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

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

#101

Post by folivore »

humbleharbinger wrote: post #27
simpaticoder wrote: post #11

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; le…

I went this route and got taken over by hackers multiples times. It was very worth it. I got taken over by hackers because my password for ssh was "mars". Me and my little brother were sharing it and wanted an easy password (yeah we have ssh keys now). Anyways, we both learnt a lot (htop tmux etc) . I'm always jealous that he got to learn everything earlier than me. But if he's not better than me then I consider myse…

There is a lot of value in learning things the hard way vs the easy way if there is no real significant harm caused, I think. In many cases you learn more or gain a deeper understanding/respect for the topic, which is worth something in its own

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

#102

Post by folivore »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #19
folivore wrote: post #7

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…

> ...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'…

Yeah, I had been wanting a good paid search engine for ages since I didn’t like being google’s product or watching as their search got worse for my use cases over time. I pay for Kagi now and it’s really worth it for me, specially considering customizations you can add to improve the experience.

I did use GSuite for my own email/cloud storage setup though have since moved to other providers to try to mitigate risk, eg if Google doesn’t like me for literally any reason, they could disable my account and I’d lose access to mail, files, etc.

I’ll often pay for products I use a lot even though I don’t get that much value out, eg Discord/Reddit, though those two companies seem to recently have changed course somewhat so I’ve stopped paying for them. It was mostly to support a product I cared about.

A lot of people aren’t fortunate enough to be able to pay for stuff, which I was once not, and realize that it’s not always so simple of a problem.

In this case, though, if you have access to the Internet and a semi-okay device, you can achieve a lot

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

#103

Post by simpaticoder »

qaq wrote: post #68
a1o wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to this 5 dollar service you mention? The ones I knew have risen prices considerably.

https://www.hetzner.com/ will give you 2GB for $5

Wow, I may move there. They even have EU only ARM instances with 2 cores and 4GB of RAM for $5/mo, which is amazing value.

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

#104

Post by phmqk76 »

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.

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

#105

Post by indigo0086 »

lamontcg wrote: post #90
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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'…

> 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). And the Peacock streaming service.

The best part about that is that they lose money and customers and possibly gain zealous competitors because of it. Customer profit incentives far outweigh as revenue incentives

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

#106

Post by graemep »

dash2 wrote: post #99
scubazealous wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious what your background or specialization is, but I can confirm the skills you learn from Linux, backups, and networking will be applicable now and in the future. The only thing they can do is help make you a better engineer.

I'm an outsider. But sometimes they see things insiders don't, or don't want to. I'm an economist, and in my reading of economic history, I have yet to hear of a skill that always stayed applicable.

How long is always?

Being able to do various forms of maths (e.g. geometry) has been a useful skill for literally millennia.

Being able to drive has been a useful skill for about a century. The number of people who need this skill has probably peaked in developed countries, but is rising globally.

A lot of basic computer and networking technologies have been around since the 70s or even earlier and the pace of change has slowed a lot since then.

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

#107

Post by graemep »

dash2 wrote: post #81
wutwutwat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be trolling Learning how linux operates, ops is done, networks are configured, firewalls are hardened, processes are monitored, resources are allocated, disks are backed up, ips are assigned, routing tables work, symlinks work, and code is deployed is never going to be an obsolete skill. Pick whatever amazing heroku, fly, render, replit, next, k8s, nomad, docker, whatever platform you think has abstracted…

I am not trolling. My view is that there will be a few very smart people at the companies you mention, doing those things. But most jobs in the tech industry will not require those skills. That's the point of specialization. It is efficient. You claim that linux, disk backup and routing tables will never be obsolete. Really?

I am not convinced. A lot of these things were specialised before these companies took off - with different people doing sysadmin, managing networks, DB admin, programming etc. There was always need for some generalists.

It is also useful to have a deeper understanding of underlying and related systems to you own - it makes it easier to understand problems, to communicate with specialists, etc.

You mentioned you are an economist. Do you think it would be a good idea for someone interested in macroeconomics to decide never to learn any microeconomics at all? Specialisation should be additional knowledge built on a broader base.

> You claim that linux, disk backup and routing tables will never be obsolete. Really?

I would interpret never is "not in your working life" which is a reasonable claim.

Also, underlying skills. We will always need OSes (even if Linux because obsolete), we will always need to backup data, and we will always need to route information. If you have learned one OS, or have experience of backups, or setting up networks it will be much easier to update to the new version.

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

#108

Post by graemep »

CJefferson wrote: post #78
coder543 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/#Virtual_servers lots of hosting providers with cheap options these days.

Well, it’s cheap until a badly behaved script starts sending lots of data and Amazon charges your card a huge bill (unless they’ve finally got around to hard price caps?)

OVH has unmetered VPSs: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/

I suspect the bandwidth is lower, but that is fair enough.

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

#109

Post by jjfoooo4 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #89
kredd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it? Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads. So you’ll get a very tiny percentage of people paying for a service where you hope you’ll recoup your investments after some years. Maybe never.

> If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it? But bnce the code is written to handle it then it's there for everyone to use (though yes, billing infrastructure does requires continual upkeep) - it could even be an internal garage/passion-project/hackathon thing. Companies like Twitter want to attact "the best", and people like that will want to build prod…

There is no such thing as “once the code has been written”.

A passion project is great until the passionate project flounder moves on, then it’s unmaintainable junk.

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

#110

Post by kredd »

tensor wrote: post #88
kredd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it? Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads. So you’ll get a very tiny percentage of people paying for a service where you hope you’ll recoup your investments after some years. Maybe never.

And yet many of these sites put enormous effort into combating ad blockers. So clearly the fact that users don’t want ads is fairly significant to them.

Users who don’t want ads aren’t exactly the same as users who are willing to pay. Prime example — myself. What I’m getting at, companies have calculated that in most of scenarios having paid model isn’t worth it. There will always be exceptions for services that people use a lot — Spotify, Netflix, Youtube and etc. For websites where you go on for a few minutes, people aren’t willing to pay up.
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