I stopped using Replit because it is no longer free

I have been studying Baysian statistics and needed a R compiler to write some code in R. I therefore decided to go into my Replit account because I know that platform supports the R programming language, as I have used it before.

Imagine to my dismay, when I opened my replit account and was confronted with the below message!

I decided that in order to be able to use Replit, I would need to delete some of the programs that I had written, so I deleted the programs that had been written in Python because I can use Google Colab to code much of what I would like in Python. I therefore deleted a number of Python files and was left only with HTML and R programs. Much to my chagrin, I still had the below message on my dashboard!

Apparently, I am only allowed to have up to three programs for free and I will be required to pay for anything more than that. I cannot pay to use Replit for the following reasons:-

1. I am on an extremely low income and cannot afford to pay for many things, such as food and clothing.
2. Replit is not such a great platform to begin with because importing libraries can be quite cumbersome and time consuming.

I researched this and found out that as of 1 January 2024 free hosting of all repls that are not counted as deployments has been suspended. Users now need to pay to deploy their projects, and this has sparked frustration among educators who have previously used the platform for free.

I personally don’t know if Replit has lost business as a result of their decision to no longer provide free hosting, but I for one won’t pay to use it because I honestly didn’t think it was such a fantastic platform when I was using it because of the problems I encountered with importing libraries.

There are a lot of free online code editors that a person can code R and other programming languages in, but I needed one that would provide visualisation, which was a bit trickier. I did, nevertheless, fine one compiler that will make charts and graphs in R, and that platform is myCompiler. With myCompiler I was able to make a program in R that included histograms and scatterplots, and also save that program into an account that I opened up for free. I am not sure exactly what the limit for creating free coding projects, but I am sure myCompiler will notify me when I have reached my limit.

So the saga goes. It is so difficult to find free, reliable resources on the internet. For the time being at least I have found a solution to Replit no longer being free, but who knows how long that will last.