I was dinking around on replit and quickly exhausted my free credits for the month. Before I pay for more, I wanted to know if there's a better option for the kinds of things replit does: i.e. building webapps from prompts.
Also, have people been able to make accounts at replit using proton addresses?
I vibe code webapps using opencode for free. When I run out of free credits using Opencode's free models (i.e. Big Pickle), I switch to openrouter's poolside/laguna-xs.2 and keep building.
Why is this answer so far down, opencode is literally the best one of them
Thanks
For simple, straight forward things, you can try https://arena.ai/agent - for free; they just want your feedback if it were any good.
Sounds perfect, thanks. I'll take a look.
Did you have any luck with this?
Yes! It's working great so far.
That's awesome!
I was going to cancel my replit subscription because I wasn't doing much with it and paying 20/month but they offered me 3 months for 5/month so I kept it. My daughter made a game with replit yesterday. I was trying to teach her what it means to iterate.
Her game is called Pet the Kitten and all you do is pet cats. Haha
Anyways if you sign up for a month at 20 and then cancel maybe they will give you a deal.
Good genre. She should try adding a feature/difficulty where if you pet too much or at the wrong time the cat bites you.
e.g.
https://byeorisim.itch.io/brush-jjaemu
Personally I think that would be hilarious but I am not sure I am going to suggest that to my 7 year old.
It would certainly make it more realistic.
Good to know. I would definitely pay $5 a month, although I'd rather pay with sats.
Well you can sign up for a different AI and have it build you a version of replit that charges you in sats. Haha
Have you tried Claude Code $20/month tier? It doesn't handle hosting for you, but it'll certainly make a webapp for you. And it can help you with hosting, like how to get it done on a platform of your choice.
Edit: disclaimer: I've never used replit, so idk really what it offers
No, I haven't used Claude. I'm not sure this is even worth $20 a month to me.
I'm very cheap and my time preference is very low.
@sjors mentioned that he uses free support chatbots to write code for him
Google Antigravity is their Cursor knock-off and you can get a fair amount done with the free tier, if you hit limits its like a week or 10 days till it resets.
Haven't played with Google AI Studio but I understand it to be a lighter more prototype focused version for the browser.
Kiro had a decent free tier last I tried it but that was awhile ago, it was good for planning which make your build tokens go further, could make the plan there and move it to something else to execute.
Replit was actually the only thing I've ever paid to try and wanted my money back, thought it terrible, couldn't understand the hype.
Any editor that lets you bring your own key is a great no-KYC/email option combined with PPQ.ai - just pay sats for tokens. Cursor sucks at BYOK so I need to try Zed next.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm playing around with @optimism's suggestion now (#1522534).
I'm mostly using PPQ through codex (with
--ossarg) right now, but it is not always without issues. Another option that works well (but you'll have to write detailed coding instructions yourself) is pi-agent.How much are you spending through PPQ?
I have Cursor Pro and GPT Plus (use codex-auth through a few things which gives me like $1000 worth of GPT tokens for $20) so my $5 on PPQ have mostly just sat there... and I just rigged up some release automation with Cursor CLI yesterday that I thought I would need PPQ for.
Gonna try some voicebox stuff soon to burn the PPQ credit, that seems to be its value to me, accessing pretty much any model my subs don't already have.
Started looking at building on Pi a little, but on the backburner... I ultimately want people to be able to use the full shocknet stack through a chatbot... point telegram bot or whatever at your node... take a picture, it uploads to lightning video cdn, creates an clink noffer for the product on pub with clink nmanage, publishes a product to nostr web shop, tracks sales via shockwallet rpc... full agentic decentralized commerce.
With just GLM-5.2 (regular, not the expensive "fast" one) on my production work, I mostly spend a bit under $1 for each hour it is plowing away at things, single-threaded because I can't review that fast anyway.
Currently it's been on the lower end - about $2 a day - because I'm hitting some bugs in codex and reading logs through sqlite is a nasty chore, so I switch between pi+ppq and claude to compensate and get shit done at the moment (though since I downgraded Claude to the $20 sub, it basically means 3 prompts and its done for the next 5h, lol.)
Just publish an llms.txt on your domain and describe everything in markdown. Like a remote skill file. That should work for most implementations
Been loving GLM 5.2, finally works right in Cursor... haven't used it directly as an API yet though but I suspect that'll be more expensive than through Cursor Pro allotment.
Grok 4.5 being 50% off in Cursor right now derailed using it a bit this week, it feels like what I expect Composer 3 should be... cheap, relatively fast, and good enough.
Experimenting with this for nodestr, will hit you up to try it... on-demand VPS.
I don't really run any "agents" like that live at the moment but always willing to
docker-compose upto test something.Just bite the bullet and pay for a subscription. Give in and join the future
No way! @denlillaapan told me that all of this crap is going to be free soon.
Lies
Be careful what you say because dumb people will hear what they want to.
Ah yes, I'm familiar with this!!
If your main goal is building web apps from prompts, don't limit yourself to Replit. Lovable, Bolt.new, Firebase Studio, and v0 are all worth testing. I've found each excels in different areas, and sometimes combining them gives better results than sticking with one platform.
Thanks
Claude Opus 4.8 has done wonders for me.