Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
noreplit.comI get that losing access to things you got used to sucks. At the same time, IMO, this post comes across quite entitled and whiny. Nobody owes you anything, specially not free hosting and/or server time forever. That stuff isn’t cheap and isn’t easy to manage, and they’re paying people and infra on what I imagine isn’t a great return.
So, free users are sad because it’s not the free they want it to be, except the free they want is essentially free everything forever. That doesn’t really work.
Registering a whole unique domain and taking the time to make this really rubs me the wrong way. If you dislike it, move on, maybe tell your friends.
I’ll also say that if something means so much to you that you paid for a domain but didn’t pay for the thing you paid for the domain to complain about, why didn’t you pay for the thing you complain about?
If something means something to you, adds value to your life, or saves you time, maybe it’s worth considering paying for it if the value provided is worth the cost. Demanding free stuff is entitled and silly and needs to stop.
“Free” is never, ever free and it blows my mind that people still don’t get this.
Like, it’s understandable that you get a little burned the first time it happens, but then you’ve learned that this is how it all works. “Free” in a SAAS context has always and will always mean “no need to pay us until we decide otherwise, end of negotiation.”
Every time I look at a free account for some product now, I ask myself if I’m willing to pay for it at some point. If the answer is “no”, then sometimes I just don’t even do it.
People can’t even be bothered to think critically about the product situations they put themselves, and I’m sure these people are intelligent in many other aspects of their lives, but this is such a simple concept that I don’t understand how people, especially tech professionals, struggle with.
I’m from very far outside the tech bubble, far enough outside it that people don’t even personally know anybody that writes software and there are almost no local software companies. People in that group - the vast majority of people in the world but by definition not really possible for an engineer to have much contact with - do not understand what work is involved in creating and running software. How well do you know the amount of work involved in getting your medication into your body or your computer chip produced?
I think with software it’s even harder for some people to appreciate the costs because they don’t have an intuitive understanding of what’s required to make it - even though most people don’t know how a lot of their goods and services are made, they know eg a guy in a factory made it and some other guys transported it, and they can kind of put a face to a name. They might know that someone had to design the page they’re looking at, but they have no idea a backend even exists (why do you think we have the term “cloud”?) and no way to estimate what it costs to run, so of course they don’t also know about CVEs and web standards and wipeout/takeout/data residency and multitenancy and releases. They just see a web page that used to work and now doesn’t.
It doesn’t help that so much of the software they use is free, because it’s being used as a funnel/delivery mechanism for paid stuff like hardware or monetized through ads, or paid for by their employer, or because it’s just cheap to maintain. It’s kind of reasonable to assume that all that software stuff you use is free because it’s easy to make. Even though replit is software-for-software, it seems like the type of thing that’s used mostly by beginners who still probably don’t understand what it takes to maintain and operate paid software to a reasonable degree of quality, so the same situation applies.
Imo the worst part about this noreplit thing is that everyone who uses their product does, or at least should, know how difficult creating something like it is. These aren't the outside the tech bubble people, they're just confoundingly entitled.
That’s the impression I got looking at the dev behind this site. They clearly have development experience, they’re just mad and trying to make as much noise about it as they can.
I got the impression that they're very young and that can understandably come with a bit less self-awareness.
If that is the case, imo they'd be better served looking into the immense amount of resources available to students: I know when I was a kid I had $0 to spend on software and hardware, just sending an email from a .edu account got people willing to give
Today it's even easier to get those kinds of resources: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/
We have faith that someone has hacked the business in a way to provide endless value.
I remember an operations incident where we had to quickly pay a previously "free" service that had recently switched their model breaking the scale up of nodes in our system. Did the developer screw up by: 1) not creating a local system for hosting docker images (would detail the project timeline); 2) not well documenting this dependency for operations team before their departure? 3) his/her Manager did not catch this dependency on docker hosting docker images or otherwise catch their change in free tier policy ?
There is some liability on the host some free things your put out there for example "free cdn hosted" JavaScript libraries. If your not at a significant scale that has a business model that lets you commit to continuing to host things you should perhaps not set up free hosting for things.
Not saying it applies in Replit case; they are I imagine a company trying to show revenue growth so they can continue to exist and does not sound like they are breaking production with these changes that are announced ahead of time. Users can migrate to another thing as the article is outlining.
I think that relying on a free service in a production environment that could cause an outage is a really, really bad idea because you have no SLA or relationship with the vendor. In that sense, you are very much getting what you paid for.
It's not like paid services haven't done tons of rugpulls and unannounced changes over the last few years.
Oh I’m not saying that paid services are perfect by any means. But relying on a free service in prod is unquestionably more risky than using an established service in a paid context.
> ...why didn’t you pay for the thing you complain about? If something means something to you, adds value to your life, or saves you time, maybe it’s worth considering paying for it if the value provided is worth the cost. Demanding free stuff is entitled and silly and needs to stop.
At risk of derailing this conversation, but a common problem today is that oftentimes the companies offering a free service simply won't let you pay for it: long before Elon and Twitter Blue, I wanted to pay for Twitter so I could have an ad-free experience with some kind of "personal-grade" API access so I could use my own clients - but that was never an option.
Similarly, I would like to pay Google for an ad-free search experience (and to filter out content-farm websites from my search results...), instead Google's attitude is pushing me towards https://kagi.com/ - which is their loss, I suppose.
There's also the worst-of-both-worlds: when you pay for something, and it still comes with ads, and introduces user-hostile changes to the UX - or otherwise leaves you with the feeling that you aren't valued as a customer (e.g. Windows 11, Reddit, post-Elon Twitter, etc).
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We're told that as customers in a free-market it's up to us to vote with our wallets, but clearly even that isn't working to effect the change we want to see.
Yeah, I had been wanting a good paid search engine for ages since I didn’t like being google’s product or watching as their search got worse for my use cases over time. I pay for Kagi now and it’s really worth it for me, specially considering customizations you can add to improve the experience.
I did use GSuite for my own email/cloud storage setup though have since moved to other providers to try to mitigate risk, eg if Google doesn’t like me for literally any reason, they could disable my account and I’d lose access to mail, files, etc.
I’ll often pay for products I use a lot even though I don’t get that much value out, eg Discord/Reddit, though those two companies seem to recently have changed course somewhat so I’ve stopped paying for them. It was mostly to support a product I cared about.
A lot of people aren’t fortunate enough to be able to pay for stuff, which I was once not, and realize that it’s not always so simple of a problem.
In this case, though, if you have access to the Internet and a semi-okay device, you can achieve a lot
If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it? Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads. So you’ll get a very tiny percentage of people paying for a service where you hope you’ll recoup your investments after some years. Maybe never.
> If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it?
But bnce the code is written to handle it then it's there for everyone to use (though yes, billing infrastructure does requires continual upkeep) - it could even be an internal garage/passion-project/hackathon thing. Companies like Twitter want to attact "the best", and people like that will want to build products that they themselves want to use - why stop them?
Plus there might be other intangible benefits to supporting power-users: it means the power-users will talk about how great something is, and you can't buy word-of-mouth influence like that.
> Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads.
People said the same thing about paying-for-YouTube, and yet YouTube Premium is here to stay, and I'm glad that Google was willing to experiment with the concept, and it worked - but what about all the companies that aren't willing to at-least try to find out?
There is no such thing as “once the code has been written”.
A passion project is great until the passionate project flounder moves on, then it’s unmaintainable junk.
A passion-project that’s been productized just becomes a regular software project to anyone else besides the original creator - no-one is suggesting we take garage-projects and ship-it immediately.
It’s kinda like how Microsoft handled easter-eggs in the 1990s (before they were banned completely around ~2003), where the egg is just another engineering feature-project, with a spec-doc, a dev timeline, a test plan, and accountability - even if the end-feature is designed to be hidden.
You really can’t apply that to a payment feature. Unfortunately everything that touches money needs constant attention, even if you “just use Stripe”.
And yet many of these sites put enormous effort into combating ad blockers. So clearly the fact that users don’t want ads is fairly significant to them.
Users who don’t want ads aren’t exactly the same as users who are willing to pay. Prime example — myself. What I’m getting at, companies have calculated that in most of scenarios having paid model isn’t worth it. There will always be exceptions for services that people use a lot — Spotify, Netflix, Youtube and etc. For websites where you go on for a few minutes, people aren’t willing to pay up.
> There's also the worst-of-both-worlds: when you pay for something, and it still comes with ads, and introduces user-hostile changes to the UX - or otherwise leaves you with the feeling that you aren't valued as a customer (e.g. Windows 11, Reddit, post-Elon Twitter, etc).
And the Peacock streaming service.
The best part about that is that they lose money and customers and possibly gain zealous competitors because of it. Customer profit incentives far outweigh as revenue incentives
As someone who has done the technical work of converting a product with a free-tier to a paid product, I mostly agree. I think the problem mostly stems from the transition being inherently painful to a lot of users - it’s not really reasonable IMO for them to expect hosted software to be free forever but it’s definitely frustrating for them to transition off of it if they can’t or won’t pay for some reason.
In my particular case there were a few pain points where I couldn’t help but sympathize with the complainers. For starters, they’re still subject to all the problems stemming from vendor lock-in, so migrating away may require not just a lift and shift but a partial or total rewrite. Another common problem is that they wrote some software for eg a for-fun website or side project a long time ago and don’t check up on it often - they may not even use or have access to the email and other contact info you have at your disposal to tell them that their stuff will break if they don’t pay by a certain date. So a lot of people don’t know about the change until their stuff breaks or they check in one some old project and find it broken or gone.
This was less of a problem for me than it probably is for Replit, but students are particularly impacted because they usually have little money relative to their investment or interest in the thing. Students under 18 without any credit or debit card may not even have any way to pay at all. And also they are still figuring out how things work so they don’t necessarily understand without being told that eg free tiers are primarily meant make it easy for people to try the software before paying for it (the company doesn’t want you to use it forever without paying), subject to a lot of annoying things like abuse, and just generally require a decent amount of operational maintenance to keep running. And of course they haven’t had corporate communication styles beaten into their brains so they’re pretty rude about expressing their discontent.
Basically, I think it’s wrong to feel entitled to receiving a free thing that obviously costs someone money to provide for forever, and that you should just pay for it if it adds value and is reasonably priced. But it’s also inherently frustrating to be on the receiving end of these changes, so grumbling and discontent are only natural.
> but students are particularly impacted
That's a failure of the product/marketing planners then - there's a great deal of positive value that comes from offering free (or heavily discounted) plans for verified students, for example. There's a reason why Adobe and Autodesk tolerate, to a certain extent, unlicensed/piracy of their tools, especially in markets where even their educational-discounts are still too expensive for many to afford.
It's not just that it isn't free, it's that prices are much higher, previous (paid!) hobbyist plans are basically useless and their pricing sucks compared to alternatives, with no features to support the higher price.
So yes, they dislike it and want to let people know it sucks. Replit is welcome to charge what they want. Former users are welcome to post a public website of what they think of the changes.
The part that gets me is they have been reaching out to schools with their Teams for Education program and given the impression that it’s great for kids because it is free outside of the program.
I disagree they owe everyone the promises they have been sending out over the last 8 years if they fail to live upto that it affects what they represent to people. The brand is damaged. Having said that they have a base of customers and press (no press is bad press) so the strategy worked.
I remember them showing up on here. I knew this wasn't going to last.
Cloud Flare will be in a similiar spot in the future.
Rent a $5/mo Linux VPS and be happy. I think more people should do this because what you learn (and you'll learn a lot) is the foundation of everything else. Do this even if you are a programmer used to deploying to sophisitcated CI/CD stacks and k8s. The tight resource constraints (e.g. 1G RAM) are good for you - they make you think, and take care what you run and when you run it. Learn to setup ssh on both ends; learn to tail auth.log; learn how to write bash library functions; learn to run podman if you must; learn to update your OS; learn about tmux and htop and a 1000 other things. Literally all of these skills are applicable to everything else - they are elementary. If you ship it you own it and if you think you can avoid learning this stuff you're wrong. Take heart: the stakes are very low so you can make mistakes. The worst that will happen is hackers take over your VPS and ddos someone for a bit and you have to wipe and start over.
I went this route and got taken over by hackers multiples times. It was very worth it. I got taken over by hackers because my password for ssh was "mars". Me and my little brother were sharing it and wanted an easy password (yeah we have ssh keys now).
Anyways, we both learnt a lot (htop tmux etc) . I'm always jealous that he got to learn everything earlier than me. But if he's not better than me then I consider myself a failure wrt being an older brother.
The only drawback is that this doesn't work if you want to do ai stuff. For those use cases I rent a machine on paper space for a cheap hourly rate.
>I got taken over by hackers
I'm a little sad I never was. I started with the Linode "hardening linux guide" and so had a firewall and disabled ssh passwords from day 1. I still have fun looking at the failed attempts on 22 and 443. My server gets so many weird requests, and they used to crash the server. A few iterations and that stopped happening.
Oh, another thing that's worth learning: how to acquire and refresh a Lets Encrypt TLS cert via the ACME protocol. Doing this requires interesting confluence of skills and tools - you must carve out a vestigial http route in your server, and also configure certbot and cron. And working out the bugs takes a few iterations. (You could install Caddy, but where's the fun in that?!)
Making it all work, from scratch, made me feel happy in the same way that when I watch people rebuild carburetors or who build bookshelves from scratch makes them feel. It's not new, it's not innovative, but its good. And it's always more interesting than you'd ever suspect.
I thought I had been once, and got a very scary email that came from my own domain, claiming to have gotten into my things, and I fully assumed it was the VPS that got hacked. After calming down and raiding the shit out of everything I realized it was just plain old domain spoofing. Both disappointing and terrifying at the same time!
There is a lot of value in learning things the hard way vs the easy way if there is no real significant harm caused, I think. In many cases you learn more or gain a deeper understanding/respect for the topic, which is worth something in its own
I currently host a personal VPN and my website (which includes a static blog, a Rust API, and a Postgres database), all on a $6/m VPS. Being a first-time customer, the service provider offered a 100% bonus on the credit I deposited making it even half as expensive. It probably won't hold up when the site has decent traffic, but for now it's the best money I've spent.
What do you do with the API?
Currently it has only one API route to simultaneously increments the view count in Postgres and returns an HTML badge containing the count. In the future I want to use it for authentication, particularly for admin routes and other stuff to access my private data.
I'm glad I did. All of my websites with domains now run off of a little Droplet running a bodgy bit of software I made called "Run my stuff" it does that, runs my websites, tunnels it through ngnix, and uses CloudFlare to bring it to the internet.
Very simple, but what works, works.
Do you have a link to this 5 dollar service you mention? The ones I knew have risen prices considerably.
also, https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/#Virtual_servers
lots of hosting providers with cheap options these days.
Well, it’s cheap until a badly behaved script starts sending lots of data and Amazon charges your card a huge bill (unless they’ve finally got around to hard price caps?)
None of these 4 providers do hard caps. If a lack of hard caps is your complaint, file it against all of them.
Lightsail instances each include at least 1TB of transfer each month, which is the same as DigitalOcean. Vultr and Linode also charge network overage fees on a per gigabyte basis if you transfer too much. Absolutely, everyone should set up billing alerts on any of these services.
I'm not here to say Lightsail is the absolute best option, just an option.
I was told digitaloceon at least had caps, but you are right, none of them do.
In which case, I’m not using any of them outside of an LLC.
OVH has unmetered VPSs: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/
I suspect the bandwidth is lower, but that is fair enough.
I get them from the aggregator https://lowendbox.com when companies offer deals; some have been great, some poor, but all very cheap; I think $14/year has been a decent one.
Although my current one only has 512MB RAM and isn’t enough for Rust to compile Scryer Prolog. Prolog, a language first run on the computers of 1971 and standardised around 1998.
https://www.hetzner.com/ will give you 2GB for $5
Wow, I may move there. They even have EU only ARM instances with 2 cores and 4GB of RAM for $5/mo, which is amazing value.
And absurd amounts of traffic
I use Linode (now Akamai Cloud). Oddly the "Linode 1GB" plan doesn't seem to have a link - you can find it in the shared cpu section under "Nanode 1GB" https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared.
The impression I get is that most $5 VPSes are basically the same, although I've really only used Linode. They give you some useful free stuff like an external firewall/router and monitoring (with only 24 hours of history, but that's plenty). Their docs and scripts are really good too if, like me, you're only a dilettante sysadmin.
Tornado VPS (used to be prgmr.com) is another one: https://tornadovps.com/order/main/packages/xen/ For $5 you get 1.25 GiB RAM and 15 GiB SSD.
Started using them for almost 15 years ago when running an SMTP server on home-tier internet connections became less feasible.
The biggest bang for your buck will be with Contabo. I've tried OVH and Cloudfanatic as well, but recently settled on Contabo just because it's cheaper
There's also some $1/month and $30/year options if you look hard enough.
linode has a $5/mo plan
Is this actually a good idea? Won't you be investing in a lot of obsolete skills?
You have to be trolling
Learning how linux operates, ops is done, networks are configured, firewalls are hardened, processes are monitored, resources are allocated, disks are backed up, ips are assigned, routing tables work, symlinks work, and code is deployed is never going to be an obsolete skill.
Pick whatever amazing heroku, fly, render, replit, next, k8s, nomad, docker, whatever platform you think has abstracted things away to make those skills obsolete and you'll find an entire cohort of our industry dedicated to using those skills to keep those services online, improving how they operate, and writing the literal software that powers them. Do you think docker or k8s could exist without Ops knowledge or systems programmers?
I am not trolling.
My view is that there will be a few very smart people at the companies you mention, doing those things. But most jobs in the tech industry will not require those skills. That's the point of specialization. It is efficient.
You claim that linux, disk backup and routing tables will never be obsolete. Really?
I am curious what your background or specialization is, but I can confirm the skills you learn from Linux, backups, and networking will be applicable now and in the future. The only thing they can do is help make you a better engineer.
I'm an outsider. But sometimes they see things insiders don't, or don't want to. I'm an economist, and in my reading of economic history, I have yet to hear of a skill that always stayed applicable.
How long is always?
Being able to do various forms of maths (e.g. geometry) has been a useful skill for literally millennia.
Being able to drive has been a useful skill for about a century. The number of people who need this skill has probably peaked in developed countries, but is rising globally.
A lot of basic computer and networking technologies have been around since the 70s or even earlier and the pace of change has slowed a lot since then.
I am not convinced. A lot of these things were specialised before these companies took off - with different people doing sysadmin, managing networks, DB admin, programming etc. There was always need for some generalists.
It is also useful to have a deeper understanding of underlying and related systems to you own - it makes it easier to understand problems, to communicate with specialists, etc.
You mentioned you are an economist. Do you think it would be a good idea for someone interested in macroeconomics to decide never to learn any microeconomics at all? Specialisation should be additional knowledge built on a broader base.
> You claim that linux, disk backup and routing tables will never be obsolete. Really?
I would interpret never is "not in your working life" which is a reasonable claim.
Also, underlying skills. We will always need OSes (even if Linux because obsolete), we will always need to backup data, and we will always need to route information. If you have learned one OS, or have experience of backups, or setting up networks it will be much easier to update to the new version.
> You claim that linux, disk backup and routing tables will never be obsolete. Really?
If data exists, backing it up will never go away, and we still use magnetic tape drives for enterprise backup so no, disk backup isn’t going away, not within our lifetimes, and since your concern is the person wasting their time, I’ll assume our lifetimes is a fine timeline to look at.
Linux, and the open source world that exists because of it and GNU, aren’t becoming obsolete. With the steam deck and EVs, and android auto, Linux is deploying more places than ever, and only increasing. Every container you run is Linux, etc. Even windows supports running Linux.
Packet switching, which routing tables are a part of, is literally how the modern day internet is able to exist, IP protocol and all.
Everything you suggested are core to all modern day tech and won’t soon be obsolete, and you’re probably well aware. Perfect troll response with the selected tech you mentioned. Someone else will have to feed you.
These are not obsolete skills.
Good on them. I know the OP link looks at it from a negative angle, but I don’t think it’s warranted to demand that anyone provide free service indefinitely.
If you don’t like it, there are plenty of alternatives I imagine. And if you find the alternatives more lacking or more difficult to use. Well hey, that’s the value add that replit is charging money for.
Disclosure: I work at Replit
I think most of the confusion here comes from some users not realizing the difference between the previous hosting solution “Always On” and the new one “Deployments”. Always On was a quick way to keep a dev machine running, but was difficult to consider for production use cases since the dev machine was what you were serving from. Deployments decoupled the two and enabled separate machines (including dynamic scaling) to be used for development and production. So now users have on-demand dev machines with our cloud IDE in addition to persistent deployments. There are a lot of benefits from this approach, but it meant that Always On wasn’t as useful.
They also had a lot of people gaming the REPL hibernation system via OnlineOrNot. I ended up banning uptime checks for their domain entirely.
Interesting strategy to stake your future on even more platforms that don't take money.
If you're tired of shifty providers, why not vote with your wallet and pay people money for services instead of forcing them to take on increasing amounts of investment to subsidize your usage?
It just comes back to bite you when said investments need to make a return and they get forced into being shifty.
_
I get money can be tight when it's just a hobby project.. a) consider taking money for it b) consider you will not find many hobbies where the "tools of the trade" as cheap as paying for compute can be.
> consider you will not find many hobbies where the "tools of the trade" as cheap as paying for compute can be.
This is a great point. Even my cheapest hobby, running, costs more than a $5/mo VPS in shoes alone.
I stoped reading when it said "unable to pay the extra $292.20/year for 4 more always on repl"... if you're switching cost is so low, then yeah, switch off. But for me <$1 a day sounds worth it for the value.
I’m curious what you use it for?
Heroku (I work there) eco is $5 a month + $5 database ($120 a year).
I understand that the use cases don’t perfectly overlap, so I’m curious about your use case.
No comment on the past or the changes, but developer tooling is a very difficult market to be in. Keeping instances always online is an expensive proposition for users that aren't paying.
I would also suspect that for a free product, nonpaying users also consume a disproportionate amount of resources, both in terms of hosting and customer support - based on my experience working on the acquisition of a similar developer product by AWS, Cloud9 IDE (2019). Students and universities and learning, etc., isn't where the money is.
> The final blow came when Replit announced that your repls could only stay online when you are actively within the workspace, now Replit Deployments stand as Replit's only hosting option. This decision seemed to counter Replit's user-friendly ethos, sparking widespread confusion and shock within the community.
Honestly, that sounds a bit entitled to me. Maybe they reversed course, and that sucks, but are people really expecting Replit to provide free hosting? (I didn't even know the product was capable of that). Free tiers for a product like this can be a massive pain in the neck: a lot of cost for little upside. It's probably worthwhile for GitHub for various reasons, but likely not for a product like this, especially for anything involving code hosting.
For Replit to survive as a business they likely need to fast track into a successful B2B model. A lot of what they built, Cloud9 IDE had developed as of 2016: a web-based IDE backed by a container that you could launch on a dime. https://web.archive.org/web/20160403092511/http://c9.io/ - perhaps it was ahead of its time.
I do think that there's a growing market now, with offerings like GitHub Codespaces; and AWS continues to offer it as AWS Cloud9 post-acquistiion, but ... I see it being very difficult for a company to break into that space with a standalone offering, while competing with integrated offerings like primarily GitHub Codespaces (that build on existing GitHub and VS Code ecosystems) or to a lesser extent AWS Cloud9 (that integrates with AWS). There is a market for cloud-hosted IDEs, and probably web-based ones, but they need to super tightly integrate with everything else to provide a better UX than local IDEs.
Let's get a clear statement about this.
Fact check: there is still a free tier (0.5GB RAM, 0.5 vCPU, 10GB storage).
Fact check: you get one always-on instance with your "Hacker" plan.
So this post has a totally misleading title.
I don't even understand the use-case that requires these 5 always-on instances, and the complaint site doesn't make it clear.
If this changed, let's get a link to an official post. My downvote will follow this post.
Disclaimer: I work at Replit.
You can read all about our hosting changes here: https://blog.replit.com/hosting-changes.
TL;DR
- deprecating always on in favor of new deployments product
- migrate workspace URL to replit.dev from repl.co
- replit.dev is the new development URL. only available when someone is in the editor.
- deployments are the only way to host things on replit
From the blog:
> We remain committed to providing a powerful free development experience to anyone who wants to code. This post is only about the hosting experience, which we are migrating to our new Deployments product.
> deployments are the only way to host things on replit
Which is only paid, correct?
Correct. Deployments are paid. But we still have a free (development) tier.
> On platforms such as DigitalOcean and AWS, they can be way cheaper.
Then immediately follows with specs and prices:
> Replit.com - $6.40/month
> 2.199GHz/1GB RAM/10GB transfer
vs
> DigitalOcean.com - $6.00/month
> 2.494GHz/1GB RAM/1TB transfer
EDIT: I originally misread 10GB as 10TB - I'll still maintain that it likely doesn't matter. It's a managed VM where deployments are handled for you, for $0.40 more, and if the author is burning through 10GB of bandwidth monthly on hobby VMs I'd be surprised.
> 9TB more of bandwidth per month
I think you mixed up your units. 1TB — 10GB == 990GB. In terms of transfer cost (at least according to those numbers, which I have not verified) DO is orders of magnitude less expensive per GB. Surely that deserves “way cheaper”?
You're totally correct. I adjusted my comment
Your own quote says 10GB from replit vs 1,000GB from digital ocean.
So, assuming your own quote is correct, DO is indeed way cheaper for anything that is more than a toy.
adjusted my comment, apparently you've all pointed out a bug with my meat cpu
Not commenting on price but have you confused 10GB with 10 TB or am I reading everything wrong
adjusted my comment, apparently you've all pointed out a bug with my meat cpu
I didn’t read the article but your numbers seem to compare 1GB with 10TB.
fixed comment
Because it's 10GB not 10TB?
Thanks, didn't notice earlier
I think the author is literally a kid? Which I’d normally dismiss, but I guess kids are a ton of replit’s userbase?
Discussed 15 days ago (under the hard to grok blog title): "Changes to Hosting on Replit"[0] (66 pts, 50 comments)
Related: much freaking out when Heroku axed their free tiers a year ago
Woah woah woah. The sentiment here is pretty wild for me. Creating a platform that offers a free tier is a BUSINESS decision. Replit knew what they were doing bringing all of those free ‘customers’ online. They didn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart and they have to deal with the very real/costly aftermath of a bait/switch. Perhaps we should be used to this rug pull by now but that’s still what it is. I’ve never used replit but have been in the position to decide on creating a freemium model and I knew quite well what the consequences would have been. The idea that were saying it’s the users fault for falling for a tactic that’s origin is “yo man, try this … first hits free” is crazy to me. Now get off my lawn.
Yeah, they've also switched their complete concept around before, going from a simple web code editor to a deployment-based hobby hoster, already breaking the use cases (and simplicity) for many users.
I totally agree and would say that openly criticising such decisions is important, so that companies are a bit more careful with introducing usecase-breaking changes - including changing their business model in a way that makes it not viable anymore for many users. Such things really make a company seem unreliable, but unfortunately it seems to have become common with the "ship early, break often" mentality especially in the start-up world.
Offering free services, especially while burning through VC cash, as a tactic to gain market share, and then discontinuing the free service when you’re ready to make money, should be considered an antitrust violation. It warps the market, keeps competition low, and sucks for consumers.
That said, I try to avoid free services now. Kagi unlimited at $10/mo replaced Google for me, I pay for Google Workspace (though only out of a desire not to take the time and energy to migrate), Dropbox, etc. If a service is a hobby for a company and not its core product, I try to avoid that, too.
oh hi, I'm the guy who made that site. Read through a couple comments here and want to elaborate:
- I've currently moved everything to a cheap DigitalOcean droplet that works wonders for me, and is far cheaper than what Replit could offer
- Comments about me & other noreplit.com contributors being "entitled" is odd to me. Nothing is ever free, but a service we paid for being switched to something that costs tons more than the competition, and suddenly, isn't great. - Replit has stopped community events such as their Reps program, all hackathons (not AI related, at least), and have abandoned their 16k+ member Discord server in exchange for a barely active discourse site.
- "That’s the impression I got looking at the dev behind this site. They clearly have development experience, they’re just mad and trying to make as much noise about it as they can." That was never my intention. Many people are mad about it, but the only thing I've personally done recently is created the website with the help of a few other folks. Forums such as this one aren't created by me.
- I'm not broke. I have about ~$5k in my bank account at the moment, but I'm not willing to let that go to waste. Beforehand, I was fine to pay $7/month for my silly little projects to have "good enough" uptime, as I think should be true for all hobby projects. It doesn't make sense for me to spend tons more for a little more reliability when I can just spend a day or two migrating, that I did.
- The domain was $15 for the year and isn't on auto-renew.
Replit simply changed their business model to not favour youngins that don't have a slightest clue what a vCPU even means, after they seemed they wanted to support that. So we're a bit pissed having to move our shit, but all is well in the end.
If you want to chase free stuff there are good alternatives. Or you can pay for something where you get good value for money. https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
I’ve been paying for Replit for quite some time, for a tiny Mastodon bot that makes three posts once daily. The price went up considerably with their last pricing change (about 4x IIRC), but fine, I bought a bunch more cycles and left it there, even though it would have cost me half as much to move to DigitalOcean. I didn’t want to take the time to fiddle with it, and I don’t mind paying for services I use. Now not only are they changing the price, they’re making me figure out some new feature just so I can keep this tiny little not-even-a-real-website running. I’m assuming the point was to get rid of little projects like mine, and I understand—enterprise is where the money is, and everyone knows it—but I’m kind of annoyed there’s no price I can pay to just leave the thing running as is. I’ll move it to my DigitalOcean droplet, and I’ll save money on it, but I’ll lose an evening or weekend day futzing with something that I put on Replit precisely because it’s a hobby project I didn’t want to spend time futzing with.
Disclaimer: I work at Replit.
We recently added autoscale (scale-to-zero) & static deployments to our plans. It should be pretty easy for you to host simple sites if you're a sub. Hacker starts at $7/mo. Can read more at replit.com/site/deployments.
Alternatively, you can also just add a card and pay for autoscale overages directly.
The problem isn’t that you’re charging too much, or that there’s anything wrong with Deployments per se. The problem is the rate of change. If I have to keep up with a product that’s changing this often, I might as well self-host.
It might not be clear from this post, but nothing is changing (w/ deployments/always on/repl.co hosting) until January 1st, 2024.
Right, I did see that. I get to pick any evening I want during the next ten weeks to do my futzing with the thing I was hoping to pay to leave alone in perpetuity.
> I might as well self-host.
Then do that, nobody is stopping you.
My point is not “wah wah I have to self-host.” I maintain a CMS backend for a living. I know how to host a website. I’m just saying that this transition has been made particularly annoying for the hobbyists being left behind, because it’s costing not only money but also time. There’s no “just let me pay for the existing service” option. It’s like an acqui-hire where they shut the service down instead of just keeping it running and taking people’s money.
I do not understand ReplIt's business model. In my head I associate them with cloud ides which were all the rage once upon a time but slowly died out. So who is using Repl It these days? They seem to be hiring frequently so I assume they are growing.
> So who is using Repl It these days?
Kids, a lot of kids.
I don't mind this change, it'll probably reduce the amount of abuse
"Ghostwriter is $10/month, yet it uses the same technology one can get for extraordinarily less from OpenAI."
OpenAI is $20/month. Or are they comparing Ghostwriter to what you can knock together yourself on top of the OpenAI API?
We actually announced that Ghostwriter is now free for all users last week: https://blog.replit.com/ai4all. The free tier is using a smaller model for chat than the paid version for cost reasons, but it has all the same integrations (inline suggestions/code transformation/etc).
(Disclaimer, I work at Replit on the AI team, but don't represent the company)
> Ghostwriter is now free for all users
Ironic that another feature at Replit is now being advertised as "free"..
This whole HN thread is about how Replit has reversed many of it's free offerings.
There is a "playground" that's basically just a thin veneer on the OpenAI API and has a conversational interface, where you pay by the token, and it doesn't include any of the ChatGPT capabilities.