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Glitch launches subscriptions to power up its bite-sized apps

Glitch launches subscriptions to power up its bite-sized apps

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Subscriptions lift some major constraints on the platform’s apps

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The coding platform Glitch is formally launching its first paid product today: a subscription that lets you pay to upgrade the bite-sized apps you can run on its platform.

Since it launched in 2017, Glitch has let anyone write and remix code and then publish bots, web apps, and other projects that it would host for free. But that free hosting came with strict limitations. Apps had limited RAM and storage, and more importantly, they would be shut down if they went dormant for just a few minutes, meaning you often had to wait through a sluggish start up before using them.

“We want this to be part of every developers’ tools.”

With its new subscription, Glitch is significantly expanding what apps can do. Subscribers will be able to “boost” the performance of five of their apps. Those apps will never go to sleep, they’ll receive twice as much storage (400MB) and four times as much memory (2GB). Glitch’s rate limit on requests an app can make will also be lifted for all projects that a paying subscriber has, not just the five they choose to boost.

“We are straight up saying we want this to be part of every developers’ tools,” Anil Dash, Glitch’s CEO, said in a call with The Verge. The subscription is meant to show that Glitch is a “a real product and a real company” that developers can rely on “to be part of their toolkit.”

The subscription is being offered for $10 per month or $96 per year. Boosted apps will get a little diamond icon beside them that Glitch hopes users will think of a little bit like Reddit Gold — sure, it gives you some extra features, but the real perk is showing that you’re part of the community.

Glitch is probably best known for the small, quirky apps that are abundant on its platform. You can find a pleasant little drum machine, a roulette game that helps you decide where to go for lunch, a customizable a colorful spinning wheel of dots, a Good Place quote generator, a mashed-up webcomics generator, and so on.

But the platform is also used for more serious tools. Plenty of Slack and Discord bots are hosted on Glitch, and Glitch says it hosts a lot of small tools that companies found were just easier to make on its site. For those users, these paid features may be more important than just participating in the community — they’re about making sure apps built on Glitch’s site are reliable.

Glitch still plans to launch more business-focused tools later on. The company says the subscriptions are a first step in that direction.

There are currently close to 6 million apps hosted on Glitch, up from 2.5 million this time last year. More than 1 million apps are actively used every month.

“I think all these creative people have just been held back by not having something that frees them to express their ideas,” Dash said. “I’m super excited about this because it gets us into almost just being just part of their environment, part of what’s at hand.”