And what makes it worse is that REPL for Education/Teams was a paid service two years ago. I had gotten a PO approved for my school and a month after PO approval REPL migrated to a free service for Education. They could always turn back to a paid service if money was the issue, but it appears educational pricing is not enough profit for them. Their lowest Core pricing now lists as $20/month.
This is absolutely devastating. I can not even begin to explain how upsetting this is - so so many hours spent curating classrooms, where my students can ACTUALLY code. This is such an incredible platform that I can not envision anything else would be able to come close to the functionality of teams. I would be willing to pay - OUT OF MY OWN POCKET - to keep my classrooms around. Please, I sincerely beg replit to reconsider this. Please just make a paid version for teams. Please.
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For those of us that will stick around and try to hobble together a system using free accounts for our students, will firewalledreplit stick around or will that be killed off also? I donāt expect an answer right now, but can that be discussed and an answer given soon? @LenaAtReplit
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I have this strange voice in the back of my mind that actual Replit employees have been instructed not to reply to any of these types of threads / questions. Just let the dust settle and let us (the community) ventā¦ do not respond. I can only imagine what some of them want to respond.
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I will just add my 2 cents here as well, as an educator who has been 100% committed to replit. I use it heavily and have done so since 2018.
I was just told recently by a moderator that I was using replit incorrectly because I was NOT using teams for edu. (that is, I was told to āget with the programā and use teams edu).
The truth is that I moved away from it when we all got burned at the start of the pandemic. It has not be great to use replit ārawā without edu teams, but I was worried about this kind of a move and so I had moved away from teams and edu features in recent years.
I think it is unfortunate that not even the moderators were notified of this upcoming change ( and that they were still promoting edu recently as the way to teach students on replit. Replit should be more inclusive of its plans with its moderators (at least).
I think the worst (and most transparent) aspect of this notification (as others have mentioned) is that it comes mid-semester.
What crazy product manager decided to abandon (or at least shock) educators mid-semester? (replit in the past has shut down for maintenance during my open book exams that rely on repls during the week, so I know from experience they have not always truly understood educatorsā use of their product).
My guess is that at some level (probably quite high in the company) there is a belief and an āopticsā focus on AI as a replacement for educators. I am pretty sure the general sentiment is that AI is a very significant feature for replitās comercial IPO strategy, and that AI is not compatible (or is a replacement for) educators. To be clear, this is not my view at all (thereās a very good use for it to help students become socratic thinkers and work with AI). But I suspect āAI killed eduā as far as replit is concerned.
My Hatās Off to everyone (including replit) who have stuck with the goal of using and enabling replit for education. This is a hard blow, but it was a formative ārideā everyone took to try and use it in an educational setting. I am not sure what the next-best-alternative is at this point.
Good luck and much respect Teachers!
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Hey @etowncodes - thanks for thoughtfully putting that all together. I appreciate it.
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According to the Replit CEO, having to make toggles like that separate from the main userbase was kinda just unsustainable and took too much work. (At least, thatās how I interpreted it in relation to the AI thing.)
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I think they debated ejecting Education for a while and with the sudden push to remove AI from Teams for Edu they decided to weaponize it by instantly closing Edu Teams and leaving AI enabled to help push teachers out.
There is a 0% chance this was part of any roadmap. This was opportunistic. Iāll be using it as a cautionary tale of the convenient morality of private business and the benefits of open source.
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True, true, but best to get input from the mods. However, all communication should be taken with a grain of salt.
Free ā either āuse now pay laterā OR āpayment accepted in ways not listedā (e.g. Google takes your data, Replit takes your sanity, etc)
I am a computer science student and I would just like to say something:
Teams for Edu was a great thing to have around. While there were problems (you couldnāt turn off AI), this is also messing up everyone elseās time, even on the studentās side. I hope you can find somewhere to migrate 
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Itās a little sad that Replit seems to be caring about the money more than the coding (which would be extremely disappointing. āReplā stands for read-evaluate-print-loop- the CORE of all coding) sometimes, or at least thatās how I see it-
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I have 122 students here! Promoted the heck out of this site since I started using it. Got my school to pay for it when they charged! I have graduates who pay and use it now and probably wouldnāt have been exposed to it if it was a such an ease of a platform to use under Teams. Potential users! They were all there! Yes. Google is still there, but you know how much influence that would be over a 4 year software engineering CS sequence in a high school!?! Grads would be like Google what? Saving money for now, but in the long run . . . especially when the AI is actually annoying and you always have to go and turn off the setting.
Itās like Google pulling the plug on Google Classroom and Google Drive and everyone goes to use Safari in their classrooms. Even the largest public school system in the country (NYCDOE) wants their schools by next year to move everything, staff too to Microsoft, but they still realized that they couldnāt leave behind Google and Google classroom. I guess itās onto sites like codesandbox.io or of the like. Smh Replit.
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Luckily Replit doesnāt have much of a monopoly since they shifted their target audience so early onā¦ but I hear you. I was trying to start a coding class, and in fact i had everything all set up on a doc and a Replit Teams for Edu org, but looks like I might need to quickly move it over to github or somethingā¦ At least provide more than 1 day notice!
If this was truly a statement from the CEO, it would indicate quite a limited range of experience developing user-centric software solutions.
Embracing customization vs defaults is a long-tested pathway to growth. āToo hardā would be like saying āit would cost too much to add a configuration setting and a UI to change it. That would be laughable as it would take a day at the most (likely minutes for a well-architected platform).
The way I would read that statement (if it happened) would be āwe are tired of hearing how much work we have to do for educatorsā. Many companys have pivoted away from their initial user base. Esp after taking millions in funding and becoming accountable for profitability.
It might have been more genuine and honest to say āwe just believe we can make more money elsewhereā. Not that thereās anything wrong with that.
But saying that adding a checkbox would be the āstraw that broke the camels backā would be just silly.
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Yeah I guess, but I think it really made them take a step back and be like, alright, this is too much work
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Can we please get a timeline for when teams for EDU will completely be shut down? I need to know how much time I have to move all of my lessons/assignments to a new platform. Iām afraid one day I just wonāt be able to access my team anymore and all my files will be gone.
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As much as I hate to say it, you better start backing things up now. The way Replit dropped the hammer about Teams for Edu being deprecated (1 day notice), I wouldnāt be shocked to log in one day and find everything gone. Unfortunatelyā¦
Also, since theyāve already said any new ābugsā wouldnāt be fixed, if thereās an update to the rest of Replit that somehow breaks Teams for Edu, you may log in and find Teams just not usable.
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Until they make some more exporting tools for it, they probably wonāt completely close everything.
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@etowncodes wishing I could give this 100 thumbs up. repl.it Teams has been a near ideal platform for teaching introductory coding. Iāve been doing this for over 20 years, and nothing comes close. AND the amount of time invested into developing my code base (examples, labs, assignments, quiz questions, auto-grading, ā¦) and pedagogy around this toolset is worth thousands or more. We paid for Teams for Edu, and we would pay again. repl.it should be compensated for their excellent product. Please reconsider - donāt sink this ship, it is too important to too many of us.
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We had 300 students in this and were paying when it paid for.
Iāll try to copy paste things over to a Google Collab but Google are also famous for pulling the plug on their own products.
Does any other teacher feel like weāre in a 2D game jumping from platform to platform before the platforms fall into lava?
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