8 ms·

Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

137 points by hackermondev 3y ago

codetrotter 3y ago
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.
- esotericimpl 3y ago
  [dead]
- rozenmd 3y ago
  They also had a lot of people gaming the REPL hibernation system via OnlineOrNot. I ended up banning uptime checks for their domain entirely.
- hiimshort 3y ago
  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.
simonw 3y ago
"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?
- jxf 3y ago
  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.
- JimmyAustin 3y ago
  We actually announced that Ghostwriter is now free for all users last week: https://blog.replit.com/ai4all 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)
  - nacs 3y ago
    > 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.
jcrites 3y ago
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/ 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.
anonu 3y ago
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.
- schneems 3y ago
  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.
folivore 3y ago
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. 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.
- decremental 3y ago
  [dead]
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > ...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/ 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). --- 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.
BoorishBears 3y ago
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.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  > 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.
simpaticoder 3y ago
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.
- a1o 3y ago
  Do you have a link to this 5 dollar service you mention? The ones I knew have risen prices considerably.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - cthor 3y ago
    linode has a $5/mo plan
  - lsferreira42 3y ago
    I do: https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    - https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared - https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ - https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Related: much freaking out when Heroku axed their free tiers a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533
gnabgib 3y ago
Discussed 15 days ago (under the hard to grok blog title): "Changes to Hosting on Replit"[0] (66 pts, 50 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771097
ksenzee 3y ago
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.
- sorenrood 3y ago
  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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ksenzee 3y ago
    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.
    - KomoD 3y ago
      > I might as well self-host. Then do that, nobody is stopping you.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
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.
- KomoD 3y ago
  > So who is using Repl It these days? Kids, a lot of kids.
fn-mote 3y ago
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.
- sorenrood 3y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Replit. You can read all about our hosting changes here: https://blog.replit.com/hosting-changes 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.
  - KomoD 3y ago
    > deployments are the only way to host things on replit Which is only paid, correct?
    - sorenrood 3y ago
      Correct. Deployments are paid. But we still have a free (development) tier.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
KomoD 3y ago
I don't mind this change, it'll probably reduce the amount of abuse
sirmike_ 3y ago
[flagged]
- KomoD 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 3y ago
  You broke the site guidelines egregiously here. Please don't post like this to HN, regardless of how wrong something is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
wutwutwat 3y ago
> 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.
- guraf 3y ago
  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.
  - wutwutwat 3y ago
    adjusted my comment, apparently you've all pointed out a bug with my meat cpu
- semiquaver 3y ago
  > 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”?
  - wutwutwat 3y ago
    You're totally correct. I adjusted my comment
- boguscoder 3y ago
  Not commenting on price but have you confused 10GB with 10 TB or am I reading everything wrong
  - wutwutwat 3y ago
milar 3y ago
I think the author is literally a kid? Which I’d normally dismiss, but I guess kids are a ton of replit’s userbase?
esdott 3y 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.
- moqmar 3y ago
  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.
ptman 3y ago
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/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
phmqk76 3y ago
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.
coding398 3y ago
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.

137 points by hackermondev 3y ago

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.

esotericimpl 3y ago
[dead]
rozenmd 3y ago
They also had a lot of people gaming the REPL hibernation system via OnlineOrNot. I ended up banning uptime checks for their domain entirely.
hiimshort 3y ago
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.

simonw 3y ago

"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?

jxf 3y ago
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.
JimmyAustin 3y ago
We actually announced that Ghostwriter is now free for all users last week: https://blog.replit.com/ai4all 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)
- nacs 3y ago
  > 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.

jcrites 3y ago

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/ 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.

anonu 3y ago

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.

schneems 3y ago
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.

folivore 3y ago

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. 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.

decremental 3y ago
[dead]
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> ...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/ 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). --- 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.

BoorishBears 3y ago

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.

mvdtnz 3y ago
> 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.

simpaticoder 3y ago

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.

a1o 3y ago
Do you have a link to this 5 dollar service you mention? The ones I knew have risen prices considerably.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cthor 3y ago
  linode has a $5/mo plan
- lsferreira42 3y ago
  I do: https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
- whalesalad 3y ago
  - https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared - https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ - https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Related: much freaking out when Heroku axed their free tiers a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533

gnabgib 3y ago

Discussed 15 days ago (under the hard to grok blog title): "Changes to Hosting on Replit"[0] (66 pts, 50 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771097

ksenzee 3y ago

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.

sorenrood 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ksenzee 3y ago
  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.
  - KomoD 3y ago
    > I might as well self-host. Then do that, nobody is stopping you.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

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.

KomoD 3y ago
> So who is using Repl It these days? Kids, a lot of kids.

fn-mote 3y ago

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.

sorenrood 3y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Replit. You can read all about our hosting changes here: https://blog.replit.com/hosting-changes 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.
- KomoD 3y ago
  > deployments are the only way to host things on replit Which is only paid, correct?
  - sorenrood 3y ago
    Correct. Deployments are paid. But we still have a free (development) tier.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

KomoD 3y ago

I don't mind this change, it'll probably reduce the amount of abuse

sirmike_ 3y ago

[flagged]

KomoD 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 3y ago
You broke the site guidelines egregiously here. Please don't post like this to HN, regardless of how wrong something is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

wutwutwat 3y ago

> 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.

guraf 3y ago
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.
- wutwutwat 3y ago
  adjusted my comment, apparently you've all pointed out a bug with my meat cpu
semiquaver 3y ago
> 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”?
- wutwutwat 3y ago
  You're totally correct. I adjusted my comment
boguscoder 3y ago
Not commenting on price but have you confused 10GB with 10 TB or am I reading everything wrong
- wutwutwat 3y ago

milar 3y ago

I think the author is literally a kid? Which I’d normally dismiss, but I guess kids are a ton of replit’s userbase?

esdott 3y 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.

moqmar 3y ago
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.

ptman 3y ago

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/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

phmqk76 3y ago

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.

coding398 3y ago

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.