The Fall of Replit

January 09 2024 - 4 Minutes

image from replit about what they think their platform is
Image Source Replit

Background

I have been using replit for almost 2 years now, and for most if this time I have been happy with replit. I loved having the ability to just open a web browser and start coding on whatever project I want. I have had gripes with replit though, for example how long it takes for java and c# repls to start. But other than that having the ability to just start programming whenever I want was amazing, and it let me learn new languages such as python.

What changed

Ever since january 2023, a year ago, replit has started making their platform worse. They have done this by changing the UI of the website and by removing features from the "hacker" plan. They also started moving a lot of these features to the their brand new pro tier, or to a seperate subscription. They also started adding egress limits and they changed the storage from per repl to per account. Before this update the storage was capped to 1gb per repl where if you needed more storage you could pay a bit per day to increase this storage. Now they changed it so it is per account where you would have 10gb for every repl in total, and the only way to upgrade this is by subscribing to a higher tier.

How it got worse

On january 1st 2024 they have implement some of the worst changes they have ever made. They decided to remove all comments, they changed how repls look on their homepage, so instead of seeing the project you would just see the code so that you would have to fork the repl just to run the code, and they changed how web based repls work. They changed from replname.username.replit.co to randomgarbage.randomname.replit.dev. And they changed it so that you were unable to have a website running when you were not in the editor. The way this would work is that after a few minutes, if the repl editor was closed, the repl would go to sleep but whenever a ping was sent to the repl's url it would start up the repl to allow that ping to process. This would allow for the repl to go to sleep, saving resources (and money) for replit, while also allowing users to have websites that would be able to be accessed 24/7 just if someone pings the website. This was fine until replit decided that they wanted to make more money, so what they did is change it so you could only access the website while someone was in the editor and they changed it so that pings would not wake up a repl any more. so if you wanted to have a repl/website be able to be accessed 24/7 you would have to pay them for "deployments" which are simply more expensive cloud hosting, somebody did a comparison and found out that somebody could pay 40 cents less and get better preformance than replit on digitalocean.

End

if replit ever changes, which I doubt I may return to the website. But until this happens I will be leaving replit and start migrating my stuff to other platforms, such as codesandbox which is what I am using right now to write the blog instead of replit.
Sorry for this incoherent mess of a blog post and sorry for not writing a new one since october, I have been working a few pretty cool projects that when I finish I will write some blog posts about.
Thank you for reading and goodbye.