If you haven’t noticed, Glitch has released uptime limits for projects per user. According to the Glitch Help Center,
To make Glitch accessible for everyone:
Apps created on Glitch are given an allowance of Project Hours.
Project Hours are spent when:
The project is being actively edited.
Someone accesses the user-facing side of a Glitch project that is not a static site
Every registered user gets 1,000 free Project Hours each month. Project hours are replenished on the first day of each month. Unused Project Hours cannot be rolled over.
Anonymous users get 120 free Project Hours. To get additional hours, the anonymous user will need to register an account or transfer project ownership to an existing Glitch account
The Project Hours limit does not apply to Boosted Apps. If you are a Glitch Memberhttps://glitch.com/pricing the monthly allowance of 1,000 Project Hours will be applied to any non-Boosted apps that you own.
Another new thing related to this new change is this:
The hello-webpage template gets you started with a basic static website with an index.html page and static HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Just type and your work will be live on the internet! Static websites enjoy unlimited uptime too! This means that your app stays on 24/7 without using up your allowance of Project Hours.
Which means hello-webpage websites are online 24/7.
I don’t think this might create a lot of problems, because even if you edit for 24 hours for 30 days, it’s still only equal to 720 hours. Plus, 280 hours extra.
2474 > 1000, I guess you can have a fourth of the 24 bot uptime
this reminds me of github but for boosted members can’t you just unboost a project and boost the project you are working on to get rid of the restriction and then repeat whenever you want to work on a project
not everything can be made free without money problems sadly
Also “non-Boosted apps that you own.”, does that mean I’ll lose hours editing a friends boosted project? Oh nvm Jenn clarified below
Also fun idea, why not get extra hours on your birthday or cakeday!
Hi @javaarchive, the way to think about it is that they are project hours, not user hours - so you won’t lose anything by editing another user’s Boosted project.
It’d be cool if glitch projects could be a virtual filesystem mounted onto your computer so each folder is a project at the toplevel and we can edit them without turning on the project then press a sync button to update the files to save hours
we’d have to hope that no one leaves the project open or leaves something like a chat app open in the tab otherwise it might use up a of project hours. Maybe we can shutdown the project if no keystrokes are performed within 15mins because I sometimes leave glitch projects open in a tab.
If the project is in a tab but no edits are made or no requests to/from the project are made, the app would fall asleep after 5 minutes still, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
Hi @anon70439135, if you hit your Project Hours limit, your apps will not be accessible until the 1st of the next month when hours are reset. You can, as the owner, still download the code of your apps from your Projects Dashboard no matter how many hours you have left, though.
If you feel like someone is abusing the platform by pinging your site, you should send an email to [email protected] (or if you know what project/user may be doing that, Report Abuse from that page). I’d also recommend changing the name of the project immediately to stop the pinging from hitting your project.
Thank goodness static sites are not part of this limit, or else I would have died. Technically, aren’t sites built with frameworks like React and Vue considered static, even if they have a package.json?
This idea is both good and a ehh. Good because our wonderful Glitch Team saves resources. And a ehh since were limited to only a minimal amount of projects open.
To be fair, Glitch is the service providing the things needed to develop, test and send to github for production, and not the one that you would use for production.
I’d not recommend buying from them. I just had an interesting chat with the CEO, it is really expensive compared to other services. Instead I would just recommend you setting up a vps with contabo.com. Discord Bot Hosting charge 4 times more than Contabo.
The CEO started getting really aggressive once I started discussing the prices, they also behaved rather like a child once I mentioned contabo’s prices. The representation was rather very unprofessional and I’m very unpleased with their behaviour. I was gonna take some screenshots, but I couldn’t take screenshots of the last messages because they removed it before I had time to take screenshot of it. I got screenshots of the beginning of the chat if you’re interested.
Bots are also hosted on a single server with shared resources not guaranteeing the performance you were promised.
If I was you I’d ask for a refund and hurry away from their services.
Generally you would use a git repo to store the code for safe-keeping and a CD (Continous Devlivery) to update the code on your vps. Meaning that making changes to your bot is as easy as pushing code to your git repo.
Personally I use GitLab to store my bots, and I have my own runner setup to update the bot on my VPS whenever I push some changes.
Well you would still have to pay most places, anyway, if you buy a vps from Contabo I could help you set it up so it will be easy for you to write discord bots on it.
Hi @random - when logged in, you should go to glitch.com/dashboard and you can archive projects that you don’t want running and using hours (hover over the project in the table to see the archive button). To reactivate projects, you can see them in the “Archived Projects” tab of the table and reactivate them (or download the code if you want to, for example, continue working on it locally without using Project Hours up).
Again, I’m not too sure about this, as I was with the removal of pinging services. I wouldn’t want to be coding and then an error pop saying I can’t view my changes. But hey, if it makes Glitch run faster, I guess it’s the best for the platform.
On a slightly different note, the dashboard really puts the amount of coding I do into perspective Most of these projects I only go onto myself for coding and they still have like 30-60 hours of uptime on them! I imagine others will have much more uptime too!
It does seem as if Glitch have now taken the route of some of the more conventional instant deployment services out there. However, the fact that they are so simple to use and write everything in English (not technical and clear, concise explanations) make them appeal more to me than all the other ones, where I have to spend 20 mins ‘instantly’ deploying my app and trying to read their 2000 words documentation.
Hi @Daniel! For the time being, we’re still offering paid users 5 boosted project - but that’s not to say we will never offer more; we’re still thinking about how we expand such offerings while keeping things stable and sustainable!
@ihack2712 How did you contact the CEO? Very interesting - you should make a site where you review/look at prices of loads of VPS/Hosting providers and what they provide and get into contact with the staff. Would be amazing!
Alright I’ve gotten very confused about this by reading this thread . So you can’t keep a discord bot online right, and you can’t edit your project when you run out of hours?
@okboomer1234321 You can not run projects 24/7 and you are now limited to 1000 hours of uptime (hours you have your project online/not sleeping). Static Projects now don’t fall asleep, all others still do.
Yes. I noticed it was using the loading screen. Surely that shouldn’t happen. Boosted apps don’t show the loading screen and they are on the same server. Are they really 247/. Has this been implemented @glitch_support
Hi @R4356th, we very recently deprecated the hand-raise feature. You can still invite other users to join and collaborate. If they are editing, the project is awake and how long the project is awake counts towards the project owner’s Project Hours.
If projects need building and the build process is in the same app, that would be considered a project that does count towards your Project Hours, not a static site.
Because package.json includes build scripts, the platform considers it a trigger for the site being full stack. If you have an example of a static site that requires a package.json file to run, though, can you share it with me so I can share with the other engineers here?
To be honest, that’s probably not something we’d end up doing, but I definitely have been thinking about how to integrate this forum more with the rest of the Glitch experience. For example, I remember hearing great feedback awhile ago (I think it was from @wh0) about community segmentation and how we don’t really curate Forum user apps on the homepage. While we haven’t been curating apps over the past couple of months because of our focus on platform stability, I have been collecting and trying all the open source apps y’all have been sharing in the gallery (like https://glitch.com/@community-engineering/as-seen-on-the-support-forum-july-2020).
We super appreciate what a great job y’all in here are doing with helping users with custom domains! We know the deletion requests are a pain and we are exploring ways to make it a better experience.
@jenn
A long time ago, I saw someone who made a suggestion to make a bot that tells people who have words like domain, domains, remove, removal in their topic to send an email to support. I tried it myself but found myself needing an API token. However, @ihack2712 has now found his own method to make posts via email! It’s called @automator
Have a look:
Yes, I have seen some but cannot remember of any at the moment. But if by that you mean a non-dynamic site using a package.json file, then this is an example. Also, a package.json file could also be used to have dependencies in it.
Vue! It doesn’t use a backend server (except while using Nuxt.js), but for installing dependencies, starting a development server and building files need a package.json.
@glitch_support Oh no! I have to move all my stuff away from Glitch because y’all introduced the hours limit before you introduced the ability to pay for more boosted apps D: D: D:
I only just learned about this change and, looking at the dashboard, it appears that I’ve exceeded my hours limit. My sites don’t appear to have gone down yet, luckily. That would have been catastrophic, but I’m guessing they could go down at any minute. Feedback: It would be exceptionally helpful if you sent an email warning about the new changes, rather than suddenly springing them on us. Just a week or so’s notice to get everything in order would have been great. It’s going to be a long night for me. (EDIT: Per my comment below, the limits only go into effect at the start of next month - not the moment that we were sent the email - this is much more reasonable! Sorry! Please ignore this feedback.)
I really want to support Glitch because I love your mission, but I don’t understand why it’s currently so hostile to paying users - not letting us pay for the resources that we need, and then cutting off service when we reach the limit. @jenn, your make8bitart.com website looks awesome! I also have several production apps running on Glitch - and they have lots of users that are relying on them each day. Is there not some empathy on the team for those of us who are using Glitch in production? Sudden changes like this with no way out for paying users – at the very least it seems bad for business.
I almost considered making multiple accounts so I can have more boosted apps, but this would make editing the apps a pain (switching back and forth between accounts), which would ruin the main benefit of using Glitch.
Yep, I got the email. I assumed that the limits were applied immediately. On closer inspection I just now noticed that servers will only start getting shut down next month (If I’m reading correctly):
Which is much more reasonable! Still have to leave Glitch :[ But this forewarning is very helpful. Maybe I’ll get some sleep and sort this out tomorrow
(Please let me know if I’ve misinterpreted that though - they could be just saying that I’ll get 1000 more hours next month, and the limits still apply thing month. But if it started next month, that would also explain why my servers are still running even though I’m over the limit.)
Edit, yep, it only applies from August onward. I just didn’t read the post properly! From the article:
‘Starting’ usually means that the limits will apply at the date. They are just showing the amount of hours you are using on the dashboard so you can understand how it works, I imagine if you go over hours not, it will be fine, but in August the project will go to sleep until the next month.
For all those wanting to know what it will look like when your project runs out of hours, I think it will look like this: glitch-help-newsletter.glitch.me
You see most people hate mentions of Glitch. That’s why they want no/custom loading pages and they probably won’t want the 404 page to change as they will add mentions of Glitch there. I would be happy to mention that the project is hosted via Glitch myself on the website, but would rather it not be mentioned on 404 pages and stuff. In fact, if I had the choice, I would rather add
to get the ability to get 404 and loading pages without mentioning Glitch to look a bit more professional. Then Glitch would get the attention they deserved, but I look a bit more professional and it’s less obtrusive.
I don’t like this change at all as I have literally nowhere else to host my multiplayer web game forks without some asinine limitation, sorry if I sound pretty unthankful.
I wasn’t expecting that they were gonna revert it anyway as that’s like the norm for corporations, so I don’t really feel that alienated by this change. But that’s about it.
That would be cool! May I ask how you know this? Hope it’s not just a rumour
Edit: Misread above post as if it were saying that they were removing the fact you lose project hours in the editor
The node binary won’t be available in the container unless a package.json file exist IIRC, so building a node.js app on a static site would technically be impossible.
Actually, no, there might be a vulnerability around this, the node binary is actually available, meaning that a 24/7 non-boosted app might still be internally possible. I’ll look further more and if I find anything I’ll alert Glitch!
So I actually did find a way to make a project run 24/7, I’m just monitoring the project now just to make sure I’m not wrong, if this is working I’ll email Glitch about it.
I’m going to re-check the project in 10 minutes to see if it has fallen asleep!
Wow… It works… I’ll email Glitch about it once I get time. If Glitch staff sees this please email me at [email protected] if I haven’t already made a ticket.
EDIT I just verified it, and it is an unpatched vulnerability. I’m going to try to run a discord bot on it that just sends a message every 5 minutes.
The picture below shows the amount of seconds since it’s last request. If the project went asleep it would’ve shown 0. Meaning that it was restarted. If it showed anything less than 600 it means that the project has been frequently requested, anything over 600 should show the wakup screen.
This can also bypass the amount of storage your container has available.
Apps have a limit of 200MB of disk space in the container. The contents of your apps’s ‘/tmp’ directory currently don’t count towards that total, but those files are removed when the app restarts.
Because the app never actually goes asleep the tmp directory will never be removed (don’t try to use this as a viable solution for cloud storage, Glitch might restart the container manually and files will be deleted!)
The project will also avoid being caught up by project hours (when the editor isn’t open), because the project is a static site. Meaning that your project can run for an indefinite time. If the container is restarted every 12 hours I’m not sure of yet, but there is an easy way of figuring that out!
I’m also not sure if the project is limited to the 4k requests per hour, but I will run tests on that as well.
I’ve seemed to make myself an issue, due to the way I did this I am unable to stop it Therefore unable to test more on the same project, I gotta archive it
It also seems that the project can exceed memory limitations, it is limited to whatever memory is given to the container, which as far as I know is 6 GB of memory.
I’m also going to check if this method that I’ve used is giving me root privileges, I’ll try that a bit later though.
The project still seems to be limited by 4k requests per hour! I’m now stress testing the memory to try and see if it dies when it hit 512 mb, but I doubt it.
can’t u install nvm…oh I actually knew about this but didn’t think it was that important. well if it does get popular we just block the terminal for static sites. however if you like maintaining static sites via terminal that’s going to be an issue.
oh I was thinking of hosting a discord bot in a static site’s container. Anyways theortically it might be possible. either it’s just a temporary issue or i still see the glitch loading screen on some of my static sites
For some reason I think the starting screen is kinda fake… It showed me the starting screen while the project was actually running and already had 35K requests stored in memory.
This might be fine, because it’s expected that you have a running project container while you’re editing. It uses up project hours too, as seems to be consistent with the screenshot.
Edit: agreed that the untracked ram usage is bad though. What are you doing to use ram? I’m wondering because you haven’t posted process ram usage.
A static site doesn’t actually consume project hours, the editor does. What was discovered is a vulnerability to make a 24/7 container on static sites that run nodejs, however I won’t get into details before they’re fixed. Anyway, it was alive for more 4 hours, 2 of those hours have been without the editor open.
Hi i have suggestion: Project hours should be not used for public projects. On github action minutes are free for public projects
Please add this feature.
Or add Thanks for helping rewards.
For example for every 5 thanks for helping Glitch should add + 500 free project hours
That won’t really work out because then everyone will make their projects public and project hours won’t count towards your account. That eliminates the necessity of Project Hours.
See, even if a person edits a project for 24 hours on a project for 30 days, only 720 project hours are used and 280 hours are remaining, and on the next day (next month) your project hours are replenished, and you have sufficient project hours to do everything. Again, increasing project hours will eliminate the need for project hours.
So this means that start using heroku it is 7/24 but you can host only one project on one account buuuuut it is totally free (almost cuz you need to link a card for additional project hours) And ping is sooo static
Yes I think that glitch should add that project hours are unlimited for public projects. But just for max 3 or 5 public projects. Lot of people want to have their code private.
it’s a v8 powered ide that basically has access to the internet and the google universe
I once made a script that encrypt a users google doc with vigenere as a joke
Just a thought:
There could be some system like youtube’s “Are you still watching dialog” that pops up every half an hour of no typing from anyone that disconnects you if you don’t answer, so you don’t burn all your project hours if you accidentally left glitch open on your laptop
and it takes ages to update the bots code, but with glitch it updated instantly 
and easily lose project hours
. Keep up the work there!
by 
jkjk
