[ksenzee]

I’ve been paying for Replit for quite some time, for a tiny Mastodon bot that makes three posts once daily. The price went up considerably with their last pricing change (about 4x IIRC), but fine, I bought a bunch more cycles and left it there, even though it would have cost me half as much to move to DigitalOcean. I didn’t want to take the time to fiddle with it, and I don’t mind paying for services I use. Now not only are they changing the price, they’re making me figure out some new feature just so I can keep this tiny little not-even-a-real-website running. I’m assuming the point was to get rid of little projects like mine, and I understand—enterprise is where the money is, and everyone knows it—but I’m kind of annoyed there’s no price I can pay to just leave the thing running as is. I’ll move it to my DigitalOcean droplet, and I’ll save money on it, but I’ll lose an evening or weekend day futzing with something that I put on Replit precisely because it’s a hobby project I didn’t want to spend time futzing with.

[sorenrood]

Disclaimer: I work at Replit.

We recently added autoscale (scale-to-zero) & static deployments to our plans. It should be pretty easy for you to host simple sites if you're a sub. Hacker starts at $7/mo. Can read more at replit.com/site/deployments.

Alternatively, you can also just add a card and pay for autoscale overages directly.

[ksenzee]

The problem isn’t that you’re charging too much, or that there’s anything wrong with Deployments per se. The problem is the rate of change. If I have to keep up with a product that’s changing this often, I might as well self-host.

[sorenrood]

It might not be clear from this post, but nothing is changing (w/ deployments/always on/repl.co hosting) until January 1st, 2024.

[ksenzee]

Right, I did see that. I get to pick any evening I want during the next ten weeks to do my futzing with the thing I was hoping to pay to leave alone in perpetuity.

[KomoD]

> I might as well self-host.

Then do that, nobody is stopping you.

[ksenzee]

My point is not “wah wah I have to self-host.” I maintain a CMS backend for a living. I know how to host a website. I’m just saying that this transition has been made particularly annoying for the hobbyists being left behind, because it’s costing not only money but also time. There’s no “just let me pay for the existing service” option. It’s like an acqui-hire where they shut the service down instead of just keeping it running and taking people’s money.