[HN Gopher] Changes to Hosting on Replit
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       Changes to Hosting on Replit
        
       Author : marjipan200
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2023-10-04 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.replit.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.replit.com)
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | Will Replit still be available as a free tool for people who are
       | learning to program to use for private experiments?
       | 
       | This post talks about hosting in terms of apps that other people
       | can visit, but it's not clear to me if Replit is still going to
       | work as a tool I can suggest to beginner programmers as an online
       | development environment.
        
         | jjtheblunt wrote:
         | They clearly say you can get a developer setup that should cost
         | about 20 cents per month, so that might the new version of what
         | you mention.
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | That's a problem, because when you're teaching people to
           | program you often find that anything that needs a credit card
           | at all is a blocker.
           | 
           | Young people often don't have them. People from other
           | countries often don't have one that works. People who work
           | for organizations often don't have the ability to spend any
           | money at all for work they are doing that relates to that
           | organization.
        
           | amasad wrote:
           | This is for hosting. Development remains free
        
         | kibwen wrote:
         | Yes, I have some friends who wanted to learn Python and we used
         | replit to great effect to collaborate together on a little
         | text-based game. I don't blame them for charging, although it
         | will be a shame to raise the barrier for an educational
         | playground.
        
           | an_aparallel wrote:
           | if you create a github account, you get a workspace with git,
           | a debugger, a file system and so on - bloody incredible if
           | you ask me.
        
         | oldtownroad wrote:
         | The blog post mentions that the website no longer lists the
         | deprecated functionality. The website still says that there's a
         | free plan so my reading of the blog post + website is that
         | they're removing the free Always On feature and replacing it
         | with Deployments. The free "write code and run it" IDE product
         | is unchanged. That's my guess!
         | 
         | https://replit.com/pricing
        
         | amasad wrote:
         | Yes, in fact we recently made the free plan more powerful with
         | non-preemptible VMs, premium networking, and package caching
         | for everyone. And working on an AI free tier coming soon. Will
         | likely invest more in the free plan once the abuse from
         | unlimited hosting go away.
         | 
         | Also -- the title is slightly misleading. Static hosting is
         | still free, and autoscale (with scale to zero) will effectively
         | cost next to nothing for most users. Especially new programmers
         | get very little traffic that according to our historic data it
         | will cost $0.2 / month.
         | 
         | Finally beginners who cannot afford to pay but learned enough
         | coding can make money on the site. eg, a story earlier today:
         | https://x.com/replit/status/1709577707435274414?s=46
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | gabrielsroka wrote:
       | Don't editorialize. Actual title "Changes to Hosting on Replit"
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Thanks, we've changed it now.
         | 
         | Submitted title was "Replit moving away from free hosting".
         | (Apparently it's a bit more complex than that but I haven't
         | looked at the details.)
        
           | lagniappe wrote:
           | The edited title was more useful for what's really going on.
        
         | BarryMilo wrote:
         | > please use the original title, unless it is misleading
         | 
         | The original title is misleadingly vague.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | falcor84 wrote:
         | The original title should be kept when it has semantic content;
         | this one doesn't.
        
           | dang wrote:
           | We do tend to treat corporate announcements differently in
           | this respect, but apparently the submitted title isn't quite
           | true, and I don't think the article's title is so bad as far
           | as corpspeak goes.
        
       | temporarara wrote:
       | Only tangentially related but out of curiosity I visited the
       | actual replit.com site and the amount of moving and blinking
       | things made me to close the tab almost immediately.
        
       | dukeyukey wrote:
       | I don't blame them for stopping the free tier, but they really
       | don't make it obvious thats what's happening. Feels almost
       | deceptive. This is the only part that mentions it:
       | 
       | > Want to use deployments but don't want to spend $7/mo for the
       | Hacker plan? We thought about you as well. Starting today, you
       | can now pay for Autoscale & Static Deployment overages without a
       | plan
        
         | amasad wrote:
         | It's communication meant to existing users and it's a nuanced
         | picture worth elaborating. But if you are not an active user
         | it's best if you just look at our pricing page for a complete
         | picture: https://replit.com/pricing
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | paulryanrogers wrote:
         | So pay-as-you-go? Would be nice if it had some spend limit.
        
           | kobpow wrote:
           | It does have a spend limit! (See later on in post)
        
       | lagniappe wrote:
       | For the inevitable discussion about open source alternatives:
       | "How Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project"
       | 
       | Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
       | 
       | Link: https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
        
         | emmelaich wrote:
         | Seems like riju.codes is no more?
        
           | benatkin wrote:
           | It looks like it is semi-active. The website appears to be
           | down. The repo has some recent activity but not a whole lot.
           | https://github.com/radian-software/riju/graphs/contributors
           | 
           | There are two others in the readme:
           | https://github.com/radian-software/riju/#similar-projects
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | flashgordon wrote:
         | I guess time to eff that with an eff u?
        
         | benatkin wrote:
         | That seems to reveal their true colors. One to be avoided.
         | Google Cloud with it, since they announced a big partnership,
         | and would have had to have known about this.
        
       | jb2282 wrote:
       | i stop using replit after it started taking minutes to install
       | crates... It started out so awesome, professor started using it
       | instead of eclipse, it was super easy to teach on, and group
       | projects were made easy for pair programming.
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-04 23:01 UTC)