Why is Surge free?

First—Thanks for asking!

We are believers in “Provide more value than you capture,” and making it free to publish to Surge by default, with a custom domain, is one way we aim to do this. It’s important to us that more people can easily publish to the web.

We also care deeply about open platforms, and open source nearly everything we build, including the Surge CLI and many of our platform’s dependencies. The co-founders of Surge also co-created PhoneGap/Cordova, and the team maintains Harp, SuperScript, Utility OpenType, and many other projects.

Surge was partially born out of the Mozilla WebFWD program, and we share many motivations and desired impacts with our friends at Mozilla.

Surge Plus

Since introducing Surge, we’ve launched Surge Plus, a way to upgrade and bolster your static project with server side features like:

• Custom redirects
• SSL for your custom domain
• Password-protected sites

…and a lot more. Using Surge,

will remain free. Mainly, that is unlimited applications with custom domains. Oh, and you will always own your content (I hate that I need to say that).

With Surge and Surge Plus, we’re focused on creating real improvements for front-end developers today, and committed to making Surge the best way for front-end developers to put HTML5 applications into production. Let us know what you think on Twitter!

Sign up for Surge Plus, right from the command line.