Disclaimer 2: This looks much better on the site
Over the past few months, Replit.com has changed their pricing drastically to the point where it is
simply not
viable.
We, along with many others, have used Replit for years, however, at its current point we are all looking for
alternatives.
This website covers what happened, a comparison, alternatives, and community quotes to give perspective
on the current issues of the platform.
The cutback of "Always On" instances from five to one hit Hacker Plan users hard. This shift took many projects offline, with users unable to pay the extra $292.20/year for 4 more always on repls.
Similarly, reducing the number of Boosts included in the Hacker Plan from five to one, and reducing base repl specs to the same level as the free plan, unless you were actively inside the Replit workspace, left users wondering how Replit Hacker plan could anymore be a justified expense.
Replit's enduring focus on AI and LLMs have put them in a state of throwing money at a losing battle. Ghostwriter is $10/month, yet it uses the same technology one can get for extraordinarily less from OpenAI.
Trending Repls have been heavily focused on AI, as well as the company's social media accounts & most heavily, their CEO.
However, it must be said, integrating AI has always been one of the main goals of Replit, right from day 1. It just feels overemphasised currently. AI is undoubtedly a very interesting space in computer science right now, however it's not the only one. A balance should be made such that AI exists within the product and community, but is not such an overwhelming majority of the focus as it is now.
Replit's price hike for power-ups like Boosts and the Always On feature greatly affected its large student and budding coder user base. The increased costs, from 2 to 70 cycles/day, for a Boost, and 2 to 20 cycles/day, for the Always On feature, made these features less accessible, impacting the budget community.
Replit has previously been very focused on their platform being used for new coders, with their motto "Bringing the next billion software creators online". However, this target audience has changed recently, with low budget beginner, student, and hobby developers being pushed away by the increased pricing.
The first offender of their Deployments is Reserved VMs. For the lowest tier, you get 0.25vCPUs, 1GiB of RAM, and 10GiB of outbound data transfer.
On platforms such as DigitalOcean and AWS, they can be more than 70% cheaper.
| Replit.com - $6.40/month | DigitalOcean.com - $6.00/month |
|---|---|
| 0.25vCPU/1GB RAM/10GB transfer | 1vCPU/1GB RAM/1TB transfer |
Replit's version of a worker-like VM is Autoscale. You get 3 MILLION free compute "units" per month with Hacker.
If you're confused by what that means, everyone else is too. Replit's site says that most projects will use under 20 cents a month, however with a DDoS bypass or a "viral repl", you can easily incur costs upwards of hundreds of dollars. You can help mitigate this, by setting a limit on your monthly spending, but the lowest, as of writing this, is $10.
On their pricing page, if you had the Lowest Tier Autoscale running for a full month with constant load, you would incur ~$64/month.
Replit's static deployments is just that - static site hosting. Just one small issue, and pay attention - all of these sites below are free.
| Replit.com | Github Pages | Cloudflare Pages |
|---|---|---|
| 10GiB transfer | 100GiB transfer | Unlimited* transfer |
On April 7, 2023, Replit set egress limits across all plans. Aimed at controlling outbound data transfer, this move faced backlash, especially from the Free tier users.
With limits set at 10 GiB for Free, 50 GiB for Hacker, and 100 GiB for Pro tiers, many found them restrictive. Particularly those on the free plan, hosting popular projects.
| Replit.com | DigitalOcean.com |
|---|---|
| $0.1/GiB, 10GiB FREE | $0.01/GiB, 500GiB FREE |
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. Especially as they promised to never force users to move away from pingers to a paid product, which is exactly was just been done. Users can no longer ping their hosted repl's repl.co url, and instead must move to the paid deployments product to continue hosting on Replit.
The top 50 most "rewarding" open bounties are all stale, having been left open for months with no accepted applicant. Replit still shows this on their "$60k+ OPEN" tag, even though there is no hope of acquiring this money from those stale bounties.
Another issue is that the payout is shown in USD and Cycles, but doesn't take into account the 25%-15% cashout fee, giving a slightly misleading expectation to new bounty hunters who aren't yet aware of the fee.
The 16k+ member Replit Discord community fell to bits after the moderation team wasn't paid any more than their Hacker plan, all nerfed and shiny at $7/month. Understandably, moderators striked, causing Replit to abandon control of the community server altogether.
The Replit Reps program was abandoned too, with it disbanding after only 1 and a half cohort cycles.
Jams were reduced from events like Kajam and #madewithreplit to AI hackathons that a 14 year old won with school & no prior experience. Prize pools have dropped from over $10k to around $2k per event, lowering the incentive.
| Replit | DigitalOcean | AWS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transfer ($6/month VM) | 10 GiB free, $0.1/GiB | 1,000 GiB free, $0.01/GiB | $0.08 - $0.2/GiB |
| Storage ($6/month VM) | 10 GB | 25 GB | Depends, varies wildly |
| vCPUs ($6/month VM) | 0.25 | 1 | Around 2 |
| RAM ($6/month VM) | 1GB | 1GB | 1GB |
| Database (per GB) | 10 GB for $1/day | $0.5-$1/GB (higher, cheaper) | $0.115/GB |
| Accessibility | Very easy | Intermediate, tutorials | Expert, easy to lose money |
| Replit | Github | CF Pages | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storage | Account-based, $0.15/GB extra | 1GB | 500GB (absolute max) |
| Transfer | Account-based, $0.1/GiB extra | 100GiB | Unlimited |
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- Glitch is an online coding platform that emphasizes creative and collaborative coding. It allows you to create and remix projects, experiment with coding, and collaborate with others in real time. It is, however, only suitable for building web applications.
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Goorm, Credit: python660
- Goorm is a cloud-based development platform originating in South Korea that offers a robust set of features. It provides flexibility in choosing programming languages, database options, and Ubuntu OS versions. With a generous amount of storage and a daily traffic limit of 1GB, it is suitable for both small and medium-sized projects. The platform also supports both public and private projects.
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- CodeSandbox is an online development environment tailored for web applications. It offers a convenient way to create, edit, and test React, Vue, and Angular projects in a sandboxed environment, making it easy to prototype and share code.
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- StackBlitz offers an online IDE for web development with features like real-time collaboration and instant dependency searches. It's tailored for front-end development and supports popular web frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue.js.
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- Hop provides an online coding platform that allows you to write, compile, and run code in various programming languages. It offers a user-friendly interface for programming using VSCode.
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- GitHub Codespaces integrates with GitHub repositories, enabling you to create and customize development environments for your projects directly in your browser. This is particularly useful for collaborative coding and maintaining consistent development environments across team members.
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- Gitpod offers ready-to-code development environments for GitHub projects, allowing you to start coding immediately without any setup.
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Cyclic.sh, Credit: python660
- Cyclic.sh is a specialized platform for hosting and running scheduled jobs or periodic tasks. The service focuses on ease of use and scalability, allowing you to set up, run, and monitor recurring tasks without the hassle of managing servers or cron jobs.
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- Vercel is a cloud platform that specializes in deploying and hosting web applications. It's known for its speed and ease of use, supporting various frameworks and offering features like serverless functions and automatic scaling.
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- Netlify is a platform focused on web development and deployment. It offers features like continuous integration, automated deployments, and hosting for static sites and web applications. It simplifies the process of deploying and managing web projects.
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- Cloudflare Pages is a free way to deploy static sites. It's great for production-level deployment, providing you with a [project].pages.dev URL, along with support for custom domains and more.
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- Static is a platform that offers simple and fast deployment of static websites with a focus on performance and security.
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- Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks, and auto deploys from Git.
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- Coder provides an enterprise-grade development environment that allows developers to code from anywhere.
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- Heroku is a cloud platform that enables you to deploy, manage, and scale applications. It supports various programming languages and provides tools for continuous integration and delivery.
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- Digital Ocean provides cloud services that help businesses deploy, manage, and scale applications. Their droplets are versatile Linux-based virtual machines.
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- Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud, allowing you to run applications on Amazon's computing environment.
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- Oracle Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of cloud services, including computing power, storage options, and networking capabilities.
These alternatives offer a range of features for coding, collaboration, deployment, and experimentation, catering to various development needs and preferences.
List by @techwithanirudh
"I've already moved a ton of stuff to DigitalOcean. I won't be coming back. I've had chats with team members, and it's clear that nothing's changing. I'll stay in the community, maybe use it for prototyping, but that's about it." ~ coding398
"Whilst Replit may be the most convenient option, you're paying too much for tha convenience and they don't provide you with enough customisability of what you pay for." ~ DillonB07
"The young aspiring developers that made Replit the company it is today ultimately have been abandoned and kicked to the curb by the platform with rising costs and and restrictions." ~ zavexeon
"You will need either money or a ton of cycles to host a site on Replit. Either one could be acquired by your mom’s credit card, however you could also get cycles by completing bounties or getting tipped on your Repls." ~ CoderElijah
"So, what? Replit is just not free anymore? Hosting on Replit was already frustrating enough with the slow speeds and the sleepy repls, and now you’re just pulling the plug entirely? Wow." ~ wutadamyt
"I used to use Replit a lot. But now, I can't find myself using it in the near future. I don't like what Replit has done to the platform, and I am in the process of switching over to better, cheaper cloud providers." ~ datkat21 "I was a power-user a little while back. Migration would be hell. I have tons of websites to port over, and it won't be fun. And that's what was amazing about Replit, you could basically make anything you wanted at any time, at any rate. It's what kept my motivation super high, Now that motivation has dried up." ~ EnZon3
Want to contribute to this site? Submit a PR!
This is in no way an attack on any Replit employees - moreso the pricing & direction.
Want something removed that's yours? Reach out to [email protected]
Thanks to DillonB07, Firepup6500, datkat21 and py660 for helping with the website.
This site was deployed with CloudFlare Pages.
Created by coding398.