Upcoming Replit Changes
A Community crisis waiting to happen
Replit seems to be changing, adding egress limits, deployments, and more. Most of our quotes will be cited from the #cycles channel in discord.gg/replit.
Created by @bddy @codingMASTER398, @EnZon3, @NoNameByProgram
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Want to view it in a prettier way? Visit https://Upcomming-Replit-Changes.bddy.repl.co
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Disclamer
We are not trying to put Replit down, attack them, or do any bad to them! We are just expressing our thoughts about these new features/coming soon features⌠(also, coding398 was tired when he put these in, lol)
Egress limits
Enter the opinion of coding398
Although we as a community understand the need for egress limits- The execution of the new limits seems to have divided the Community into those who use hardly any egress to those who have to optimise a ton to get it to fit.
As an example, in the past 2 days, I (coding398) have had a look at the new egress meter and panicked at the sight of using 50GB. This is absolutely unacceptable, yes, and unfortunately Iâve had to remove some of my projects because of it. However, this scare didnât come after an email informing of this change, an announcement on Discord or Slack, nothing. It just appeared. The following day, I shut down Code your snake, my uptimer, and ironically Rock Paper Camera is now cameraless.
The new limits donât just impact those who have huge projects however- even those who want to create an app in a framework like React will be instantly bombarded with hefty usage, whilst others use a fraction of the limit.
In my personal opinion, the way this panic and diversity could be resolved would be with a few changes:
- Allowing for users to request more data & exemptions for free or a small amount of cycles (e.g. net-positive apps, trending games)
- DDoS + DoS protection. I had a small DDoS happen to me last year- if that happened now, Iâd be out of an account for a month.
now enter bddyâŚ
Think about the new coders, they code their first app and get on trending! People stroll through the trending, and find their app. They run it, and whatâs that? Their egress limit reaches max. This isnât good, because they expect a kid to pay $7 or $20 for hacker/pro. Which, high chance they cannot get. This limits younger people with a passion to code and make good apps for community.
now enter EnZon3âŚ
Getting on trending is no longer a joyfull moment, itâs now your worst nightmare. Knowing that your entire month of egress will be eaten up because of that one repl is genuinely scary to think about. This isnât a good thing. Either increase egress limits for trending repls or remove trending entirely. Two of my repls, Hatter Hangout and furret walks around the world ate up MY ENTIRE EGRESS QUOTA in a single day.
now enter NoNameByProgramâŚ
Me, being a full-stack developer, I of course, make backend repls. Being publicized is now my worst nightmare, and now I must limit how much repls I make. This new egress system removes the ability to post to community and have the experience Iâve always loved with replit.
Deployments (please, noâŚ)
Note: none of these changes are final, they might be changed in some way shape or form.
coding398:
Deployments arenât out to the public, nor in a beta. We havenât even had a good glimpse, and weâre dreading it. Mostly for 2 reasons: The cost, and The cover page.
Most of this info has come from a Replit employee Soren, that has for some time now not really given the Community reassurance that any of their projects will live after this.
Deployments, said by Soren, are told to cost at a minimum of 500 cycles a month for the same specs as we currently have. Thatâs an infinite markup, you see. Already terrible- but thereâs free deployments! What about those? No custom domains. No running outside of the Cover page. Replit advertising all over.
Practically the whole community relies on free Replit hosting, if unreliable, to power their apps. For example, I host Cheesgle on Replit with the custom domain cheesgle.com for practically free, but it was on Trending for a good few weeks and now has evolved into a little Replit brand. Itâs net positive to Replit.
If this new deployment rule comes in, Cheesgle will cease to exist, along with the Byte, hackathon, and wait- All of my other projects. All rely on being ran outside the cover page.
Custom domains would be a waste of money, thousands of apps would stop working, and cycles would be drained.
Why is the cover page so bad?
- Not a subdomain, unprofessional and a bad look
- Replit branding all around
- NO COOKIES, Repl Auth and related functionality will cease to work
- Limits apps to Replit, and nowhere else.
If this comes about- If this is true- If deployments take over⌠Replitâs goal of global accessibility will never be reached. Most of the platform will leave. And of course, no more Cheesgle. Decide wisely Replit, hopefully youâll find a way to monetize something else. Nobody said limiting the free plan more was off the table- They make up most of the userbase.
It would be cheaper to buy a dedicated server off of Amazon and run it for 6 months than it would running my Repls off Deployments for 6 months.
quote from EnZon3âs markdown notes:
âThe news about the deployments beta is extremely scary. I found out that when Deployments comes out, you wonât be able to see free repl sites outside of the cover page. So no *.repl.co, it will be replaced with .replit.app, which will be premium. Soren said that free repls will not have their own *.repl.co domain, and you can only see free web repls in the cover page of the repl. Most of the traffic from my repls comes from the *.repl.co domain, which I use to share to people, friends, and family. This is a really bad change for people like me, as I, or other people wonât shell out money for Cycles, which is for deployments and other things. I used to pay for private repls using cycles I got from tips, ALONE. Iâm not going to pay for cycles, and even if I wanted to, $100 DOLLARS!! will get you nowhere. Replit has essentially turned from bringing the next 1 billion developers online to bringing in the already existing professional developers in. They are essentially contradicting their goal with all of these features. This is extremely hurtful to people who code for fun, which makes up a major portion of Replitâs users. This is not good for replit, and this isnât good for anybody. If Replit wants to succeed and get out there, Replit has to appeal to everybody, or itâll become another Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services.â (https://i-might-not-be-here-soon.enzon3.repl.co/)
Whoâs leaving if this gets worse?
- I, EnZon3 will move on with Replit hosting and go to Vercel, DigitalOcean, or fly.io. Iâll still be in the community but I wonât be actively developing websites, and I wonât do Bounties either because that will require deployments.
- I, coding398, will probably move all my web apps to a place like Digitalocean, but still build on Replit. The development experience is great, the hosting if this continues, will be terrible.
- I, NoNameByProgram may move to DigitalOcean, Vercel, or any other program that catches my interest. You may catch me around the unofficial replit discord and replit community still, but I will no longer code here if this proceeds.
- I, bddy will have a low chance on leaving, since I am a moderator & still enjoying moderating + creating tools. If I do end up leaving, I will think about it, but I donât have a set choice in my mind. Thatâs IF I DO END UP LEAVING.
TL;DR: What we want changed & to not happen
- Free deployments should not be limited to the cover page and instead act like they do now, even if it means less powerful computers.
- Egress limit increases generally and when asked for, especially for net-positive and trending Repls
- Spam & DDoS protection on the egress side
- Custom domains to be free or less than 30 cycles/month/repl
And of course Replit, wait a while and check on that GCP bill.
