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.
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
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...)