noreplit.com

Disclaimer: This is about community management and pricing. The tech, design & prototyping aren't involved. retweet

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.


What happened?

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.

Replit.com - $6.40/month
2.199GHz/1GB RAM/10GB transfer

DigitalOcean.com - $6.00/month
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.

Replit.com
10GiB transfer

Github Pages
100GiB transfer

Cloudflare Pages
Unlimited* transfer
*Cloudflare's Pages obviously isn't unlimited, however will incur terabytes of transfer before you may get a friendly email.

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.

Replit.com
$0.1/GiB, 10GiB FREE

DigitalOcean.com
$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.



Comparison Table

The Ultimate Comparison Table™

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

Static

Replit Github CF Pages
Storage Account-based, $0.15/GB extra 1GB 500GB (absolute max)
Transfer Account-based, $0.1/GiB extra 100GiB Unlimited

Alternatives

Completely Free

  1. Glitch

    • 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.
  2. CodeSandbox

    • 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.
  3. StackBlitz

    • 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.
  4. GitHub Codespaces

    • 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.
  5. DriveToWeb, credits: albumcovers

    • Host static pages completely from your Google Drive
  6. 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.
  7. Vercel

    • 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.
  8. Netlify

    • 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.
  9. Cloudflare Pages

    • 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.
  10. Static

    • Static is a platform that offers simple and fast deployment of static websites with a focus on performance and security.
  11. Render

    • 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.
  12. Coder

    • Coder provides an enterprise-grade development environment that allows developers to code from anywhere.
  13. Danbot Host

    • Danbot.Host is a platform which provides hosting for multiple coding languages including static site hosting for free. Also, as stated by them, "We do not limit your resources, you can host as many bots as you want, as many servers as you want, all for free."
  14. Solarhosting

    • Solarhosting.cc is a website for Discord bots or any NodeJS/Python applications, It's 24/7 and does not require renewals or a credit card. It has a very generous free plan and support.
  15. Alwaysdata

    • Hosts your files, your emails, your sites, your media, your databases, and more. Alwaysdata can be used with almost any server-side framework you desire, with out-of-the-box support for PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, Ruby Rack, Node.js, Deno, .NET, and Elixir with 100MB of storage for free.
  16. Silly Development

    • SillyDev provides a free 24/7 solution to run and host programs with popular code languages. You can host static sites, as well as node, python and C#.
  17. Neocities, Credits: @RixTheTyrunt

    • Neocities is a site that gives you a free place in the internet, letting you to code whatever you want on your site. It gives you a free [account].neocities.org site, but you can pay for a Supporter plan for infinite site creating, custom domains, and just being nice to an overlooked hosting service.
  18. Nekoweb, Credits: albumcover

    • Nekoweb is a free static website hosting service, created in 2024 by a group of coders, programmers and artists, passionate for the old web and personal websites.

Credit Card Required (Paid)

  1. Ionos

    • Ionos provides nice hosting for 6 dollars a month, but you can pay for an upgrade of 16 dollars to get unlimited storage and websites.
  2. Heroku

    • 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.
  3. Digital Ocean

    • Digital Ocean provides cloud services that help businesses deploy, manage, and scale applications. Their droplets are versatile Linux-based virtual machines.
  4. AWS EC2

    • 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.
  5. Oracle Cloud

    • Oracle Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of cloud services, including computing power, storage options, and networking capabilities.
  6. Fly.io, Credit: bddylol

    • Fly.io transforms containers into micro-VMs that run on our hardware in 30+ regions on six continents.*
  7. Datalix.eu, Credit: atomic2ds

    • Datalix is a reliable and stupidly cheap vps and dedicated server provider, based in the eu with servers in Frankfurt, Germany you can pick up a 2vcpu, 4gb ram, 25gb storage, 1TB bandwidth also including 5 backups for just 3 usd a month!
  8. Hop

    • 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.

These alternatives offer a range of features for coding, collaboration, deployment, and experimentation, catering to various development needs and preferences.


Community Quotes

"I am highly disappointed I resonate with the concern about introducing premium subscriptions and the potential challenges it may pose for the teen user base. Many of us, being part of this group, may find it challenging to access premium features without relying on our parents’ cards. It would be great if Replit could explore options that allow for free deployment with certain restrictions, making it more inclusive for all users. Replit should not just throw away its free users. Is it how they will support the next 1 BILLION users ? By forcing them to pay? We all have no option but to leave replit" ~ prakarsh17-coder(replit)/infinotiver(github) "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 "Replit once said that they will bring the next billion software creators online. Recently they have been doing the opposite. It seems now that their focus is on the professional and buisness side of things. Especially with the AI that they are investing so much into." ~ bddylol "Well it was fun while it lasted. Replit already had a lot of issues, but this is the final nail in the coffin. Thats all I have to say." ~ Kurizu "We have to pay for repls now... I mean, I usually make a lot of repls but now I have to pay to make each one? We could obviously tell that Replit is literally greedy that they want to make even repls cost money." ~ Buhron "Replit was the best when other companies weren't using it, but now they think that they can push their actual users, the people that made Replit into.. well Replit, into an erupting volcano because other companies are using it. I really hate corporate f**ks and now one of my favorite companies is turning into one. I bet Replit's income is gonna fall at Mach 9 after this sh*t. Goodbye, Replit, and I do NOT thank you." ~ NullClock (Cubic) "Replit was the platform for which my coding journey started. It was superior to any rival platform that I knew of. Recently, my Guilded bot which is showcased and acknowledged by Guilded itself hit 500 servers. Looks like the celebration isn't gonna last long as I may have to shut it down after December. Thank you Replit, for the contribution." ~ ServerDeveloper "I liked Replit alot, I really did. But I guess companies these days just get to throw their users out like trash. Thanks alot Replit, have a good downfall." ~ Mixxer (ByteNetwork) "Replit used to be a wonderful place with a wonderful community. Now it's dead. I HAD to leave Replit. So many of my projects relied on databases like Sqlite and JSON, which the new Deployments feature doesn't support. Most of my apps and websites have gone down, simply because they didn't give let us use .repl.co domains at least until they had persistent storage support. This, and so many other problems have forced me to leave Replit for the most part." ~ hg0428

Wrapping Up

Want to contribute to this site? Submit a PR!
This is in no way an attack on any of the Replit employees - moreso the pricing & direction.
Want something removed that's yours? Reach out to [email protected]
Thanks to the many contributors for helping with the website.

This site was deployed with CloudFlare Pages.

Created by coding398.