Replit has self-destructed.

To watch so much potential wither away is… disappointing, and disheartening. What happened?

The start of the story

Amjad Masad, a seven year old, had a love for for programming. Despite facing a range of academic odds, Masad graudated from high school and majored in Computer Science at PSUT. After working at Yahoo and Codecademy, Masad moved to starting up a platform of his own. Hence, Replit was born.



Masad, the CEO and founder of Replit.

Last year, I took AP Computer Science Principles, and Replit was mixed in the course. We were taught, for a year, that Replit was an IDE to build and test your code. If you search “What is Replit” on DuckDuckGo, it is defined as an IDE - or as they put it, “ an American start-up and an online integrated development environment.” In fact, there are hundreds of videos on YouTube calling Replit an IDE.



This is where the problem starts. In 2020, far before all of these occurences, Masad stated that Replit is not an IDE. It just was an IDE for everyone. And so, hundreds of Repls manifested on the platform. Their Python course, 100s days of Python, requires making a new Repl each time.

They then instill a limit, 3 repls. Now, you’ve gotta pay for more. And, your old Repls will be deleted.



I don’t disagree with the policy of removing old, unused Repls. If they don’t serve a purpose, it is a waste of resources. The incredibly low Repl limit introduces their subscription service. No activity on their twitter can be found discussing this. In fact, Replit seems to have done more to make the subject be radio silent.

Radio Silence

Replit’s Twitter has only covered their Replit AI features and Replit Agent. The loss of this free resource for code is gone, essentially. It was a competitor to Microsoft and GitHub, and it seems GitHub will still be the coding capital as it stands. I’m posting this through Github, and I am grateful for the resources it provides for free. However, it is still unfortunate to see such a competitor with so much potential wither away. Masad’s twitter, blog and online prescence.

Other peopel can’t talk about it easily either. Their Discord server is no longer active or accessible. Replit Forums and Community has been taken down, and they reccomended to go to StackOverflow. Going to StackOverflow, you can only discuss code issues. There is no one else around to ask: “What happened to Replit?”

Hello??

There are so many flaws in how this is covered. Many of their users just got shut down without anything. No twitter post, no YouTube video. Just two emails. This subscription service can still be a great resource for those willing to pay, but it won’t be worth it, as there are better resources that are free.

Was it Doomed?

Replit is another case of something growing too big, too fast. I learned in economics that the goal of a company isn’t to maximize revenue, but to find the ground between the most profit and least costs. Replit stock has only grown because of the subscription service, as now the company can pay for the the resources and investors aren’t losing money. As a free resource and a start up, at some point, they did have to find some way to monetize the platform. It was unexpected to have occured so fast, and in such a short amount of time.



The unprofessionalism coming from the CEO on the issue is reflected on his unprofessionalism generally. Private beliefs should not intermix with your work account. The inability for the CEO to manage the platform unfortnately was to be foreseen with this mismanagement of PR. PR and marketing is everything to selling your company as credible, and keeping your Twitter professional is step one.

I don’t have any takes on his opinion, but it simply doesn’t belong in a professional environment.

The Consequences

I’ve seen Replit being withdrawn from a few places. GirlsWhoCode are reworking their choice of IDE, as paying for Replit Core is going to be unsustainable for the company. AP Computer Science has switched to App Lab and Scratch again. My club, Video Game Creation Club, is switching IDEs. The coding clubs at our school have moved back to Github.

Closng Thoughts

At the end of the day, it’s unfortunate, but not the end of the world. It’s strange to me, a little bit. To see something disappear, and everyone just keeps walking. The rain starts, and everyone in the crowd opens an umbrella, and continues. This blog post is me standing in the rain, before I walk on too. Thank you Replit, for being where I started coding. I’m grateful for the platform it provided. Goodbye :)

Thank you for reading.

Works Cited

Mr. Masad’s background: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130919080958-1326123–young-hungry-and-waiting-to-be-unleashed/