Glitch

Glitch was the friendliest way to put an application on the internet: an editor in the browser, a running app on every keystroke, and a remix button on somebody else’s project that gave you a copy of it running under your own name. It hosted several million of them, most of them small, many of them made by people writing their first server-side code.

App hosting and user profiles ended on 8 July 2025. The announcement from Anil Dash gave two reasons, and both are worth recording: the legacy architecture had stopped being uniquely useful in a market full of easy options, and the cost of defending a free hosting platform against abuse had gone up. Dashboards stayed open until the end of that year so that code could be downloaded, and subdomain redirects are promised to keep working until at least the end of 2026.

It is the clearest case in this register of a shutdown that was not a business failure so much as a change in what free hosting costs to run. What replaced it is not one product but a dozen, none of which does the remix button.