After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/after-nine-years-of-grinding-replit-finally-found-its-market-can-it-keep-it/

by toomanyrichies • 10 months ago

158 136 10 months ago

sincerely• 10 months ago

Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off.

I gotta wonder who the median techcrunch reader is if the writer/editor felt it necessary to explain the point of having a staging and prod environment, and with such a pointless analogy. We surely cannot understand what a database is unless we're told it's like a filing cabinet, right?

jychang• 10 months ago

You don't write for your median reader, you write for the vast majority of your readers.

That's a basic concept of writing. Journalism should be accessible, so even if you know what a database is and how to deploy it in different envs, you shouldn't write assuming that. If a large portion of your readers don't know what you're saying, you've failed as a writer. If your readership includes high school students, you write with that as the baseline.

Richard Feynman certainly didn't write as if he assumed the reader knew particle physics. Be like Richard Feynman.

kortilla• 10 months ago

Richard Feynman didn’t use poor analogies.

mejutoco2• 10 months ago

If the median has half the users over it and half under it, wouldn’t writing for most of your readers be very close to writing for the median? If we are aiming for 51% (most readers). Most readers is somewhere between 50% and under 100%.

I appreciate the idea, but I think there are always assumptions. Like you did not explain what the median is because this is hn. I like the standars of the economist, always saying what an acronym is on first usage, and what a company is (Google, a search company). What they dont do is say: Google, like a box where you enter what you want to find and points you to other boxes. That would be condescending for its readers I believe. It is a matter of taste, and not objective, I guess.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 10 months ago

I'm not sure if any of my coworkers has ever properly used a filing cabinet

sooperserieous• 10 months ago

Be like Richard Feynman

Oh the things he did to filing cabinets, especially "secure" ones...

ChadNauseam• 10 months ago

Ironically, especially when you combine it with the em-dash, it really sounds like exactly the type of completely pointless and unilluminating analogy that LLMs love to generate. These analogies are essentially a bridge between two concepts, much like how a physical bridge connects two pieces of land separated by water, except in this case the 'water' is understanding and the bridge doesn't actually help you cross it.

verandaguy• 10 months ago

Well done

notarobot123• 10 months ago

To be fair, this was an indirect quote from a founder trying to make programming accessible to "white-collar employees with no technical background".

The bigger question here is why prod/staging wasn't an obvious design choice in the first place!

petre• 9 months ago

Maybe it diverted too many resources from the original goal. They fixed the issue afterwards and made a fuss about it.

unmole• 10 months ago

median techcrunch reader

Is probably a consumer tech enthusiast and not a software developer.

layer8• 10 months ago

They are merely quoting the analogy from Masad — for whom it makes sense if they are targeting nontechnical users and not professional developers anymore.

recursivecaveat• 10 months ago

It's kind of a beautiful turn of phrase, in that the filing cabinet is entirely superfluous, you can use almost any noun. "it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s sub sandwich — the AI agent can experiment freely with a development sandwich, but the production sandwich, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off".

"When you click a button on our website, a request is sent across the internet to our servers, it's a little like if a sockeye salmon was sent across the internet to our servers."

dvrj101• 9 months ago

Masad and his team owned the problem. he fired half of his team so it really wasn't an option for rest of them team.

0xsn3k• 10 months ago

personally, the evolution of replit makes me sad. i remember writing some of my very first ever programs in python using replit in middle school, as it wasn't blocked by the school network and it was the best way of running arbitrary code online back then. i used it to execute java code for AP computer science in high school, and i improved a ton at using the terminal as well. At some point, I stopped using the replit web editor and was coding by full-screening the built-in terminal and using vim. it was a formative experience and really helped me develop as a programmer even though all i had access to was a locked-down chromebook. but now, going back to the website and seeing the first thing it shows to you is how you can "build apps using AI", not even being able to even create an environment to run some python code without talking to an LLM, and the company focusing on ARR and becoming "AI-native" and creating value and all that jazz, and it feels like the magic of learning to code for the first time has been lost. luckily, kids these days are spoiled with webassembly and can run pretty much whatever they want in the browser, so i'm sure the next generation of young programmers will be alright

brazukadev2• 10 months ago

You should be grateful and happy for the people that helped you in your journey, they made it! You know, apps are not AI (yet), what you used for free was built by someone that deserves the success.

reactordev2• 10 months ago

But that’s true of everything we use. Someone made that fork you use. That plate. The shoes you wear. Same for an app. You don’t deserve anything. If you make something, and release it into the world, you have a responsibility. Not a reward. A reward may come. People may pay you for your services or your novelty but in no way shape or form are you deserving of it. Deserving of something is a 3rd person observation. You can not demand that you deserve anything.

csixty4• 10 months ago

I agree so much with this. I used Replit extensively to prototype things in different languages and share my work with my teammates, who could then suggest tweaks to my ideas. We never came close to the limits of the free tier, but I paid for it anyway because I loved the product.

The magic is definitely gone.

gcr2• 10 months ago

FWIW you can still start from template environments by going to "Developer Frameworks," picking an example language, and clicking "Remix."

It's not as nice as before though. I miss when free accounts could have unlimited projects.

freetonik• 10 months ago

I've used Replit for educational materials when teaching beginners Python and JavaScript. They had a nice product called Teams for Education. It was even announced that it'll become fully free (the original blog post with the announcement was deleted from their website) [0], but soon after that the company had pivoted to AI and later discontinued the Teams for Education completely [1].

I also used Replit's embedded widgets for occasional lessons, but they kept changing the UI and behavior, making it difficult to write consistent reliable documentation for beginners.

I think by now it's clear that the product is not meant for educators, like it was originally, so that's ok.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20240924020257/https://blog.repl...

[1] https://blog.replit.com/update-on-teams-for-education

vesterde• 10 months ago

Oh you brought back fond memories of using the very first education product Replit had. It was so good. I was teaching GCSE CS and having a blast giving kids python with turtle to play with. I would just give them some multicoloured octagon and more complex shape, and they had to draw it with turtle.

They enjoyed it, I enjoyed it, and the teacher UX was great.

gerdesj• 10 months ago

Libre Office has a Logo implementation built in. You can have turtles whizzing around your documents and spreadsheets.

jackblemming• 10 months ago

Sounds like these guys kind of flailed around for almost a decade and then jumped on the AI bandwagon. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just surprised someone decided to bankroll them for so long. Also not sure how successful they’ll be long term, since they’re presumably a wrapper around one of the big three in a highly competitive space.

mcherm2• 10 months ago

I’m just surprised someone decided to bankroll them for so long.

When you are PROFITABLE (but not as profitable as your investors would like) you can run FOREVER without anyone "bankrolling" you. It's a foreign concept in the AI world (and sometimes it feels like it's foreign to the tech startup world) but quite effective.

maxbond2• 10 months ago

Even if you are profitable your investors could pressure you to exit to some other company so that they can recoup their investment. But I doubt they were profitable. Going by the article they had about 100 employees and about $2M in revenue before they downsized. Assuming a median salary of $100k that would put their payroll alone at $10M. But the napkin math is kinda beside the point because they did keep raising money [1].

[1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/113831-02

josefrichter• 10 months ago

I don't think they can keep it. What they have has already been replicated by the big guys, with just maybe a few months delay. It seems like they're usually going in the right direction, even ahead of others, but it's usually not any massive breakthrough, they're just being good at executing quickly the natural next steps.

Perenti• 10 months ago

I've seen bots promoting Replit on Steam forums of indie games.

If this is the way they are marketing their product, I don't see it as having a future. What I've seen in the Dwarf Fortress forums alone makes me want to avoid the company with a 10' pole.

nurettin• 10 months ago

Let us not forget how replit tried to cancel Riju (an open source project from one of the early devs which does something similar)

Edit: looks like they succeeded or the author moved on

Jtsummers• 10 months ago

https://radian.statuspage.io/

It's still up, it only supports IPv6 so that may be why you can't get to it.

JimmyAustin• 10 months ago

Hey, Replit employee here. I'm pretty sure this isn't us (definitely isn't our marketing team's MO AFAIK). Can you email me some examples at james @ replit dot com so I can look into this?

Kiro• 9 months ago

I find exactly one post about Replit in the DF Steam forums and it's definitely not from a bot account. Players who have just discovered vibe coding love to tell devs "just" to use something like they've been enlightened.

speff• 9 months ago

I found two, but it looks like the topic was deleted. Kagi had it partially cached as a search result[0]. The first thread in that list seems a bit more ...pushy than the second thread. Though I think you're still right - was probably just a new coder who was excited about what they found.

[0] https://files.catbox.moe/oepmri.png

rsp1984• 10 months ago

Let's not forget this gem here [1].

Tells you everything you need to know about the company and its leadership.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

jeswin• 10 months ago

He threatened the ex-intern by saying they have "a lot of money to pay for top lawyers" (goodness!), the incident gathered a lot of attention, got caught, and was forced to say sorry.

Replit is in the news because of the Vercel fiasco. And it's jarring because of how they've tried to take advantage of that situation.

redwood2• 10 months ago

Vercel fiasco?

hu32• 10 months ago

Sad to see https://riju.codes offline. Cant resolve DNS.

Last push to main was 2 months ago so there's hope: https://github.com/radian-software/riju

jlundberg• 10 months ago

Seeing it as offline could be related to this:

”Please note that Riju is only available on IPv6-enabled networks due to the higher financial cost of supporting legacy protocols.”

pengfeituan• 10 months ago

They are working at a too competitive area. Techs changed, and everything should re-start from scratch. Nine years may mean nothing at all.

MangoToupe• 10 months ago

What, college students with credits who haven't figured out docker yet?

cloudking• 10 months ago

I took it for a spin spin to build a simple task manager. It worked for 45 minutes, built half the solution and then asked me for money. Compared to the other options in this space, it seems like an expensive solution.

markdown2• 9 months ago

What other options?

_heimdall2• 9 months ago

An entry level programming book? Building a basic task manager is a pretty straight forward task, it doesn't take much coding knowledge to do and is one that is often used as an example to teach programming.

ctkhn2• 10 months ago

If OpenAI and Anthropic's models are good enough at coding to make coding agents useful for non-technical employees Replit is targeting, why can't either of those companies use their AI to build a wrapper around their product as good or better than Replit? Has this guy never taken n -> infinity in a problem before?

sillyfluke• 10 months ago

OpenAI taking an interest wouldn't be so bad for Replit. Since YC boasts that being incestuous is an upside of YC, ie selling your product to other YC companies, it is possible that OpenAI does the decent thing an outright buys Replit. It is rather likely that Altman and Masad have some sort of relationship going back to their YC days.

CuriouslyC3• 9 months ago

Replit has a lot of "value" that's actually dead weight that's going to fall by the wayside as AI gets better and humans move out of the loop. Cursor and the IDE agent companies have the same problem. They need to cannibalize their products to build for the fully autonomous engineering future, but I'm 95% certain that they won't, and the business that DO focus on full automation and moving the human out of the loop will eat their lunch.

ctkhn2• 9 months ago

Why would OpenAI buy Replit? My point is, if Sam's model is so great and advanced, it should be able to autonomously code a replacement. Or Cursor, or any of the others.

kubb• 10 months ago

The funding round is all that matters. Now he can pay himself 15 million per year plus a severance package and he’s made it.

ares623• 10 months ago

Bingo. Us plebs are busy thinking about long term plans.

Pet_Ant• 10 months ago

Is miss repl.it for what it used to be, just a quick way to play with a bit of code.

VBprogrammer• 10 months ago

We used to use it for coding interviews during COVID. It never struck me as anything special and I'm not convinced saddling it with AI improvements it's prospects. In fact it might make them worse given it's general applicability to learning which will surely be surpressed by the worries of an AI takeover.

laweijfmvo• 9 months ago

Same, but that doesn’t justify half a billion dollars in investment.

system22• 10 months ago

I don't understand the appeal of Replit. Claude and other agents do what they do for much cheaper and efficiently. Is it for newcomers who don't know anything about software development, nd Replit fills the gap with basic user instructions and structure? Why is it even a thing while real agents are there?

gcr2• 10 months ago

Replit's original value proposition was on-demand sandboxed environments.

With Claude, it's like you're handing YOUR laptop's terminal to an intern. With Replit, you can mess things up without consequences, which is a great help for newbies.

system22• 9 months ago

WSL + local Git? Don't people use it to sandbox their applications and create necessary branches without losing their minds?

fredfsh• 10 months ago

But the technical achievement wasn’t translating into revenue growth, and by last year, with the company at 130 employees and burning through cash, Masad said he had to make a painful decision. “I looked at our burn, and I looked at our progress on our revenue chart, and it just didn’t make any sense. The business wasn’t viable.” Replit cut its headcount by 50%, bringing it down to around 60 to 70 people at its lowest point.
Plus, Replit has another unusual advantage for a startup: a $350 million war chest. Despite raising $100 million in 2023, the company “hadn’t touched” those funds by the time it raised this latest round, Masad told me. The company is capital efficient by design, though Masad joked that as an entrepreneur who grew up watching his refugee father struggle, “one thing I need to learn is to be less frugal and start spending money.”

tczMUFlmoNk• 9 months ago

Wow, so, connecting these dots:

- reducing headcount by 50% down to ~70 people = firing 70 people

- at a generous estimate of total burdened cost of $1M/person/year, that's $70M/year

- which accounts for a full 5 years of that war chest

- and, moreover, "at its lowest point" suggests that perhaps Replit has expanded headcount again since; the article mentions that it has done some acqui-hires.

Levels.fyi shows Replit salaries in the $200k–300k range, so even at a 2× burden rate, I think that this is probably a significant overestimate of the costs.

Firing 70 people when you have $100 million that you haven't touched, have raised money on top of that, and have many years of runway for the people you fired… comes together to paint a picture that is, imho, less than flattering.

justonceokay• 9 months ago

Ehh. I don’t love it and it isn’t good optics, but if you can’t find a way to utilize your employeees (such as having a hard time finding a maeket fit for an existing product) then it isn’t your moral obligation to keep paying them. It isn’t clear what employees were laid off ir for what reason either.

ed• 9 months ago

A sustainable business can pay more employees than a failed startup. And pivoting with 150 employees is nearly impossible; all those people were hired for a different business.

forgingahead2• 9 months ago

Hilariously naive comment - "if you have money you should spend it on salaries". This is not a charity, it's a transaction, the salary is paid in exchange for revenue generating activities or supporting activities in a viable business. If the business is only doing 2.7mill in ARR, then it's entirely valid for the whole lot to get laid off.

HDThoreaun• 9 months ago

Its a business, not a charity. Just because they have money doesnt mean they should spend on people who arent contributing to the bottom line.

SadTrombone• 9 months ago

What information do you have that they weren't contributing to the bottom line?

ahf8Aithaex7Nai2• 9 months ago

This has nothing to do with charity. Every employee can contribute to the bottom line. It is the company's responsibility to organize and empower its employees in such a way that added value is created. If this is not achieved, the employees have still given up their time and must be compensated for it.

You are welcome to optimize your processes so that you no longer need any employees. But society will still consist of people who need money. And if you don't pass on the surplus you have accumulated in the form of salaries, they will get what they need from you by other means.

davikr• 10 months ago

personally, I hate the AI pivot. could barely find a way to make a project without the vibecoding option, recently

bitwize• 9 months ago

Pivoting to AI made Repl.it worse but Warp.dev better.

sporkxrocket• 9 months ago

Amjad is one of the only leaders in tech (along with Paul Graham) speaking out against Israel's apartheid and genocide. He also happens to be Palestinian. I will happily give him my money and invest in ethical platforms. Replit's a really good option for AI coding anyway!

saltyoldman• 9 months ago

"Replit found its market"

HN: It sucks now

Imustaskforhelp3• 9 months ago

maybe HN isn't the market then :p

jjangkke• 9 months ago

probably not for many founders sharing their product on HN

neither is reddit

dilyevsky• 9 months ago

At the risk of stating the obvious, is it really that surprising people who frequent “hacker” forum don’t appreciate a product pivot pitched specifically to non-coders?

Cyclone_• 9 months ago

I've used it for creating a template for an app. It usually creates a pretty accurate app with at least a basic UI and some interactions. The biggest issue is that once you've created the template, it's pretty tough to add some more complicated features using the AI.

markdown2• 9 months ago

This has been my experience also.

You gotta give it detailed instructions for everything at the start. You can't just build as you go, because every time it adds something it breaks something else.

joshdavham• 9 months ago

I've never used replit but I'm curious what types of choices the app makes when building. Like how does it decide on the architecture, backend language, frontend framework, etc? Even if the non-technical user is unaware of the tech choices being made, the AI still has to make such decisions. How does it decide?

apwell23• 9 months ago

because every time it adds something it breaks something else.

standard ai workflow

nextworddev• 9 months ago

I tried their pro version then cancelled after realizing it’s worse than Claude Code

sergiotapia• 9 months ago

Too much money for a business that really won't find a way to justify the investment. Could have been a terrific lifestyle business and become extremely successful.

submeta• 9 months ago

There is no future for Replit considering how Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are moving into dev tools. And then there‘s Cursor and the likes.

As an online IDE they would have had a chance. But when they pivoted into AI, they decided to enter a highly crowded place with very strong players.

Recently OpenAI and now Anthropic are developing mobile clients as well:

https://www.testingcatalog.com/anthropic-prepares-claude-cod...

chrismustcode• 9 months ago

They were failing as an online IDE for several years then growth shot up after the AI pivot.

CuriouslyC3• 9 months ago

Cursor is in the same lifeboat being circled by sharks as Replit. What value does teaching noobs how to code or showing changes in an IDE have when the AI is smarter than humans and human in the loop just slows things down and makes them worse?

vasco• 9 months ago

This guy is exactly like the get quick rich scheme guys.

I believe he initially had a vision for the product but now the whole schpiel is quotes like "a kid made $180k on an app in 4 weeks" like he was on and on about in podcasts.

Ok if its so easy, why don't you use your own website to do a bunch of $180k / m apps? How many companies can have employees produce 12 different apps per year and a combined revenue of $2.1m per employee? Also everyone can do it so you can pay them minimum wage you don't need developers.

But of course nobody is going to make any successful apps other than the people in the marketing materials.

psnehanshu• 9 months ago

When I hear Replit, I remember how the CEO tried to kill an intern's pet project.

https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

bigcat12345678• 9 months ago

I am surprised the CEO does not understand the dynamic of his business. An open source project replicating your product is always a boost to the business. There is no case where that's not the case. The OSS is essentially the minatenance free free tier of the paid product.

BoorishBears• 9 months ago

I went to a YC event where the founder of a multi-billion dollar open source SaaS said pretty much the opposite and tried to drill home how strategic the choice needs to be for the company to survive.

aidos2• 9 months ago

To play devil’s advocate - where do you draw the line? They say they’re not going to push further into competing, but what if they did? I don’t know enough about either platform to really comment on how much of a big it is / how much they crossover. I do feel that it shows somewhat bad judgement on behalf of the intern to build something in exactly the same space as a former employer. One of the great things about software is that you can always move into another domain with your skills.

Obviously, I love the likes of Tailscale for embracing and supporting this behaviour - but that’s super exceptional (because they’re a strong team).

alexey-salmin• 9 months ago

Well the line is law: infringing copyrights and patents. And the US law is very specific about ideas not being copyrightable, so clones are usually safe.

stefvw93• 9 months ago

[…] unlike many AI-powered coding companies, Replit is gross margin positive.

Well, that’s highly unusual. I recon it is because replit covers the whole production pipeline, from specification to implementation to deployment?

JDazzle• 9 months ago

It's strange that their buzzwords are "to democratize programming"... isn't that already done very well with all the online free tools, documentation, tutorials, learning paths, etc?

Both AI and traditional programming paths share the same initial huge obstacle which is full access to a computer and the internet?

I'm not sure how AI is democratizing programming

Mario970• 9 months ago

You need to read between the lines: in boardroom speak, to "democratize" something usually means to dilute its rarity, usually to eliminate some party's bargaining power.

tracerbulletx• 9 months ago

Pretty much every company that says that eventually ends up spending 100% of the time catering to and trying to sign enterprises, and actively disdains supporting individual customers.

After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

Related Stories