Nerfing Hacker Plan
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.
UPDATE: The Hacker plan is no longer available. The only option for private repls and other boosts is the $20/month "Core" plan
Outrageous AI
Replit's enduring focus on AI and LLMs have put them in a state of throwing money at a losing battle.
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.
10x Hike in Power-ups
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.
Reserved VM Pricing & customisability
The first offender of their Deployments is Reserved VMs. For the lowest tier, you get a CPU with 2.199GHz clock speed, 1GiB of RAM, and 10GiB of outbound data transfer.
On platforms such as DigitalOcean and AWS, they can be way cheaper.
Replit deployments also don't have live SSH, reserved IPs, choice of OS, UDP, firewall rules, and has an overall lack of customisation.
2.199GHz/1GB RAM/10GB transfer
2.494GHz/1GB RAM/1TB transfer
Uncompetitive Static
Replit's static deployments is just that - static site hosting. Just one small issue, and pay attention - all of these sites below are free.
10GiB transfer
100GiB transfer
Unlimited* transfer
Egress Limits
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.
$0.1/GiB, 10GiB FREE
$0.01/GiB, 500GiB FREE
Replit.dev
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.
Misleading Bounties
Replit proudly shows over $40,000 open in bounties, but when analysing further over 175 "open" bounties are over 4 months old, leaving an estimated $15k in bounties that aren't stale. 64.5% of open bounties are over 4 months old, last updated 11 Oct.
New Repl & Storage limits
Replit pushed out a new limit of only having three public replits and
cannot create anymore then that.
Because of this replit is pretty much one of the worst platforms to
create a project on. Most people are using tools to export all there
repls. I would recommend using
this tool to export all
your repls.
They also limited the storage from 10gb to 3gb which makes it seem like each repl would really have 1gb storage.
Terrible community management
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.