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Repl.it's current business model appears to be giving cloud services away for free, attracting lots of users, and using their high user counts to get more ventu

Repl.it's current business model appears to be giving cloud services away for free, attracting lots of users, and using their high user counts to get more venture capital funding to spend on giving away cloud services for free. Am I missing something, or is this basically the programming equivalent to MoviePass? Surely as soon as they start trying to be profitable, people will find some other startup to give them cloud services for free. See, e.g., Koding, who went through this exact cycle a few years ago: they started out getting tons of users by giving away cloud servers for free so people could learn programming, then they tried to monetize by building out IDE features and cloud filesystems and orchestration, and pretty much no one bought them.

amasad 8y ago
I see you keep creating throwaways to spread misinformation. I answered you elsewhere but here we go again: we've been bootstrapped and profitable for a while before we got funding and we still make lots of money. We grow our MRR from classroom and hacker plan more than 5% monthly: https://repl.it/pricing https://repl.it/pricing Go find something better to do.
- tomglynch 8y ago
  I agree with you, but suggest you lose the personal attacks. Not a good look
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mistersolomon 8y ago
  If you check the timestamps, I actually posted this before writing my reply to you elsewhere in this thread, but the post was killed immediately. Maybe HN has a naughty word filter banning people from mentioning MoviePass in threads about YCombinator startups. Dunno why it came back, guess some other users thought it was informative enough to vouch for.
  - lacker 8y ago
    Why are you constantly creating new throwaway accounts? Just... don't do that.
    - mistersolomon 8y ago
      I usually just do drive-by comments and not often enough to remember the login info. Although I suppose for all you know I might not even be the one who made those posts

amasad 8y ago

I see you keep creating throwaways to spread misinformation. I answered you elsewhere but here we go again: we've been bootstrapped and profitable for a while before we got funding and we still make lots of money. We grow our MRR from classroom and hacker plan more than 5% monthly: https://repl.it/pricing https://repl.it/pricing Go find something better to do.

tomglynch 8y ago
I agree with you, but suggest you lose the personal attacks. Not a good look
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mistersolomon 8y ago
If you check the timestamps, I actually posted this before writing my reply to you elsewhere in this thread, but the post was killed immediately. Maybe HN has a naughty word filter banning people from mentioning MoviePass in threads about YCombinator startups. Dunno why it came back, guess some other users thought it was informative enough to vouch for.
- lacker 8y ago
  Why are you constantly creating new throwaway accounts? Just... don't do that.
  - mistersolomon 8y ago
    I usually just do drive-by comments and not often enough to remember the login info. Although I suppose for all you know I might not even be the one who made those posts