Last week, Heroku announced they are discontinuing their free hosting plan. We get it. Offering free hosting and compute is extremely challenging, but there are many creators globally that are unable to pay for resources. As a result, many Heroku users are moving over to Replit, and we're excited!
At Replit, we believe anyone should be able to create software, and we will continue to create pathways for users to host their projects without swiping a credit card. Not only that, but we are taking it to new levels.
Today, we host 1M concurrent containers and serve 10b+/month in dynamic content from apps deployed on Replit. At this scale, we are one of the largest compute providers in the world. But we're only getting started. In the coming months, we're going to radically change our hosting offering.
Earlier this year, we set super ambitious goals:
- 10x performance and reliability
- 3x the nines of availability
Next, we're going to unlock:
- Full vertical scalability
- Arbitrary storage capability
- LLMs and Image generators
In parallel, we are working on additional perfomance features and with best-in-class partners for powerful SDKs, APIs, & databases. One drawback of hosting on Replit is that it's hard to create different production vs development environments, but that is also getting solved.
In the next 2 months, we'll be introducing a deployment product. We think it will be the easiest way to deploy apps.
While Replit's free plan is and will continue to be robust, we've also introduced a credit system known as Cycles so developers can spend as much or as little as they want to power an app. This will give builders access to elastic resources while also having complete control of their spend.
Moving to Replit
We built a custom Heroku to Replit import flow so you can easily clone your Heroku projects onto Replit. You can do so in three simple steps:
- Go to replit.com/heroku
- Paste the link to your GitHub repository. If your repo is private, authenticate with GitHub first.
- Select the repo, language, and owner of the Repl. Replit will also try to detect the language of your repository automatically for you!
If you're interested in learning more check out our step by step guide for the import flow in our docs.
The Power of Replit
Once your app is deployed on Replit, you'll have access to a set of features that's expanding and advancing weekly. Examples include:
- Embedded IDE: Stop bouncing between applications. Have your codebase in Replit -- and deploy with just a few clicks
- Custom Domain Linking: Personalize your application with a custom domain.
- Persistent filesystem: Earlier this year, we opened up persistant filesystems to all hosted Repls, so all users can build more complex applications.
- Repl DB: user-friendly key-value store inside of every repl. No configuration is required. You can get started right away.
- Repl Auth: authenticate users without having to write your own authentication logic or work with databases.
- Replit Community: Join our global community of +15 million software creators.
These are just a few of our features that will take your application to the next level once you join Replit. Our teams moves fast, and we have many more to come.
Let's make this fun
Tweet your hosted Replit project at @Replit or @amasad and get a chance to win 1,000 cycles. Cycles is Replit's credit system. They can be used to purchase power-ups like private, always-on, and boosted repls. We're so excited to see all of your amazing projects hosted on Replit.
