5 ms·

Changes to Hosting on Replit

66 points by marjipan200 3y ago

temporarara 3y ago
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.
- avtar 3y ago
  Rest assured that you're not alone https://web.dev/learn/accessibility/motion/ https://web.dev/learn/accessibility/motion/
  - jackyzhao 3y ago
    fwiw it does respect @prefers-reduced-motion
- rvz 3y ago
  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.
  - mft_ 3y ago
    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!
lagniappe 3y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 Link: https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
- emmelaich 3y ago
  Seems like riju.codes is no more?
  - benatkin 3y ago
    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 https://github.com/radian-software/riju/graphs/contributors There are two others in the readme: https://github.com/radian-software/riju/#similar-projects https://github.com/radian-software/riju/#similar-projects
- flashgordon 3y ago
  I guess time to eff that with an eff u?
- benatkin 3y ago
  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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dukeyukey 3y ago
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
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  So pay-as-you-go? Would be nice if it had some spend limit.
  - kobpow 3y ago
    It does have a spend limit! (See later on in post)
- amasad 3y ago
  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 https://replit.com/pricing
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Looks like they have a free plan on their pricing page when I just looked now, what are you referring to exactly?
simonw 3y ago
Will 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.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  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.
  - simonw 3y ago
    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.
    - dukeyukey 3y ago
      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.
      - lazyasciiart 3y ago
        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-credit-cards/ https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/study/kids-and-cred...)
        3y ago
gabrielsroka 3y ago
Don't editorialize. Actual title "Changes to Hosting on Replit" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- BarryMilo 3y ago
  > please use the original title, unless it is misleading The original title is misleadingly vague.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- falcor84 3y ago
  The original title should be kept when it has semantic content; this one doesn't.
  - dang 3y ago
    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.
- dang 3y ago
  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.)
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    The edited title was more useful for what's really going on.
    - dang 3y ago
      As far as I understand, it's not true; and it can't be more useful in that case, right?
jb2282 3y ago
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.
- amasad 3y ago
  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.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    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.
miki123211 3y ago
And so the enshittification begins...
getpost 3y ago
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?

66 points by marjipan200 3y ago

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.

avtar 3y ago
Rest assured that you're not alone https://web.dev/learn/accessibility/motion/ https://web.dev/learn/accessibility/motion/
- jackyzhao 3y ago
  fwiw it does respect @prefers-reduced-motion
rvz 3y ago
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.
- mft_ 3y ago
  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!

lagniappe 3y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 Link: https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

emmelaich 3y ago
Seems like riju.codes is no more?
- benatkin 3y ago
  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 https://github.com/radian-software/riju/graphs/contributors There are two others in the readme: https://github.com/radian-software/riju/#similar-projects https://github.com/radian-software/riju/#similar-projects
flashgordon 3y ago
I guess time to eff that with an eff u?
benatkin 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

dukeyukey 3y ago

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

paulryanrogers 3y ago
So pay-as-you-go? Would be nice if it had some spend limit.
- kobpow 3y ago
  It does have a spend limit! (See later on in post)
amasad 3y ago
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 https://replit.com/pricing
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
satvikpendem 3y ago
Looks like they have a free plan on their pricing page when I just looked now, what are you referring to exactly?

simonw 3y ago

Will 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.

jjtheblunt 3y ago
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.
- simonw 3y ago
  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.
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    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.
    - lazyasciiart 3y ago
      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-credit-cards/ https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/study/kids-and-cred...)
      - 3y ago

gabrielsroka 3y ago

Don't editorialize. Actual title "Changes to Hosting on Replit" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

BarryMilo 3y ago
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading The original title is misleadingly vague.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
falcor84 3y ago
The original title should be kept when it has semantic content; this one doesn't.
- dang 3y ago
  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.
dang 3y ago
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.)
- lagniappe 3y ago
  The edited title was more useful for what's really going on.
  - dang 3y ago
    As far as I understand, it's not true; and it can't be more useful in that case, right?

jb2282 3y ago

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.

amasad 3y ago
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.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  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.

miki123211 3y ago

And so the enshittification begins...

getpost 3y ago

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?