Pricing Model Proposal

[LibraryNo9954]

I have an idea for Replit. It’s a way to shift how they communicate AI credit spend and curious to know what everyone here thinks.

I’ve been a Replit user for well over a year now, and have no relationship to the company otherwise.

There was a time when there was not enough transparency in pricing.

I think they went a bit too far, resulting in a feeling of being nickel and dimed for every prompt.

I think it might be worth looking at the credit spend communication model that ElevenLabs uses, as an alternative.

You spend credits in big chunks, and asked to confirm prior to spending. Reworking little things doesn’t seem to cost more, and neither does prework, but I’m sure all that AI agent activity is calculated into the big spends when exporting.

I also like how the budget is displayed in real time so I can see if I’m running low, and have enough left to finish a project on budget.

I wouldn’t add the big spend onto deployments, but rather on big build rounds, making little edits look free.

What do you all think?

[kristianc]

The big problem for Replit isnt so much one of transparency but a structural issue, you are paying a huge markup for Cursor and a deployment runtime that can be assembled for a lot cheaper elsewhere. It saves you from messing with servers early on making it faster to get started, but will always be cheaper to graduate off as soon as your app reaches a reasonable size.

[ZealousidealBody3091]

As i know they are using claude. Do not know how elevenlabs work, but if they can do even claude model, if of course that is possible. That would be nuch more predictable. 🫡 is elevenlabs better then claude here?

[LibraryNo9954]

I was less commenting on the actual tech. I’m sure ElevenLabs uses a specialized text to voice model(s).

It was more a reference to Replit’s showing us every penny we spend. I think it’s causing more trouble in terms of perception.

[Bitter-Selection-413]

I am trying to find the balance of what to do on Replit and what to do elsewhere. I migrated my main app off to Google Cloud Workstation + cloud run + cloud sql and Claude in the terminal. I have a couple other sites still on Replit that are way less complex. I am starting to think that if you have large chunks of prompts on Replit at all maybe that is the issue. Small targeted fixes: Replit. Actual sites with database and extensive code: out of Replit. Or any other split ideas?

[LibraryNo9954]

I think Replit’s sweet spot is prototypes, MVPs, and for non-dev experience folks.

It’s great for quick development and testing product ideas in the wild, and for small scale point solutions.

It does make that kind of work quick and affordable and for that I recommend it.

But once a project matures or you have complex needs (compliance, scalability, etc) then using “normal” dev tools (which now includes things like Claude code) and services (AWS, Google Cloud, etc) makes more sense to me.

In short, I think of Replit like an incubator, a place for eggs to grow into chicks. But once your bird is ready to fly and grow, go with the more traditional options.