno to kill it. The numbers simply must not add up to keep the platform running. And that brings us to a reflection on the open source world: companies using this software without the money or profit made from it ever flowing back to the project.

In March 2021, Deno raised a $4.9M seed funding round to revolutionize secure JavaScript & TypeScript runtimes. Five years later, here we are. They launched a lot of things: Deno Deploy, JSR and Claw Patrol. Many open source projects, very little revenue potential.

When Deno Deploy hit v1 on June 23, 2021, it was born as the first serverless platform to run Deno, similar to Cloudflare Workers. Then came v2, on February 3, 2026 (I took part in the beta, helped test and report bugs), and the platform changed drastically: only 2 regions, versus 32 in v1, which had been gradually reduced over time due to operational costs. What used to run only Deno and a few frameworks became a platform for deploying pretty much anything that runs on Node.js.

The platform got good, but the regions dropped dramatically and bugs started to show up. They moved from Google Cloud to a multi-cloud setup, and that’s when resource management and operational problems started piling up, until the Discord channel about Deno Deploy simply died and people stopped replying. Then came silence, ever since version 2.9, released in June 2026.

Deno has always offered a very generous free tier, and JSR is completely free too. But all of this consumes a lot of resources: storage, bandwidth, CDN, memory, and a bunch of other things that at the end of the month add up to a massive bill to offer something for free to other people. Sometimes that’s a detail the people using it never stop to think about.

They also launched Deno Deploy Subhosting, a white label platform to run scripts and deploys for companies’ customers, extending products and offering more features like edge functions. Some of their customers? Netlify, Slack and deco.

Other companies like Supabase and BunnyCDN also use Deno to offer their serverless services, like Edge Functions. And one question remains: of all of them, many making serious money, did any of it ever flow back as a donation? Or even to support the enterprise plan and ensure the project’s longevity?

Maybe I’m being overly dramatic. Maybe the Deno team simply lost interest in continuing to work on Deno, which is a real shame.

This reflection may not hold true for big projects: many, like Vue.js, have large donation funds, and Cloudflare itself is in that picture too, the same company the Deno team is now joining. But that’s not what happens with small and medium open source projects: tons of companies and services using them in production, making great revenue, while almost none of it comes back to the project in exchange for the usage.

It’s a reflection that’s been made before, and one that in my opinion needs to be made again, not only about donations and sustainability, but also about the quality and continuity guarantees of these projects. After all, how many are abandoned due to lack of time or resources?

I’ll wrap up what I wanted to say here. And I’ll also wrap up by saying that I now have several scripts, GitLab CI/CD files and automations written using Deno to update and use Node.

Deno joins my list of amazing projects that sadly died along the way: Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone, Lagon, Windows Phone, Ubuntu Unity, among a few others.

PS: I’ll keep and cherish my Deno mug. 🧡