I 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
Interesting strategy to stake your future on even <i>more</i> platforms that don't take money.<p>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?<p>It just comes back to bite you when said investments need to make a return and they get forced into being shifty.<p>_<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>Honestly, that sounds a bit entitled to me. Maybe they reversed course, and that sucks, but are people really expecting Replit to provide <i>free hosting</i>? (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.<p>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. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160403092511/http://c9.io/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20160403092511/http://c9.io/</a> - perhaps it was ahead of its time.<p>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.<p>Fact check: there is still a free tier (0.5GB RAM, 0.5 vCPU, 10GB storage).<p>Fact check: you get one always-on instance with your "Hacker" plan.<p>So this post has a totally misleading title.<p>I don't even understand the use-case that requires these 5 always-on instances, and the complaint site doesn't make it clear.<p>If this changed, let's get a link to an official post. My downvote will follow this post.
> On platforms such as DigitalOcean and AWS, they can be way cheaper.<p>Then immediately follows with specs and prices:<p>> Replit.com - $6.40/month<p>> 2.199GHz/1GB RAM/10GB transfer<p>vs<p>> DigitalOcean.com - $6.00/month<p>> 2.494GHz/1GB RAM/1TB transfer<p>EDIT: I originally misread 10GB as 10TB - I'll still maintain that it likely doesn't matter. It's a <i>managed</i> 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.
Discussed 15 days ago (under the hard to grok blog title): "Changes to Hosting on Replit"[0] (66 pts, 50 comments)<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771097">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771097</a>
Related: much freaking out when Heroku axed their free tiers a year ago<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533</a>
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.
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.<p>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:<p>- I've currently moved everything to a cheap DigitalOcean droplet that works wonders for me, and is far cheaper than what Replit could offer<p>- 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.<p>- "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.<p>- 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.<p>- The domain was $15 for the year and isn't on auto-renew.<p>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. <a href="https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/</a>
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.
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.
"Ghostwriter is $10/month, yet it uses the same technology one can get for extraordinarily less from OpenAI."<p>OpenAI is $20/month. Or are they comparing Ghostwriter to what you can knock together yourself on top of the OpenAI API?