We’ll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch
43 comments
·May 22, 2025vorador
Is this the end of fog creek? I remember they had shut down most of their services by the time their rebranded to glitch.
I wonder if anything is left of the company besides Joel's blog posts.
kbrosnan
Trello sold to Atlassian. Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow sold to Prosus FogBugz sort of lives on at https://ignitetech.ai/softwarelibrary/fogbugz but it looks like one of those companies that buys software solutions and retains the minimum staffing to keep lights on.
skeeter2020
Glitch isn't FC either, but to answer your question: is there anything left?
Yes, giant piles of money!
weiliddat
Sad, one of the first of its kind. Created a bunch of one-off tools for friends and colleagues on glitch, but could see why it didn't really take off. For me I switched to other platforms like codesandbox, replit because the editor UX wasn't great for a long time. I get wanting the simplicity angle but having poor hints/autocomplete/etc is a hard sell for writing code.
biker142541
Just coming to say this is a great example of how communication should be done for such changes. So many companies get this wrong, but this is thoughtful and to the point. Glitch was a springboard for myself as well, so very bittersweet (and I guess I need to migrate really old stuff... but to their point, this is super easy now).
DannyPage
I really enjoyed using Glitch as it allowed me to quickly publish and iterate on various experiments or try out new libraries like Datasette or HTMX.
I am curious what Glitch will look like after July. If they aren’t hosting apps, will they still be hosting code and letting it deploy elsewhere? It says it’s not a full shutdown, but it doesn’t appear to say what will be left to do on Glitch after that date.
drewda
Glitch was acquired by Fastly a few years ago, so perhaps the user-facing brand will continue on for a while on top of some Fastly hosted services...
bfdm
This a real loss. I'll miss Glitch for rapid experimentation with UI and APIs together.
steivan
I've been a long-time Glitch user and am now looking for good alternative platforms. My primary use case involves online coding with a Node.js backend using Express and some React apps. If anyone has recommendations, I'd greatly appreciate it.
qudat
Me and a buddy built https://pico.sh to make it easy for developers to prototype and share their projects. In particular we have a static hosting service (https://pgs.sh) and a tunnel service (https://tuns.sh) that should cover most apps in the prototype phase.
raybb
It's not nearly the same experience, but I'd argue a bit nicer of one, I'd recommend giving coolify a shot https://coolify.io/
You have to bring your own server to selfhost but it's dead dead easy.
If you have a nodejs app you can basically just click "new project from github", select the repo, and click deploy. Then it'll be there on your domain (or a free one) and auto redeploy any time you push to master.
weiliddat
Is it more small temporary projects you need to make and throw away, or large projects you keep working on?
LordShredda
I'd recommend, unfortunately, buying a cheap $200 netbook and running cloudflare tunnel on it. As long as you're relying on other people's computers for hosting you'll keep looking forever
barnabee
My vote for doing this is to get a second hand Lenovo/HP/Dell mini pc.
They're cheap (thanks to corporate upgrade cycles and the sheer number of "obsolete" models that are out there on eBay et al.), quiet, reliable, low power consumption, and generally pretty capable for the money.
lxgr
> As long as you're relying on other people's computers for hosting you'll keep looking forever
> running cloudflare tunnel
There's some irony here.
CharlesW
The Cloudflare dependency is for networking, not hosting. It would be very impressive to see a self-hosted service available over the internet without introducing a 3rd-party dependency or two.
andrewmcwatters
That's nearly 20 years of lowendbox provider annual payments for what this guy is asking for.
ignoramous
Workloads allowing, sub £50 SBCs like Banana Pi might do?
andrewmcwatters
...are you averse to just doing this stuff over a cheap VPS? Here's an affiliate link if you're interested.
1 GB RAM KVM VPS
1x vCPU Core
1 GB RAM
20 GB SSD
2 TB Bandwidth
Price: $10.96/Year
I don't work for Racknerd, but my business uses them for our clients. Most of them have low-end requirements. I mean that's less than $1/month right there.
ignoramous
2 TB Bandwidth
sabellito
Wait what, 11 USD per YEAR? How.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t
Lowendbox has lots of cheap shared VPS providers. For small projects that's all you need.
v5o
[dead]
mschuster91
The problem is, having a server on the internet is painful because you have to be constantly on guard for patches - if not you'll get hacked sooner than later.
barnabee
Debian with unattended-upgrades and a [weekly] scheduled restart has worked for me for a long time.
andrewmcwatters
What?
duck
Why is Glitch and Pocket both shutting down the same day and announcing today?
sureIy
You may be surprised to find out how many more things are happening today! It's definitely a conspiracy.
42lux
Someone is looking for coin and doesn't find it.
curiouser3
glitch.com brings back memories of the pre-slack era Glitch MMO. What an amazing time that was, really beautiful game made by talented people, pivoted the communication side into what we now know as Slack
null
busymom0
As someone who had never heard of them, can someone explain what Glitch was used for?
alexjplant
Glitch the company also used to be Fog Creek of Joel Spolsky/FogBugz fame.
qilo
. (dot) got truncated
js4ever
It was a platform to create / edit / host frontend and node.js backend. It was popular because it was an easy and free way to deploy something on a playground.
When it went out I was super impressed, but they failed to monetize it and got badly abused by bad actors
daveguy
This is excellent communication and respect for their users. Applause for Glitch. Especially allowing users to retrieve resources for a full 6 months after the closure.
If you appreciate this level of communication and respect, avoid Digital Ocean at all cost. They will fail to send you emails for a few weeks and then delete your resources permanently with no recourse. They are the literal opposite of Glitch. Avoid Digital Ocean.
I would recommend Glitch remove Digital Ocean from their list of alternatives.
Glitch has been a key piece of the A-Frame community (open source project I maintain) for almost a decade. I'm super thankful to the team! So many people started programming and had first steps in game and 3d graphics development with Glitch.
It's sad to see it go. I was always somehow worried. They had an awesome and super generous free tier. Unfortunately, it looks they couldn't make the numbers work.