Again, the storage changes are still out only to Explorers 
Weâre actively taking your feedback and working on ways to make this transition smoother, yâall are helping us out with this!
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Iâm glad to hear that Replit is listening. I often feel ignored by staff. I guess verbal confirmation more often would be nice.
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I know, and Iâm grateful for that, but if you ask me, it shouldnât have taken much to figure out that the community wonât like this update, itâs like people purposely wanted to torture explorers with this. Some people might have forgotten that they enabled explorer and thought this was a permenant update and just left.
Also as 9pfs said before, someone may want some perks of being an explorer, but not others, like this storage update. Just forcing this onto users⌠Man.
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Honestly, itâs hard for me to continue believing that Replitâs staff care when nearly every change this year has, as far as I can tell, helped destroy not only the free tier, but Replit as a whole. By the way, howâs Lincoln and Sorenâs project going?
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but if you ask me, it doesnât take more than 2 braincells to figure out that the community will hate this update
I think youâll be surprised to hear that itâs just this demographic of users that isnât too fond of these changes, weâve been fielding storage betas elsewhere and most people (albeit, more often paying/willing-to-pay users) quite like the ability to have more than 1GB of storage in their Repls.
Also I hear what youâre saying about Explorers but we make it clear that you can (and should) leave the Explorers group when you donât want to participate in whatever changes weâre fielding. The Explorers group is the very last group before global rollout of features, after significant testing in various internal alphas, public betas, etc.
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So you want us to have no idea what youâre working on, so weâre caught off guard when you make a change that breaks everything on our Replit accounts?
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It seems that the Ask community has different priorities than the Replit community as a whole. Almost everyone in the Ask community (and dozens of people not from Ask) voted against the new UI, yet we were told that users overall like it. Evidently, the people on Ask are not like the people on mainsite. I always knew that as a general rule, it was a more positive, friendly experience on Ask, but I didnât know it went that far.
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(Another personal opinion here) this forum does often feel like an echo-chamber of like-minded thinkers, and thatâs partly because the various demographics of Replit donât actually all use Replit Ask. Thatâs why we host various hackathons, private betas, etc. to more effectively get feedback from all people who use Replit
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Seems true; thatâs why we all get along so well and almost always agree.
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Itâs all Iâm ever told (by staff), actually.
Yeah, I get that. Most of my Repls are like 0.1 GiBs or less, so of course I prefer how it was before. Tbh Idk how it all adds up to 8 (like 13 before I deleted most of my 100DoC Repls) GiBs.
9pfs said exactly what I think about this.
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Exactly. If a user feels mistreated, they are extremely unlike to continue using your service, let alone pay for a premium plan.
If possible, the best way is not to limit the free plan so much that Replit is impossible to use without upgrading but to provide a solid and functional free plan that will fit most usersâ needs. Paid plans are meant to be appealing to try to sway users into upgrading, not to make a site hardly usable, like the free and paid plans were almost.
The paid tiers do not feel worth their money, even with the added storage. And as Qwerty said, absolutely no one is going to upgrade just because of storage or buy storage boosts. There need to be some other appealing upgrades, especially for Hacker, which needs improvements. Pro is the only plan that offers decent upgrades and is still overpriced for what it offers.
Speaking on storage, lets compare Replitâs storage to some other storage providers.
GitHub - Recommended 5 GiB or less per repository, but 100 GB hard limit (unlimited public AND PRIVATE repositories)
Google Drive - 20 GiB Free Plan, 200 GiB for 3 dollars a month
And not to mention, most hard drives come with 200 GiB of storage or more these days. Even school-issued devices are capable of storing large-scale projects until they need to be used.
Ask users are some of the only users who actually care about expressing their opinions openly. Users who may not agree with the general Ask opinion donât have the chance to provide reasons to their opinions freely, because of how unknown Ask is.
I can completely agree with this, but this is likely because Ask users actually get to see the reasoning behind peopleâs opinions, and have an opportunity to switch sides.
This brings up another, unrelated topic. Why is Replit Ask so unknown? The only mention Iâve ever seen of it on the main site is the ridiculously small Forum hyperlink in the bottom-left corner. Thatâs how I discovered Ask, but many people probably differ.
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Itâs hardly fair to compare our organization to otherâs based on storage alone. Cloud services are our main offering and method to revenue. Github has various other offerings where they can take profits from and partly subsidize storage costs (e.g. Copilot, Github Pro, Github organizations) not to mention Microsoft backing. And Google is Google, they an insane amount of money off ad revenue.
I actually have a fun read for you, this is a blog post from Railway.
TL;DR: They realized that they were losing money in free tier and just decided to drop it entirely and introduce a low-cost paid tier. Similar deal happened to Heroku. Platforms that donât have money to burn and only offer cloud services without another product are forced into a model of either cutting out free tier or losing money to it, thatâs just the way it works. At Replit weâre trying to make free tier work as best we can, weâre still losing money but weâre exploring how best to improve the experience while working with what we have. Worst case scenario we just improve the free tier after we have money to burn like Microsoft and Google 
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I really appreciate you taking the time to explain all this and repeatedly respond to othersâ posts. It means a lot. I wish that it was more common for Replit staff to discuss such issues with users like this (at least on Ask; I canât speak for Discord).
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I apologize for not considering that and thank you for bringing it to my attention. Itâs a good point I probably should have mentioned. Replit is a smaller company with less revenue, so I shouldnât have compared it to companies owned by Microsoft and Google.
Replit is a good service, even with the free-storage limitations, so letâs compare it to a more similar service, CodePen.
While Iâm not sure about storage, CodePen Pro is required to host collaborative projects, or store assets locally. You canât even upload files in bulk without paying anything, and CodePen offers much less flexibility when compared to Replit, even though CodePen is likely more popular.
This really relates to the first subject of my previous post, limiting a free user so much so they are forced to upgrade, which is basically the case with CodePen, and many other services IMO. Replit, while still limited, does not do that, which I really appreciate.
Thatâs a solid explanation right there. For a company with a much smaller size than compared to something like Google, while 10 GiB isnât much, itâs still something. Replit doesnât have much to work with, and itâs impressive to think about them allocating 10 GiB per each user in the massive database of free accounts on Replit.
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Just a quick question, as you mentioned these changes were at a loss. If revenue didnât increase, what would be done if Replit ran out of funding to keep providing these features? How long do you think you could keep providing the storage allocations and computing power before they would have to be lowered again?
Considering that 10 GiB is enough to enjoy Replit, and itâs not as limiting as other services, itâs likely to get more users to upgrade to paid plans, so this may not even be an issue.
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To be honest, from my time at Replit we donât look at the worst case scenario often. We just look at where we are now and do what we must to improve. Itâs part of our ship fast, seek pain culture Everything weâve done in the past year has been in direct response to the losses and weâre on the path to hitting our end of the year goal!
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Many users are above the pro plan limits and will have no options that donât include giving up on Replit.
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Please note discussion about the changes to storage should be on the storage topic.
Only discussion about pricing packages/bundles should be discussed here
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Instead of paying for something we should get for free, I have just started coding on GitHub, VSCode, and Glitch. 
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