Glitch Is Killing Free Hosting, So I'm Saving One Special Corner of the Internet

Yesterday, Glitch announced that they’re nuking their free tier. If you’re not familiar, Glitch was a place that let you (past tense) build+host web applications. Oh well I guess! Another one bites the dust. I don’t know what your first thought was, but mine was very clear: “Shit, what’s gonna happen to the Russian Turkish Baths Boris/David Page??”

The Russian & Turkish Baths is a New York institution from 1892. It’s known for its spa-but-not-“relaxing”-spa-ness, its weirdly convenient location in the East Village (literally in the middle of a residential block), its scorching, sun-surface-like temperatures, and, of course, its two owners’ historical beef that has them treating the Baths like a child of divorce, forced into a bizarre week-on, week-off arrangement that everyone pretends is normal. Here’s an article.

That brings us to the Russian Turkish Baths Boris/David Page: baths.glitch.me, a quirky little piece of the internet. A perfect 32 line piece of JavaScript telling you whether it’s David’s or Boris’s week at the Baths. That page works and is useful and absolutely delightfully weird. It is the internet that I love. const isBorisDay = () => { should bring you joy regardless of your jadedness. It is the most organic form of anti-depressant.

But now Glitch is pulling the plug on free hosting come July 8th! Which means that little beacon of bathhouse scheduling is 1000% about to go dark. How is anyone supposed to know whose week it is?

But also – Why?? Because free hosting at scale is monstrously expensive (I have no doubt)? Because the VC money runs a certain course and then “strategic realignments” happen? Whatever the boardroom discussions are (no offense to boardrooms – well, some offense), the result is the same: useful, quirky bits of our shared web culture get erased. It’s like one of those wonderfully specific, single-serving websites from the early 2000s – the kind that did one funny or surprisingly useful thing – suddenly being replaced by a ‘domain for sale’ page. A little piece of internet personality, 86’d.

So, yeah, sorry not sorry for getting worked up. And I did the only thing that made sense: I re-deployed it.

One More Time for the “Old Farts Were Right” Symphony

Absolutely nobody likes to admit that curmudgeons are ever onto something, but here we are, again. Remember Heroku’s free tier funeral? That was a signal. Glitch is just the latest verse in the same sad song.

The playbook is tired:

1. Well I’ll be damned, a new thing that’s blindingly shiny! And free too!
2. Everyone piles in, builds cool stuff. The Word spreads.
3. “Growth metrics” are simply amazing (on free users).
4. What used to be a runway becomes a cliff edge. Investors get nervous…
5. A clichéd email rears its head: “Exciting updates to our pricing! We’re focusing on our valued enterprise clients!” aka “get bent”.
6. Your free project gets a 30-day eviction notice. Did you miss the email? Your site’s dead.

I and You are tired of It. So many of us are working so hard to make cool, weird, experimental, not-always-monetizable things. And it’s absolutely tiring to see our digital playgrounds turn into ghost towns “just because.”

Is this just how it is? How it should be? Everyone gets kicked to the curb? Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody knows the good guys lost? Is “free” some dumb mirage, a venture-funded fever dream that inevitably shatters and leaves shrapnel in your back?

Maybe. I also suppose free plans can make sense. I use GitHub Pages for this blog; it’s cool. I’m assuming Microsoft isn’t going to kill it tomorrow? Or maybe they’ll just start charging for it. Learning that your “free forever” thing actually now has a price tag is a manageable adult life situation. “We’re deleting everything, cheerio” is just a whole other level.

Ok but wait, has anyone ever tried to do anything about this ever in the history of mankind.

Get this. One of the most level-headed, and extraordinary developers I’ve ever worked with, Antoine Leclair, and I started working together on a project about a year and a half ago. I was tired of paying hundreds of dollars per month to Heroku for side side side projects that never made any money, and he wanted to simplify deployment for the projects he was consulting on. We both kept seeing the same pattern: overpaying for hosting, underdelivering on features, and zero control over our own infrastructure. So we built what we wished existed, which is now live, which is Disco.

Antoine and I wanted a way to deploy our own stuff, on our own terms, without holding our breath for the next “platform update” email. When folks ask us “why? (did we make this)” we answer “because! (this kept happening)”

Fundamentally, here’s what we are about:

• You can 100% use your own server. Rent a cheap VPS. Dust off a Raspberry Pi. Whatever. It’s yours. Disco helps you deploy to it so you can get back to other things (like building more cool things, rearing a child, petting goats, etc.)
• Disco’s core and CLI are open source and free. An MIT license is hopefully a damn good promise. Use it, fork it, run with it. Open PRs. Suggest that we rewrite it in Rust. It’s all fair game.
• Servers cost money. Our time costs money. If you want us to manage the hosting for you with Disco’s paid plans, we will. And you (or your employer) will pay us for that service. That’s the deal. No fuzzy math, no “incredible journey” blog post in 3 years explaining why we’re shutting down your free stuff.
• We care about Developer Experience so much some days it physically hurts - what do you want, I am an empath. git push should deploy extremely fast and it does. SSL of course. Good CLI. Good UI. All the stuff that you’d expect to be there and to work, is and does.

You want to run it yourself on your server? Mazel Tov. You want us to handle the server part? Inch’Allah we can do that too, even at enterprise scale, and for a fraction of the cost of our competitors. The point is transparency and control.

The Beautiful Ecosystem of “Actually Owning Your Deployments” (and giving a shit)

We’re not the only ones thinking this way. There’s a whole constellation of cool tools out there helping folks take back control:

• Coolify – self-hostable Heroku vibes.
• Kamal – DHH’s take on deploying anywhere.
• Val Town – neat for quick cloud functions.
• Fly.io, Render, Railway – other PaaS options that do have free tiers (be mindful of their terms, obviously… not to call them out, but to call them out, Render’s Free PostgreSQL instances expire after 30 days…….).

Explore all of them! Find what fits. We think Disco’s approach is pretty special for those of us who are tired of platform roulette and vendor lock-in but also don’t want to spend our weekends configuring nginx. (No offense to nginx - but we do use Caddy).

The Real Point: Keep the Internet Weird (and Functional)

This isn’t just about one bathhouse schedule page. It’s about what the internet could be, and what it often was. A place for the quirky, the useful, the personal, the stuff that doesn’t need a Series A to justify its existence.

When “free” becomes a bait-and-switch, it chills experimentation. It makes people wary. It paints the internet with the color of bleh.

So yeah, we’re hosting the baths page. Not because it’s a scalable business opportunity (can you imagine?). Not because it’ll get us on TechCrunch (call me). But because I actually care about the damn Baths, and I need to know if it’s a Boris or David week (the “hots are hotter” with Boris), and I believe that this kind of simple, useful, local knowledge deserves to exist online, stably, for fucking ever.

What Now, Disenfranchised Glitch User (and Friends)?

1. SAVE YOUR CODE. You’ve got until the end of 2025 to download your code but also, your site will go dark in ~40 days. Sorry for real.
2. Ponder your next move. Another “free but maybe temporary” ride? Somewhere with more control?
3. If you want control:
   • Check out Disco.
   • Try deploying one of your Glitch projects (or something new!) to a cheap server.
4. Reach out: email me or join our Discord. We’re fun to hang around, and I promise that we’ll do our best to answer all of your questions, bathhouse or web deployment related.
5. And if you’re ever in New York: baths.withdis.co will tell you who’s on duty. Deployed with Disco. Hosted by people who, apparently, get weirdly passionate about bathhouse schedules and sustainable hosting.

Let’s build an internet where the cool, weird, useful little things don’t just get casually deleted “because.” It might cost a few bucks for a server, but maybe that’s a fair price for a bit more permanence and peace of mind.

Wanna talk? Let’s.