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

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

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/ - 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.

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.