Qwik

Qwik takes a fundamentally different approach to JavaScript delivery, making pages fast by default (not 'fast for a React app'). Instead of sending all your JS upfront and hydrating the page, Qwik sends near-zero JS on initial load and only downloads the code for a button when you actually click it.

What's free: Everything. MIT license. The framework, the optimizer, the Qwik City meta-framework for routing and data loading. All free.

The 'resumability' concept is innovative. Traditional frameworks (React, Next.js, Svelte) ship JavaScript, then re-execute it on the client to make the page interactive. Qwik serializes the app state into HTML and resumes exactly where the server left off. The result: near-instant interactivity regardless of app size.

The catch: the ecosystem is tiny compared to React or even Svelte. Finding Qwik developers is hard. Third-party component libraries are scarce. If you need a rich component ecosystem, you'll be building a lot from scratch. And the mental model (lazy-loading everything, dollar-sign functions, serialization boundaries) takes real adjustment even for experienced developers.