Comment by doomspork
17 hours ago
I have been helping a non-profit migrate off Replit. What an awful experience using the platform has been. Their LLMs produce very bad code compared to Claude Code or Codex with the exact same prompt. Ultimately you end up having to go back and forth to get to a better solution while they nickel and dime you on tokens. It feels questionable, like it is intentional to squeeze money out of you.
Having used lovable.dev as well, I must say Lovable is a much better product.
Replit is easily one of the worst products and platforms I've use. I wouldn't even recommend it to my enemies.
But why did the non-profit go with Replit in the first place? Some guesses:
1) they were inexperienced or just hesitant to use even managed infrastructure
2) they started with a small Replit footprint and kind of got stuck there out of some niche convenience
3) it started free* and was thought of as a cost cutting measure to use this temporarily VC subsidized service (we've all been there)
Inexperienced, thought it was a good solution to get something up and running quickly and affordably to better serve their users.
Their inexperience has definitely cost them as they continuously tack on half baked features but I took some of their prompts, got the project code, and tried Claude with far greater results and quality. That got me digging deeper and left me feeling like Replit is a border line fraud. They asked to support markdown in a JS app. Replit opted to build a Regex based markdown parser that barely worked. No one prompted it to roll its own. They just asked for markdown support. They then spent numerous sessions trying to get it to work never understanding why it didn't. All the while Replit was printing money from them.