Changes to Hosting on Replit
blog.replit.com
blog.replit.com
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.
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.
(https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/study/kids-and-cred...)
Also — the title is slightly misleading. Static hosting is still free, and autoscale (with scale to zero) will effectively cost next to nothing for most users. Especially new programmers get very little traffic that according to our historic data it will cost $0.2 / month.
Finally beginners who cannot afford to pay but learned enough coding can make money on the site. eg, a story earlier today: https://x.com/replit/status/1709577707435274414?s=46
Not only this has absolutely nothing to do with the announcement, but this is really just petty to get triggered over.
Oh dear.
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!
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?
> 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
The original title is misleadingly vague.
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.)
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
There are two others in the readme: https://github.com/radian-software/riju/#similar-projects