saying goodbye to glitch.com 🎏
The long and short of it:
Glitch.com is going away.
In a statement on their website. The Glitch team announced substantive and what seems like pretty clear changes to their service offerings.
We’ve got an important update for the Glitch community today: We’ll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch. - May 2025
A brief intro
If you aren't familiar with Glitch.com, it's an online javascript ide that supported several languages. Perhaps even more than the online real time ide was the hosting. With Gitch you could build applications and instantly have them hosted online. This was huge for learning how to work with front end and back end components of applications.
Web hosting was one of the biggest draws for me to Glitch.com in the early days of react.js development. The ability to easily test and deploy web apps for everyone to demo was a huge help especially in building portfolios, testing web apps, and testing services such as Pigeon Maps and Mapbox.
But as with all good things, Glitch is closing it's doors. And perhaps it was inevitable. I can only imagine the cost of running an app like this, and the exploits I'm sure many bad actors used alongside the many great applications.
I've personally used Glitch.com for several years now. I've really come to love it's easy setup. Getting packages installed and storing assets is really a breeze. In addition to the speed setting up, I greatly enjoyed the user interface. It was simple and easy to use with all the debugging and previewing tools I needed to stand up applications quickly and troubleshoot issues.
Alternatives
All that to say, I'm searching for an alternative.
Github Codespaces - On the surface this looks promising. However it's not made for deployment, sharing or really anything outside of your private and online environment. Which is fine for most cases, but in terms of a single platform that allows for sharing active apps it is far from glitch.
Val Town - A Typescript heavy editor with similar sharing and collaboration communities. Obviously much less robust than glitch.com but a space that's helpful nonetheless.
Honorable Mentions
Fastly Fiddle - A pure js testing environment (reminds me of js fiddle).
Fly.io - Hosting for applications, 0perating on the "Pay As You Go" model.
Deno (Deploy) - Still in early access, seems to match the layout of Glitch.com visually. I've not yet been able to test the Deploy feature as of yet.
GitHub Pages - Not to be confused with Github Codespaces, Pages, are the hosted and live version of the applications. While not as feature rich as Glitch.com, a simple app on Github pages might work for you.
the neon writing on the wall
Glitch.com is staying active in some form until the end of 2026. I guess that gives me enough time to find a suitable alternative. But in my search for a new online ide with hosting, I've stumbled upon a movement known as vibecoding.
To put it plainly, vibecoding is fully relying on AI to write and develop tools. While there are many reasons someone should not vibecode, there's a large growing wave of non-developers moving in to the coding space on the wave of AI. Even Rick Ruben is getting in on the action.
Rick Rubin and Anthropic
