Changes to Hosting on Replit
blog.replit.comWill Replit still be available as a free tool for people who are learning to program to use for private experiments?
This post talks about hosting in terms of apps that other people can visit, but it's not clear to me if Replit is still going to work as a tool I can suggest to beginner programmers as an online development environment.
Yes, in fact we recently made the free plan more powerful with non-preemptible VMs, premium networking, and package caching for everyone. And working on an AI free tier coming soon. Will likely invest more in the free plan once the abuse from unlimited hosting go away.
Also — the title is slightly misleading. Static hosting is still free, and autoscale (with scale to zero) will effectively cost next to nothing for most users. Especially new programmers get very little traffic that according to our historic data it will cost $0.2 / month.
Finally beginners who cannot afford to pay but learned enough coding can make money on the site. eg, a story earlier today: https://x.com/replit/status/1709577707435274414?s=46
Really? The pricing page doesn't say anything about free private repls.
The blog post mentions that the website no longer lists the deprecated functionality. The website still says that there’s a free plan so my reading of the blog post + website is that they’re removing the free Always On feature and replacing it with Deployments. The free “write code and run it” IDE product is unchanged. That’s my guess!
Yes, I have some friends who wanted to learn Python and we used replit to great effect to collaborate together on a little text-based game. I don't blame them for charging, although it will be a shame to raise the barrier for an educational playground.
if you create a github account, you get a workspace with git, a debugger, a file system and so on - bloody incredible if you ask me.
They clearly say you can get a developer setup that should cost about 20 cents per month, so that might the new version of what you mention.
That's a problem, because when you're teaching people to program you often find that anything that needs a credit card at all is a blocker.
Young people often don't have them. People from other countries often don't have one that works. People who work for organizations often don't have the ability to spend any money at all for work they are doing that relates to that organization.
Anyone who can't get a credit card or any legal way to pay Replit isn't gonna be a profitable customer, so I can't blame them for doing that.
Best data I can find is that only 50% of US parents have let their kid use a debit or credit card for online purchases (and many wouldn't do it again). I think it's incorrect to say that 50% of American kids should be written off.
(https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/study/kids-and-cred...)
Since each kid has 2 parents that means on average they will have 1 parent who will lend them a credit card for such a purchase.
That's short sighted. Getting a credit card when under 18 or an unemployed student isn't possible. Those are the people you want learning on your platform because later on they become your valuable knowledgeable customer.
I'm surprised there - I got a debit card at 14 from my bank, and that was a decade and a half ago!
A debit card can't be used like a credit card online unless you use services like paypal which have age requirements
I'm nearly 30 and only got a credit card like a year ago. Before then, I used a debit card for everything and never had a problem with it. Granted I'm in the UK where debit cards are way more common, but I use plenty of online American tech services.
Just a few months ago, I was able to get a Visa debit card for my two teens for their savings account with no hassle.
A debit card isn't a credit card and can't be used the same way online. You could get them credit cards under your existing account but if they fail to pay you will be responsible.
Many debit cards can be used online. It depends on the particular card and the network it's backed by. In fact I haven't had a debit card that couldn't be used for online purchases since around 2003.
I have a debit card but not a credit card (and can't get one). I'm locked out of many hosting services, which don't want to allow me to pay up-front. It's very American-centric and annoying.
i wonder if it's an admission that these hosting services don't have billing sophisticated enough to alart when you hit a limit, in this case of the debit card's available balance?
This is for hosting. Development remains free
Fantastic, thanks for clarifying.
Only tangentially related but out of curiosity I visited the actual replit.com site and the amount of moving and blinking things made me to close the tab almost immediately.
Rest assured that you're not alone https://web.dev/learn/accessibility/motion/
fwiw it does respect @prefers-reduced-motion
That’s it?
Not only this has absolutely nothing to do with the announcement, but this is really just petty to get triggered over.
Oh dear.
Have you not been on HN long? :)
Complaining about the website itself in some way unrelated to the actual topic (e.g. design, fonts, use of JS, size of download, number of modules, failure on a particular browser, OS, or device, etc) is a time-honoured subject!
i stop using replit after it started taking minutes to install crates... It started out so awesome, professor started using it instead of eclipse, it was super easy to teach on, and group projects were made easy for pair programming.
Crates is especially challenging -- the build process is very expensive on all resources (cpu, ram, and disk), and packages are very hard (impossible?) to cache. It works super well on the Pro plan.
Have you tried cargo-binstall instead? They're pre-compiled crate binaries that fall back to cargo install, works very well. Also, you might want to look into the mold linker as well as sccache.
I have a Pro account. Not having to install software locally, and being able to do shared online development is very appealing and helpful. To put it another way, Replit saves me from having to spend time learning and monitoring "administrative" aspects of development. I can just work on my coding challenge. Unfortunately, the new billing system is a step backwards.
The problem for me is that hosting costs are now variable, and the mere fact that I have to monitor or worry about an unexpectedly high bill is a drop-dead. Moreover, I have to take time even to understand the billing system.
If I understand the new billing system correctly, and again, I don't want to have to spend time figuring it out, there is a monthly allowance, so that my typical small test deployments are unlikely to incur any charges beyond my prepaid annual subscription. Is that right?
Suppose I leave a site deployed, and there's a DDOS attack? Or by some fluke, the site goes viral because a Reddit user happened to like a test image on the home page. My allowance is exceeded, and I'm suck with a bill. Sure, it's unlikely, but it could happen. I see complaints about unexpected bills from various cloud providers often, nearly every week.
The whole appeal of Replit's earlier billing system is that there was a fixed cost. Is there a setting so a deployment will be taken offline if the prepaid allowance is exceeded? If not, I won't use the service as much as I'd like. Why pay for a service I use only for the occasional one-off?
That said, this makes me realize I'm not a satisfied customer, and I regret renewing my one year plan recently. The site is just too unreliable. A problem the replit has had for years (I haven't tried this recently), for example, is that if I accidentally select a large file in the editor (like a data file), the browser freezes while an attempt is made to render the file. Sometimes the only way to recover from this is to delete the repl. At least put up an alert if a large file is selected, "You have selected a 1 GB file....."
Also, the forum-based support is practically unusable, unless someone happens to have recently posted about the problem I'm having. Searching through posts and reading lot of unsolved, minimally categorized issues with non-authoritative replies is not a good use of my time. I get that Replit doesn't want to provide support, and there might not be a market for paid support in Replit's user base, but Replit can do better. EDIT: Is anyone working on ML-based support?
And so the enshittification begins...
I don't blame them for stopping the free tier, but they really don't make it obvious thats what's happening. Feels almost deceptive. This is the only part that mentions it:
> Want to use deployments but don’t want to spend $7/mo for the Hacker plan? We thought about you as well. Starting today, you can now pay for Autoscale & Static Deployment overages without a plan
It’s communication meant to existing users and it’s a nuanced picture worth elaborating. But if you are not an active user it’s best if you just look at our pricing page for a complete picture: https://replit.com/pricing
I'm an occasional user, but the one thing holding me back is the almost complete lack of intellisense. I mostly work in JVM languages, and I get that JetBrains-level language awareness is hard, but if you're aiming for the professional market it's what you're up against. And it's really fraustrating, because you're solving a big problem! But JetBrains solves an even bigger one.
Looks like they have a free plan on their pricing page when I just looked now, what are you referring to exactly?
So pay-as-you-go? Would be nice if it had some spend limit.
It does have a spend limit! (See later on in post)
Don't editorialize. Actual title "Changes to Hosting on Replit"
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading
The original title is misleadingly vague.
The original title should be kept when it has semantic content; this one doesn't.
We do tend to treat corporate announcements differently in this respect, but apparently the submitted title isn't quite true, and I don't think the article's title is so bad as far as corpspeak goes.
Thanks, we've changed it now.
Submitted title was "Replit moving away from free hosting". (Apparently it's a bit more complex than that but I haven't looked at the details.)
The edited title was more useful for what's really going on.
As far as I understand, it's not true; and it can't be more useful in that case, right?
For the inevitable discussion about open source alternatives: "How Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project"
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
That seems to reveal their true colors. One to be avoided. Google Cloud with it, since they announced a big partnership, and would have had to have known about this.
I guess time to eff that with an eff u?
Seems like riju.codes is no more?
It looks like it is semi-active. The website appears to be down. The repo has some recent activity but not a whole lot. https://github.com/radian-software/riju/graphs/contributors
There are two others in the readme: https://github.com/radian-software/riju/#similar-projects