Comment by tmpz22
16 hours ago
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.