Pretty please prioritize paid plans

“This is still a beta so don’t ask me how many 9’s. You can have all the 8’s you want.”
Joel Spolsky introducing Glitch (then HyperDev) in 2016

I’m not sure if Glitch is living up to that 88.8888…% uptime promise but I feel their pain and am really grateful for their hard work to keep things running as smoothly as possible despite the crushing popularity!

Tragically, I’m seeing friends making the tough choice to migrate away from Glitch though. These are serious users who consider the paid plan plenty cheap and would be happy to pay for more reliability.

My question: Is it technically possible, when the servers are breaking, to shut down all apps except for paid/boosted ones? (Or maybe all apps owned by paying users, boosted or not.)

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This can seem very bad in the eye of others. Other people might see this is as a desperate act of getting paid users, which may cause them to migrate away from Glitch as well.

I respectfully disagree to your idea :confused:

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You mean like, “nice app you have there, shame if anything were to… happen to it”? Or just like throwing non-paying users under the bus or something?

  1. C’mon, this is Glitch. We know what amazing people they are and that they’re doing everything they can to make Glitch as reliable as possible for everyone.
  2. They’re hosting all these apps totally for free.
  3. A big reason, as I understand it, that they’re having server problems is all the people writing pingers to keep their apps from going to sleep, totally thwarting the whole mechanism by which Glitch can afford to host all these apps in the first place. It’s quite antisocial and we shouldn’t feel bad if those filthy freeloaders end up with more downtime as a result. :grin:

In fact, the more I think about it the more of a no-brainer it is. If paid apps are having downtime and it’s possible to bring them back by the force-pausing the unpaid apps, that’s the fair and just thing to do. Glitch doesn’t owe the free users anything – the paying ones they do!

PS: In fact, why would you, as a forum regular, disagree here? Are you not a paying user yourself? You should be!

C’mon, this is Glitch. And Glitch is for everyone.

There may be sustainability pressures that lead Glitch to make changes like the ones you’re discussing, but I hope they do it for a reason other than for not caring about free users. And if they do it, I want them to do it knowing that I admired them for trying out radical idea of treating free users with respect.

This–I really hope you can come around on at least this objective point. There are users who, to put it frankly, came here not because they compared plans across many paid services and settled on Glitch, and those users then stuck around and became active in the community.

dreeves, I said all this, but this doesn’t make us enemies. I hope we can still have positive interactions on topics other than the perceived value of different users.

P. S., on a lighter note:

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I’m a forum regular and I don’t pay! In fact, @ihack2712 said that he doesn’t even use Glitch, he just uses the forums to help people out! Being a regular doesn’t mean you need to follow what Glitch does and do everything that Glitch would like people to do (e.g. pay for boosted apps), but instead means you give back to the community for the free service you are being given. We are basically paying for Glitch’s free plan. Not in money, but with the support we give to the community and by taking load of the support team by us helping people instead of them

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Ooh, yes, this is important! What about this amendment to my proposal: The apps of any forum regulars, maybe all forum participants period, as of unixtime 1592933796 (now, as I type this) are treated the same as those of paying users. (The “as of this timestamp” is so there’s no incentive to spam the forum.)

Even friendlier idea: bury something deep in settings or as a command-line script you can run that basically says “uptime is important to me for this app” and then prioritize all the apps where people bothered to say that.

I still believe in the extreme version but it may not be necessary!

And we can all agree that something has to happen because Glitch apps are unreliable enough at the moment that serious users are migrating away.

I said we are kind of paying for Glitch’s free plan by giving back to the community (may I remind I have took time out of my day to reply to your post and many others), not boosted apps. I never said that I wanted this to be added. Please cut the sarcasm. I agree that some priority should be given to boosted apps in support, but I don’t agree that regular forum users should have to be paying users, not that I want us to be given boosted apps for free, just I don’t need to pay and I don’t agree that you should just pull the plug on free apps for a week, days or even hours. The free apps are what made Glitch popular, you shouldn’t then just abandon us!
Eddie

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You misread me. There was no sarcasm.

You convinced me on that point. Being a forum regular is itself an important contribution (no sarcasm!).

Kind of have to side with @dreev on this one because while some of you might be calling this “unethical” or what not, Glitch is still a company and has to find ways to get more money at the end of the day.

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Wow! This is confusing me! Yes @RiversideRocks. Glitch should make money (I am totally with boosted apps - I just don’t have the money to buy them :joy:) and the banning of the pings are fine, just turning off free apps is a little overboard, do you not think?
Just reread and saw it says just in outages. This is fine! :joy: However, some people have wanted to stop all free apps forever or for a certain amount of times even though there isn’t much of an outage now

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To clarify, yes, during outages, boosted apps should be given the priority and free apps should be turned off if they are the issue, so that people who are paying money’s app can run like normal. But, as others have suggested (I know you didn’t say this - I misread), turning of all free apps, even for some while, while their is no or little outage (like now) shouldn’t happen.
Hope this makes sense :slight_smile:
Eddie

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Glitch Does This For Free Because they Want to Inspire Others TO Create Things they are not in it for the Money
of COURSE
@ihack2712 would Disagree with you on that
They Already made the tough choice to Perm ban Ping services to keep performance
They actually wanted unblock them in the future
Also yes i do believe if someone is paying Good Money they should Get their projects priority
But Remember People Who are Free users also help others Out They are Giving to the Community Code Their Code glitch is NOT just a Host it is a Community
and if i were Honest if i could Buy boost Just To Support Glitch I WOULD
But i can’t i am Poor That is one of the Reasons i rely on Free Hosting To host my Code

I disagree with your idea. You may wonder why, we’ll here is why:

  1. Most of the “free” users are students, poor, young or hobbyists (like myself) who may not able to afford hosting and they want to create something cool for community however they wouldn’t able to do it without awesome sites like Glitch. Free users are people too don’t forget about that one.

  2. Glitch wasn’t meant to be for “professional” hosting, if you are looking for one, then there is a lot of cheap hosting services with a lot more possibilities for cheaper price.

  3. Both free and paid users should be treated as equally and fair as possible. Because a lot of us are free users doesn’t mean we don’t count, we have reasons why we are not paid users. Paid users shouldn’t mean that you become human that can step on ants (free users) because you paid for it.

  4. Being higher rank doesn’t mean that money will fall magically into your hands and subscriptions will somehow pay for themselves. We are still the same people, just with more trust in our community.

  5. Glitch isn’t just about hosting, here on Glitch people are helping each other and they are also collaborating and teaming up to make fun and cool projects.

Of course no offense, but I really don’t like your idea where you just treat free users like they didn’t matter at all. Not all people have money :pensive:

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Well said Buddy i am Poor and have trouble Setting Up Modules which is Why i prefer Using Glitch Then anything else

Why would @ihack2712 disagree?

Because of the first post:

Which @dreev replied to:

Of to which @Boofhead1000 assumed I would disagree with @dreev, which I, to quote myself again, said

Wowzers!! That got confusing :joy:

Anyway, the why of it is because;

  1. Fog Creek (or now Glitch) started their company to be free and open for everyone!

  2. Glitch has become a part of the learning curve to a large amount of people, many people come on these forums and to Glitch to learn how to write code.

  3. There are very few communities out there that offer these kinds of services and truly care about their community.

Glitch has made something unique and special.

That sounds cheesy, but hey, Glitch has something good going on here! :slight_smile:

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You Bet That was but anyways
Glitch is a Community And Doing that could Break it Up
Like @ihack2712 Said

I do not Think Glitch would like to do it besides We all Help That is why i proposed a Idea To Glitch That The More you Help The More Power your Projects ur can have,
Not as Much Power As Boosting But you can Also Boost to Supercharge your Projects and Stack Helpful Boosts on TOP of it

Thanks for explaining, it was really confusing. :joy:

Here’s an idea @dreev. I wouldn’t want it buried in for anyone to use, but instead, have a coding/encryption/computing related puzzles similar to Cicada 3301 (see more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2O7blSSzpI) where users would have to decrypt different things or do/figure out code (I remember a thing people were doing at CoderDojo once where they had to find code errors/hidden/encrypted things in the code). This will prove that they really are bothered about getting their projects online and they could get free boosted apps for 1 year or something. This would also be some nice publicity for Glitch

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Just sort of feel that something like this would get spread around become well known, like the uptime robot trick did.

I really just think that Glitch needs to promote itself more as a testing environment than a permanent hosting website.