Create: 2025-07-13, Update: 2025-10-12
Sometime ago, I was really interested in htmx. I have even built some tools in Emacs for myself to write htmx. But htmx is sometime a pain in the butt, especially for some big form. Therefore, I looked for an alternative.
In some random reddit post, I came across datastar, which is another hypermedia library, but uses SSE and signals. It claims to have both of the good thing from htmx and alpine.js. The author has a stand that he thought using form in htmx to communicate with server is a mistake, json should be used instead.
I had a running service written in htmx for some time. It is a clinic opening hour service to inform my patients when I will be available in which clinic. (Yes, I am not a programmer, but a healthcare professional.)
I decided to swap my whole service from htmx to datastar. And I have been working on it for a couple of weeks.
Today, as usual, I open the datastar official site for reference. The site is changed. And the visual is now stunning. I thought it was a great thing, it means the developer is now rapidly working on this good project.
But shockingly, a weird word of datastar pro is out. I was at beta v1 before. It is now finally released.
I then look at what pro version gives us. I thought it was just some quality of life add-on like tailwind components.
But no, the datastar dev somehow move a portion of the freely available features behind a paywall. What the fuck.
Things like replace-url, scroll-into-view which were free, is now NOT free.
With my mouth wide opened, I continue to check out what the price is. A shocking $299 for solo dev.
It is not like $299 is much for me, but I am just a hobbist. I enjoy using the cutting edge technology and framework just for fun. Now the fun is going to cost me money.
I do not make any money with my service. And I don't see a reason to pay features that were free before.
I understand open source dev needs money to sponsor their work. However, the way that datastar dev do is utter disgrace.
Just as Reddit user Extreme-Ad-3920 concluded what I feel.
Fuck you datastar. I am going back to htmx.
I discovered that this post is getting some attention in hacker news thread and being cited in the DataStar website as an essay.
I am keeping the original content, just fixing some typo.
This update is about my current thought on the issue, and some additional background on why I wrote the blog.
My simple server is using htmx. In my simple use case, htmx and datastar would work, including the current free tier datastar.
The pro features don't really matter. The only pro feature I relied on was replace-url. I was able to write some lines of JavaScript to achieve the same result.
Learning to use datastar was a fun experience.
This blog post was an emotional product. I was furious and desperate because I thought I have to ditch weeks of work in converting an existing project from htmx to datastar.
In my opinion, there was a trust issue between the datastar dev and users. I worry about more features being stripped away to the pro version, if I keep using the free version, my software would not work in the next update.
But from the dev's point of view, the worry did not make sense, because they rebuilt the whole code base, multiple times. The only consistent thing is the API. They think they are sharing something new to us.
It appeared as a rugpull to me, because some API no longer work. The stripped API isn't that hard to replicate even to a non-programmer like me, but breaking the userspace annoyed me.
Will I use datastar in the future? Maybe. Will I convert my existing service to datastar? Probably not, but this time is due to laziness.
Do I still think the dev of datastar is greedy? Yes, but because of its non-profit nature, pro version purchase is more like a glorified donation. I, as a user is also greedy, I expect the open source author will provide everything for free.
When critics appear, the datastar author always come out real quick to defend his work, his points are like this, just for reference.
The license is MIT
He rewrote the whole thing multiple times
Fork the beta and support yourself
He expect nothing from us, so we should expect nothing from him
What pro features you relied on was "taken away"?
I wish datastar all the best in the future.
I would like to apologize for the words I use in the original post, I should never have said fuck you in the first place.
But now I would like to say fuck you again, not to the project or the author, but to some random guys that from the datastar discord server that mocked and humiliated me. Those reckless defenders that do personal attacks hurt the project.
In a retrospective view, if those stripped API were never in the beta, the whole drama will not happen.
And here are some unrelated extra things that I would like to talk about.
I am a non-native English speaker, I tried my best to keep my message clear. I do not use an LLM to write blog.
I know how to use version control. I know what a software license is.
Did I make any profit of using datastar as a tool to connect with my patients? No, the datastar server rewrite was killed before production, it was htmx only. But would I benefit from using datastar as the backend? Maybe that would justify the purchase of a pro license.