Statically

What Statically actually is

Statically is a free, open CDN for static assets pulled straight from Git repositories and npm. You hand it a URL shaped like cdn.statically.io/gh/:user/:repo@:tag/:file and it fetches the file from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, GitHub Gist, or the npm registry and serves it through a global cache. No account, no DNS changes, no billing page to get past. For open-source projects that want a CDN in front of a stylesheet or a JavaScript library without standing up infrastructure, that is a genuinely useful primitive, and it has been quietly running since 2018.

The project was started in August 2018 by Frans Allen and is run out of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, by a team of two to ten people depending on who is counting. The public GitHub repository dates to August 2018 and is still being updated. Under the hood Statically is not its own network: the company is open about being "powered by bunny.net and Cloudflare", and third-party listings describe the delivery layer as multi-CDN (Google Cloud CDN, CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, BunnyCDN at various points in its history). In practice your bytes are cached and served by those upstream networks; Statically is the fetching, rewriting, and image-processing layer in front of them. That distinction matters for anyone assessing the risk profile of building on it, and we come back to it below.

Beyond raw file passthrough, the other headline feature is the image CDN. The /img/:domain/:params/:file endpoint resizes, converts, and re-compresses images on the fly: w= and h= for dimensions, f=auto for WebP negotiation, f=webp to force conversion, q= for quality (default 85, range 10–100). Supported input types are GIF, JPEG, PNG, and WebP, with a 20MB per-image source limit. There are WordPress plugins built around it, and ecosystem projects that wire it into asset pipelines. A "Statically Pro" tier appears in the documentation (with per-user image URLs), but we could not find a public pricing page for it — more on that in the pricing section.

Pricing: what you really pay

The core product is free. That is the pricing model: no credit card, no per-GB invoice, no trial clock. The GitHub README calls it "a free, fast global content delivery network for open-source projects", the homepage repeats it, and there is no checkout flow anywhere on the site. If your asset delivery needs fit inside the product's shape — public repository content, npm packages, images under the documented limits — you can run it indefinitely at zero cost, and in our view that is the entire argument for Statically existing alongside Cloudflare's free tier and jsDelivr.

How a free service stays funded is a fair question, and the answers are visible on the page: donation links (a Patreon for the founder) and referral links to bunny.net and Cloudflare. We do not hold referral monetization against a free tool — our own site is ad-free precisely so we can say this — but readers should know the revenue model is thin and mostly goodwill. There is no enterprise contract, no support package to buy, and therefore no real SLA conversation.

The one honesty caveat: we have seen "100GB monthly bandwidth" quoted for Statically's free tier (it appears on comparison pages, including, previously, our own). We could not find that figure in Statically's own documentation, and the project's stated limits are different things entirely — 25MB per file for repository content, 20MB per source image for the image endpoint, public repositories only, and rate limiting applied in abuse cases. We have removed the unverified bandwidth number from our copy and flagged it in the corrections notes. Treat any specific free-tier volume figure for Statically as folklore until the project publishes one.

Performance & infrastructure

Statically's infrastructure is borrowed, by design. When you request a file through cdn.statically.io, the platform resolves it against the origin (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or npm), caches the response, and serves it from whichever upstream CDN is in the rotation. The company currently names bunny.net and Cloudflare as its delivery partners; earlier descriptions of the stack also mentioned Google Cloud CDN, CloudFront, and Fastly. So the raw edge reach — hundreds of points of presence — is real, but it belongs to those networks, not to Statically. The homepage's "serve optimized files from Git repositories via global CDN" claim is accurate precisely because of that.

What Statically adds on top is convenience and transformation. Automatic WebP conversion and quality tuning via query parameters is the kind of thing you otherwise need an image pipeline for. Cache behavior is CDN-standard (long cache on tagged/immutable paths is the sensible way to use it), and the project exposes a status page at status.statically.io. There is also a plain "paste your repository URL" box on the homepage that generates the CDN URL for you, which tells you who the target user is.

On measured performance we have nothing to report. We have not run our own benchmark suite against Statically's endpoints, and we will not invent numbers for a service we have not tested. What we can say editorially: for cacheable, immutable assets with sensible cache headers, delivery latency will track the upstream CDN serving the request — which is to say good to excellent — and the first-hit fetch from a Git host will be the slow path. For current measurements on providers we have instrumented, see our benchmarks.

Where it falls short

Start with the obvious structural limit: only public repositories are supported. Anything private has to go somewhere else, which rules out internal tooling, private package assets, and most enterprise use. File sizes are capped at 25MB for repository content and 20MB for source images. There is no account layer, so there is no per-project analytics dashboard, no authenticated API, no cache-purge-by-API contract you can build automation on with confidence. "In cases of abuse, rate limiting may be applied" is the closest the project comes to an acceptable-use policy, and it is deliberately vague.

Then there is the business risk. This is a small, donation-supported project layered on top of other companies' CDNs. If bunny.net or Cloudflare change terms, if the founder moves on, or if abuse costs become unbearable, there is no contractual recourse — no SLA, no support queue, no enterprise number. We watched this exact pattern kill bigger services: our own review of StackPath documents a platform with $400 million in funding shutting down and telling customers to copy their data off. Statically at least has a cheap exit — your assets live in your own repository, so the CDN is a rewrite of URLs, not a hostage situation — but you should treat it as a convenience layer, not as infrastructure you promise your own customers.

Transparency is mixed. The documentation is clear where it exists (the image API is well specified), but key operational questions — the real bandwidth policy, cache eviction rules, what the Pro tier includes and costs, what happens when an upstream CDN is in the rotation today versus last year — are not documented publicly. The "Statically Pro" docs page exists without a discoverable price. For a tool this popular, we would like the limits written down.

Who should pick this

Our pick for hobbyists, open-source maintainers, and demo projects that need to serve assets from a Git repository without spending anything or configuring anything. If you are embedding a stylesheet from a tagged GitHub release, or you want on-the-fly image resizing for a small WordPress site, Statically does the job with one URL change, and the pricing is right.

We would not pick it for anything with an uptime requirement. Production sites with paying users, internal applications, or anything serving private content should use a CDN with a contract behind it — Cloudflare's free tier covers a lot of the same ground with a real company behind it, jsDelivr overlaps heavily with Statically's Git/npm use case, and BunnyCDN or CloudFront give you documented limits and an SLA. If your interest is the image transformation piece specifically, compare it against dedicated image CDNs before standardizing on it.

The honest framing we keep coming back to: Statically is a well-made free utility run by a tiny team on top of other people's networks. Used within that envelope it is a good deal. Used as a load-bearing dependency it is a risk you are not paying anyone to absorb. Our CDN category lists the contracted alternatives if you need one.

Key takeaways

• Statically is free, sign-up-free CDN delivery for public GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Gist, and npm content, running since 2018 and maintained by a very small Indonesian team.
• Delivery is multi-CDN by way of bunny.net and Cloudflare (historically also Google Cloud CDN, CloudFront, and Fastly) — the edge footprint is borrowed, and Statically adds fetching, caching, and image transformation.
• The image endpoint (resize, WebP conversion, quality control, 20MB source limit) is well documented and useful; the rest of the operational policy is thin.
• Documented limits: public repositories only, 25MB per file, rate limiting on abuse. The widely-quoted "100GB free bandwidth" figure is not in Statically's own docs — we stopped repeating it.
• No SLA, no support contract, no private content. Fine for hobby and open-source use; wrong for anything with paying users.
• Zero lock-in risk: your assets live in your own repository, so leaving Statically is a URL change.

Sources

• https://statically.io
• https://github.com/staticallyio/statically
• https://github.com/staticallyio/statically/blob/main/README.md
• https://statically.io/docs/using-images
• https://thecompanycheck.com/company/b/statically/c8af2f818c1848338
• https://alternativeto.net/software/statically/about