People have built over 5 million apps on Glitch, a popular platform for tinkering with code and building projects, and now the company is launching a subscription service to let users launch their apps for real.
Glitch is somewhat like Google Docs for code: It allows developers to build, collaborate, and share apps. These apps are often experimental and exist within the platform.
Until now. On Wednesday, Glitch announced that it will allow users to launch and host apps through a subscription service. Users can still create, test, and prototype on Glitch for free, but this new service allows people to boost up to five apps with more disk space and memory, with no rate limits, instead of having to set up and run their apps on the cloud themselves.
This — the ability to actually get their apps running — was the number one thing developers have been asking for, CEO Anil Dash told Business Insider.
While there are services like Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, or Salesforce's Heroku that allows developers to run their apps, they can be complicated to set up and make it difficult to figure out the cost, Dash says. Glitch is offering a simple $10 per month subscription.
This will make launching apps "as easy as putting a video up on YouTube," Dash says.
"At a fundamental level, we want to lower the barrier for every developer," Dash told Business Insider, adding that he wants Glitch to be in every developer's toolkit. "Right behind that is reintroducing to people that the web is something we make, not just something we consume."
The company has actually been around for 20 years. Previously known as Fog Creek Software before 2018, it acted as an app development shop and spawned many popular services, including the developer Q&A site Stack Overflow and the project-planning tool Trello, which Atlassian acquired for $425 million.
A 'fun place to hang out'
Dash says Glitch has seen an uptick in usage during the coronavirus pandemic because the service makes it easy for people to collaborate remotely. Some companies are even moving their developer interviews onto Glitch so that they can watch candidates code in real-time, he says.
Some developers are even using it to respond to the coronavirus crisis by building apps to help people support local businesses. Other developers just use it for fun.
"We check the box of work collaboration around coding and a fun place to hang out that's not full of depressing news that's not slowing down people's creativity," Dash said.
In the coming year, Glitch is working on making its platform work better with other popular developer tools, like GitHub and Visual Studio Code. It's also thinking about how it can help developers on the platform connect with each other.
"It's the same as if you have great photographers you follow on Instagram or a YouTube channel you subscribe to: There's great value in connecting people to creators," Dash says.
The service has also become a haven for people of all backgrounds, a strength that Glitch plans to encourage.
"People who don't feel welcome in classic programming culture are coming here, and we're doing the work to maintain the community to feel healthy," Dash said. "They love the company and community and the features are really great and really powerful."
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