Feb 12, 2024Flexible Credits and Usage-Based Billing
Replit has evolved from a simple online editor to a comprehensive end-to-end software development platform trusted by developers worldwide. As we’ve grown, we’ve introduced new tools and payment methods for services. We’ve recognized a desire among developers for greater control over their expenses on Replit, and today, we’re introducing usage-based billing. In January 2024, we enabled usage-based billing for any usage that exceeds your plan’s allotment. This change offers a more flexible and transparent view for managing development and deployment costs on Replit. Replit will continue to offer our powerful Starter and Core plans, and any usage beyond plan allotments will be billed via usage-based credit card payments. We’re confident these improvements will make using Replit to scale your projects easier. What's new? Flexible credits Previously, the Replit Core plan included specific allotments for Static and Autoscale Deployments. Feedback from our Replit Core community highlighted a desire for more versatile hosting options, particularly for bots (such as Discord, Telegram, Slack, etc.)
Dec 15, 2023Updates to Social Features on Replit
In 2024, we're excited to introduce improvements to our social features on Replit, all centered around making it easier to share and explore code. We learned from our top creators that a cover page's primary value is sharing code and giving other developers something to fork. Additionally, we recognized that viewing applications in an iframe is a suboptimal experience. Often, missing Secrets prevented the program from running as intended. The best way to view someone’s work is to visit the production deployment directly. With this in mind, we’re reimagining cover pages to focus primarily on code consumption. This shift marks a move away from running and viewing program outputs. Instead, we’re making these pages a hub for exploring and understanding code. Starting early next year, when you land on a cover page, it will show the project’s code or README file. They’ll be presented in an intuitive, editor-like environment for more straightforward navigation. When you find a project you want to work with, forking it is straightforward. We’ll set up an identical development environment for you so you can start making changes or running the code immediately.
Sep 13, 2023Introducing the Replit Desktop App
Replit is first and foremost a cloud-based company. You can code, run, and deploy your favorite apps using virtually any technology or framework, all on one platform. But just because we’ve created a cloud-based product doesn’t mean that you have to be limited to using Replit in the browser. That’s why today we’re super excited to announce the official Replit Desktop App. About the app With the Replit Desktop App, you can finally enjoy a native Replit experience free of browser distractions, on macOS, Windows, and Linux. This new form factor allows you to stay focused on coding with a “zen-mode” like experience, quickly create multiple windows for different Repls, and easily access Replit from your dock or home screen.
Sep 11, 2023Deploy Bun Apps that Autoscale on Replit
Using Replit Autoscale Deployments, developers can launch Bun apps that automatically scale from zero to meet customer demand, combining the speed of Bun and the power of Replit infrastructure. Build, iterate, deploy, and scale directly within Replit in seconds. Here’s how you can create and deploy a Bun App to Replit Autoscale Deployments in less than a minute:
Sep 5, 2023Announcing Autoscale and Static Deployments
Today, we are announcing our biggest release yet. Scalable hosting infrastructure directly from the editor. This release transforms Replit into an end-to-end platform to go from idea to production for your next project or startup. Two new products are immediately available to all Hacker and Pro subscribers: Autoscale Deployments - Infrastructure that scales up when your app goes viral and scales down when your app goes unused. Only pay for the resources you use. Static Deployments - Free option to host client-side sites like blogs and websites. Best of all, it's directly from the editor. Deploy to scalable infrastructure directly from the place you build. No additional vendors. Just Replit.
Sep 5, 2023Speeding up Deployments with Lazy Image Streaming
Replit Deployments is our new offering that allows you to quickly go from idea, to code, to production. To make the experience as seamless as possible, we built tooling to convert a Repl into a container imager which can be deployed to either a Google Cloud Virtual Machine or to Cloud Run. Early on, we started to hit some issues with large images taking too long to deploy to a virtual machine. It could take minutes to pull and unpack the container image before it could be started. There’s two angles of attack: reduce the image size or speed up the pulling of images. It's preferable to shrink the container image size; however, that is not always possible. In this post we’ll go into some of the technologies and approaches used to speed up image pulling/booting. What is a container image? First, we’ll need to establish some baseline knowledge around container images. If you already know the details, you can skip this section. At a high level, a container image provides both a root filesystem and configuration for running a containerized workload. Inside the container, the filesystem is mounted to the root directory /. The root filesystem is stored as a list of multiple compressed tarballs, called layers, which are overlaid on top of each other. That is, if two layers have the same file, layers later in the list have higher precedence and their files replace the files from lower layers.
Aug 15, 2023New Workspace Features to Keep Your API Keys Safe
As the community using Replit continues to grow, we want to help all users follow best practices and store API keys and secrets securely, rather than directly in code. Our Secrets feature, available in every Repl, allows you to store API keys securely where other users running or forking your Repl can’t access them. Now, we’re introducing new Workspace features to proactively help you protect your API keys and secrets. When Replit detects that you’re attempting to paste a likely secret value, like an API key or token, into a file, our Secret Scanner will warn you and give you the option to store that value as a Secret instead. The scanner runs behind the scenes and is completely client-side. You won’t know it’s there unless a potential secret value is encountered. How it works The Secret Scanner uses a list of known API key patterns and regexes to identify a likely secret value and warn you. Within the Secrets feature, data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest, and encryption keys are stored in a secure location that is protected by multiple layers of security. To help protect against key compromise, encryption keys are rotated regularly. Only you and your invited collaborators can see Secret values in a Repl.
Jun 5, 2023Replit AI Manifesto
Amjad Masad, CEO: I'm excited to welcome Michele Catasta to the Replit team as our VP of AI. Michele joins us from Google, where he was Head of Applied Research at Google Labs and, before that, Google X, where he researched Large Language Models applied to code. Michele has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and was Research Scientist and Instructor in AI at Stanford University. This manifesto is a culmination of a conversation Michele and I have had for over a year on the future of AI and its impact on the software industry: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” [1982] More than 40 years later, Alan Kay’s quote still sounds as relevant as it gets – no wonder he is recognized as one of the most influential pioneers of our industry. As a matter of fact, over the past few decades software and hardware worked in conjunction to dramatically augment human intelligence. Steve Jobs celebrated Alan’s quote in his famous 2007 keynote, right after launching the very first iPhone – possibly one of Steve’s mottos, considering how Apple built its reputation and massive success story on unprecedented software/hardware integration. At Replit, our mission is to empower the next billion software creators. Our users build software collaboratively with the power of AI, on any device, without spending a second on setup. We accomplished that by creating from the ground up a delightful developer experience. The Replit development environment allows our users to focus solely on writing software, while most of the hardware (and Cloud computing) complexities are carefully hidden away.
May 1, 2023Announcing Replit Extensions
At Developer Day, we revealed our commitment to increasing the extensibility of Replit to better serve the diverse needs of our community of makers and all developers. And today, we’re excited to announce a major milestone in our mission to empower a billion developers: the launch of Replit Extensions. Extending the Replit Environment Makers have an ever-present desire to have control over their tools. This is true in every creative domain, be it software, music, photography, or painting. What makes software unique is that much of the tooling is itself software, and with any mastery of software, you can begin to shape your tools to your needs. Making Replit extensible has been at the top of our minds since the beginning. We've been busy at work—we've iterated on our core primitives, our layout system, refactored our code towards modularity, allowed people to configure their Repls, and even replaced our code editor with one that's far more composable, with extensibility as one of the driving reasons. Over the last year, we explored security paradigms to create a safe yet flexible extension system that doesn’t compromise user or developer experiences. Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts detailing the ideas and prototypes we’ve tried along the way. After months of collaboration with our community members and beta testers, we are thrilled to officially release Extensions to everyone. Check out the Extension Store in a Repl to use extensions built by other Replit community members.
Apr 11, 2023Replit Deployments - the fastest way from idea → production
After a 5 year hosting beta, we're ready to deploy. Introducing Replit Deployments Today we’re releasing Replit Deployments, the fastest way to go from idea to production in any language. It’s a ground up rebuild of our application hosting infrastructure. Here’s a list of features we’re releasing today: Your hosted VM will rarely restart, keeping your app running and stable. You’re Always On by default. No need to run pingers or pay extra. Say goodbye to the “Repl Waking” screen because your VM doesn’t go to sleep. Isolated VM resources for your app will give you improved security and performance.
Mar 23, 2023Building Ghostwriter Chat
Why did we build it? At Replit, we want to give people the most powerful programming environment, and what better way is there than giving people access to a pair programmer directly in their IDE? Enter Ghostwriter Chat. Gone are the days where you had to search Stack Overflow for an obscure error message or visit the docs of your favorite package for the millionth time because you forgot what that one argument was called. Interacting with Ghostwriter should be as easy as interacting with a team member, and it is. Since Ghostwriter Chat can have access to your repl file and context, Ghostwriter can help answer questions about your program without copying and pasting entire code blocks. We started working on Ghostwriter Chat during our Hackweek in January, and we wanted to be the first to market with an LLM chat application native to your editor. From start to finish, we shipped the product in ~6-8 weeks
Mar 19, 2023An update to cover pages
We're excited to announce that Replit rolled out a big visual update to cover pages last week. With this update, Repl content comes first more than ever before. Everything else is now off to the side, allowing for a cleaner and more focused app experience. Our goal with this update is to improve the user experience for both creators and visitors of Replit projects. Two key improvements come with this update:
- Feb 14, 2023
Announcing Ghostwriter Chat: The first conversational AI programmer
Today, we are announcing the beta release of Ghostwriter Chat. Now with chat, a proactive debugger, and awareness of your project’s context, Ghostwriter becomes the best AI pair programmer in the world. Building Ghostwriter Last fall, we introduced Ghostwriter, Replit’s coding AI, with Complete, Generate, Transform, and Explain Code - coding assistant tools that work with you as you code. Together they made coding faster by automating repetitive tasks and removing the drudgery of writing boilerplate code. That was just the first step towards our master plan to create a fully autonomous pair programmer – one that feels like working with another teammate.
Jan 29, 2023Git in the Shell
Starting today, the Git command-line tools of all Repls provide a much better experience and integrate with your GitHub account. If you connect your GitHub account to Replit from the Account page, your Git commands (like git clone, git fetch, git push) will have access to your GitHub repositories: You're now able compose Git commit messages in the editor:
Jan 23, 2023PostgreSQL Database Preview Now Available On Replit
Databases and web apps go together like peanut butter and jelly. In a word, they're inseparable. And despite all the amazing innovations in NoSQL data stores, often a good old relational database is the most reliable tool for the job. We want to make it completely seamless to develop applications that need databases on Replit. Starting today, you can create and instantly begin to use PostgreSQL databases from within the Replit workspace. Here's how you use it. First, click the PostgreSQL icon in the Tools pane on the lower left hand side of the workspace.