My official list of post-glitch.com hosting options

4 hours ago 1

my official list of post-glitch.com hosting options

we are less than a week away from fastly shutting down glitch.com. while i haven't worked there in 10 months, i'm still as much a glitch power user as i've been since i helped launch it in 2017, so i have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, and with some of you live, to find new homes for my most precious projects.

the following are important dates, some glitch-specific links and alternative services i'm using. i hope this will help you out if you're in a scramble to migrate your projects - or if you've never even used glitch but are interested in what's out there in the app hosting/community ecosystem.

important dates 📆

these are from the official blog announcement

july 8, 2025 (next week as i write this) - project hosting and user profiles shut down. this means your projects will not be running and user profiles and playlists will not be accessible. you'll still be able to access your dashboard and download projects.
december 31, 2025 (end of this year) - until this date your Glitch dashboard will be available with code downloads for all of your projects and you can set redirects
december 31, 2026 (end of next year) - the team says they'll keep redirects active "at least" through this date

there are dates i don't know about yet, like when the forum or blog will shut down - or even if they will. the blog is basically free for fastly to run, but i know the forum is not. my guess is it will be shut down at the end of the year along with download access. i'll update this page when i hear otherwise!

glitch-specific links 🎏

mass-export all your projects - including assets - using pomax's glitch-bulk-downloader script. if you manually download via the dashboard, it will not include assets, but his script does.
if terminal stuff is not in your lane, potch made a downloadable app version which uses pomax's script, but gives you an app to do it from vs. having to install python or run commands.
once you move your projects, they will have a new url off of glitch, but you can/should set redirects to the new urls in your glitch dashboard. this is good in case the community has linked to your apps in blogs or something and you don't want those links to break.
go to the glitch community forum for discussions about the shutdown and to get answers straight from the glitch engineering team - that's where all the links above are from. also, be fucking nice to them - this shutdown isn't their fault and it impacts them at least as much as it does you.

alternatives i'm using 📀

here are the services i'm using for my projects that i absolutely need to keep running past july 8th, as well as my cool site discovery needs. i'm intentionally avoiding services from companies run by people who attended trump's election and/or are funding genocides and causing societal harm.

digital ocean - full stack & static

this blog, jennschiffer.com, make8bitart.com, and bugsrock.online are static sites (2 straight html, 2 eleventy) that i have running on digital ocean's app platform. the first 3 static sites are free, the 4th one costs me $3 a month. you can create an account and see what the dashboard looks like and what the deployment workflow is, but you will need a payment option set up before you can actually deploy anything. also an editor on your computer and a bit of git experience.

with regards to community, digital ocean's strategy appears to not so much about sharing what you've made (there are no user profiles for following), but sharing how to make things on their community platform, although they do run hacktoberfest and have other community programs. while not great for an absolute beginner, i think this platform is a great resource and community for upskilling to more advanced project deployment tasks.

here's my affiliate link if you want to sign up. i did a walk-through and explainer of the app platform on my stream here if you'd like to watch

codepen - static, community-focused, built-in web editor

i've been using codepen since the beginning. i just found this "in progress" live horse birth in css that was last saved 11 years ago. i would say this is my biggest recommendation for educators and students who are working with static projects. i'm pretty sure you don't need a credit card to sign up, but they have a pro subscription tailored for power users and teachers.

anyone who doesn't think codepen is the blueprint for developer communities is out of their mind and/or element. they curate, create content, run challenges, etc. the people who run it are great.

check out codepen here and perhaps follow me for updates on that horse birth.

val.town - serverless, community, built-in web editor

i use val.town to host my bluesky countingsheep bot. i've used a val in the past for getting a google spreadsheet's contents and sending it back when my static glitch site makes a fetch call to it - so i can see anyone using it as the api backend for a codepen, neocities, or any jamstack site. they also have cron triggering (great for bots), email triggers, and blob storage. it's free to try, no credit card needed, and they have a pro option if you need more flexibility.

valtown has a great community newsletter and showcase page. you can't follow other users, but you can remix and make PRs to vals.

check into val.town, where you can find me counting sheep. and you can watch my stream where i migrated that project, and val.town ceo steve krouse's stream where he improved it!

render - full stack & static

i recently tried out render for the first time, as i needed a free option to run some websocket servers. during a stream, i moved my presents-or-bugs glitch project to it and it was a good experience. no credit card needed to try, and the app falls asleep after inactivity just like glitch. i would say that it's the most comparable to glitch as far as project hosting goes.

community on render is simply their discourse forum and while it's active, there's a lot of threads with no replies so that tells me it's likely a support forum of folks trying to get their specific stack or service working on render.

go to render.com to try it out like i did on stream from account creation to websocket server migration.

neocities - static, community, built-in web editor

neocities is another blueprint for web communities that enables static site creation in the browser. while i've been on it for quite some time, i've not been active because i've been doing my thing on glitch. it's free to use, but upgrading to supporter gives you more capabilities. this is a great solution if you simply need a place to put your personal site for free, have never written code before, and/or you want to see cool sites others are making - their firehose of activity is really cool to watch.

check out neocities where i've been but plan to participate more.

when i left glitch, the community code jam program (along with the glitch jams livestream) basically died. while i was bummed about it, i was not at all surprised; fastly basically laid off the headcount for a new community manager before my last day even came. after the shutdown announcement, i was reading ribo.zone's great memoriam to glitch, along with other blog posts from the community, when i realized two things:

this program was as impactful to the rest of the community as it was to me
i don't need an enterprise content delivery platform to keep it going

while i have a bit on my plate, migrating the rest of my glitch projects and launching my first business, nothing will make me feel more connected to code and the developer community together than starting a new community code jam program, free from corporate stewardship.

if you want to take part in this, or simply keep up with what's happening with the project, sign up for this newsletter that i made specifically for jam updates. and subscribe to my youtube page, because you can bet your ass i'm going to be live-coding a submission form so i don't have to use google forms lol.

hope this helps!

one of the best parts of being part of the glitch community was the friendly and helpful nature of all its users and people building it. i look forward to seeing all of us move into other communities and carry that friendliness and helpfulness and get more creative people building the web. if you have any questions or ideas, i'm all ears/inboxes - [email protected] is the best way to reach me.

see you on jennschiffer.com

xoxo jenn