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.
Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
11–20 of 120 posts
Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
#12Related: much freaking out when Heroku axed their free tiers a year ago
Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
#13Discussed 15 days ago (under the hard to grok blog title): "Changes to Hosting on Replit"[0] (66 pts, 50 comments)
Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
#14"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?
We actually announced that Ghostwriter is now free for all users last week: 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)
Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
#15Good 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.
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.
Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
#16Rent 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; le…
Do you have a link to this 5 dollar service you mention? The ones I knew have risen prices considerably.
Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
#17I 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…
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Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
#18"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?
We actually announced that Ghostwriter is now free for all users last week: 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)
> 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.
Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
#19I 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…
> ...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/ - 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).
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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.
Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service
#20Rent 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; le…
Do you have a link to this 5 dollar service you mention? The ones I knew have risen prices considerably.
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