So my replit has been inactive for over a week because im tired of it billing me 50$ every few days wether I use it or not. And it send me another 50$ bill even though I havnt been able to use it… Anyone can explain how I accumulated another bill when its inactive?
Either way looks like my run with replit is over, cost me over a grand to make this game and since ive slowed down using replit since games complete the billing has actually increased!! Guess the project i worked so hard on will go inactive
Thank you. Either way I cant afford this. The game hasn’t been on play store long enough to generate an income. I cant imagine charging someone 50$ every few days for hosting wich is basically all ive used it for for past couple weeks
Ya im very lost it just keeps billing me.. I understand it cost me alot to develop this game because I added alot of depth and features. Cost me a little over 1k. But ive literally stopped using it bc the cost and I just keep getting new invoices. Maybe replit isnt set up to a run a mmorpg and its using way too much data but if that’s the case they should make that clear to customers before skyrocketing tye bills
Looking at your invoice in the other post, this is: compute, data transfer, and postgres/DB. Basically, your app is hammering everything. And this issue is not going to go away. Until you get a handle on it, then as long as there are users, your bill is going to keep going up.
If the revenue was “a lot more than the costs” then happy days and no issue. But I assume it isn’t. So, whilst I appreciate it is live with real users, personally I would recommend:
you pull the deployment ASAP. Or perhaps get Agent to put up a “Down for maintenance, back soon” message and block access to the game
carry out surgical tests in the dev environment, with the help of agent/assistant, to find out which bits of code are hammering it. No app should take this much compute/DB/data transfer unless there were “A LOT” of users. So something with how the code is working is very wrong
Add in some logging of times taken for key functions, and look at the database logs to see how many inserts/updates are being done and how heavy they are. Agent/assistant will help you create a plan of what to log
then try to fix the key areas which are hitting you; ready to re-deploy to the live site
However, I understand Replit probably won’t let you access the app and agent until the existing bills are paid. If that is the case then sadly I am out of answers.
Transparency is very much the problem. I havnt had access to the app and yet have agent usage charges. And there is no way the consumption trippled when i was still using it out of nowhere when I dont use the agent 1/10th what I used to when creating the app. I understand you a are inclined to always defend replit on here but Transparency is not a word that should ever be used with replit lol.
I need to jump in alongside Eric here. Your invoices show very clearly that it is compute, data transfer and database usage which is a major cost.
Perhaps we missed the Agent part of the invoice, but from what I saw, it is the way your app is running and/or the heavy usage which is causing a major part of your billing.
You are stuck in a catch-22 position. You need to get into the app to close it down and/or fix it. But Replit probably won’t let you until you’ve paid your bill. Best of luck.
UPDATE: I can now see the big Agent usage as well, although not sure what time period this covers. All of these circled parts are costing you:
I dont think replit is designed for online gaming, not with the way it calculates cost. While I do not have alot of people using my game the ones that are using it play for hours a day. Maybe that’s causing the massive cost calculations. I dont think Replit was designed to calculate cost in that way. At roughly 150 a week in charges and over 1k up-front for a game that is essentially text based and dosnt even use complex graphics that is a horrible deal. I could of hired it out or used unity for much cheaper. Oh well live and learn.. Thanks for yalls help and replies
EDIT: I wish replit would work with me to develop a gaming side. With the speed and power of replit i could create games like crazy. Literally one a month or less time. They can keep the profit of the games just let me create lol
Replit charge for compute/data transfer the same way the entire global industry does. They are a little bit more expensive than some others I’ve seen, but pretty much in a normal range.
The issue is not Replit’s usage billing model. If you lift your codebase and drop it into Google Cloud, AWS or others, you are very likely going to see similar prices for running the game.
I appreciate you feel burned, and I would love you to not give up - we need to see people succeed with AI dev.
Maybe have a break from it, and then take the code and get an AI agent (or another developer) to analyse it. AI code is renowned for being inefficient and sloppily written, and I am pretty certain you will find some answers - code that takes 1000x the amount of CPU or data transfer than it would if the code was tightened up.
We’ve all done it - I used to own an SMS marketing platform (like Twilio). I once upgraded some code and went to bed. When I woke the next morning I found it had got stuck in a loop and burned £10,000 of SMS credits with my upstream partner. We live and learn
Thank you for the help, I agree with most of what you’re saying but it dosnt explain the charges increasing when I use it less or agent usage charges when I do not even have access. Ive reached out to support about it maybe they can help.
Let me add im not dissatisfied with Replit just the way the billing is set up, Replit itself is amazing. It allows imagination to control the product instead of technical knowledge, as it should be. But when you make the billing aspect about a technical understanding of data usage and hosting and different things you then handicap it back to those who have the technical understanding to use your product. Let me specify what I mean.
For so long creation (especially in the gaming market) has been limited to coders and people with the technical knowledge to make games come to life. Well that’s great and those people are amazing at what they do but they are often not the most imaginative people, they are not creative genius. It would be like having your publishers write all your novels, while they are great at getting the book out there in readable format they are not the creative genius behind the story.
Thats why the gaming market (especially app gaming) is in the state its in with copy paste generic games that are graphically cool but very dry and sorry but, could have been thought up by an 8 year old they lack in creativity so bad. Well ai frees us from that, it will allow the most creative powerful imaginations among us to create amazing games!!!
When you then turn around and make it to where we require a college course just understand how to work around the billing then you’ve completely undone whats beautiful about ai creation. Does that make sense?
I agree, Replit needs to communicate all this a lot better, and I am truly shocked at what a bad job they are making of support - they can’t even be bothered to come and engage is this community (that they own).
But,… in less than 1 year of AI dev, you have been granted access to a world that did previously require college courses to understand. For example, I’ve done 7 years tech training from school through to computation degree, plus 10 years in the IT industry, and 30 years building tech startups. And I still only know 5% of what there is to know in tech. So with a lot of genuine due-respect, do you really think these new AI dev tools are going to be able to tell you everything you need to know in a few months?
As @realfunnyeric said elsewhere “strap in, this is a rocket ship”.
I don’t have all the answers, but here are a few observations:
Password security: A 5-character minimum feels a bit too lax. I’d recommend increasing complexity and adding safeguards like CAPTCHA and 2FA to deter bot farming. Games like this are often targets for exploiters.
AI/NPC design: I noticed your AI warriors/creatures showing up in chat. I’d suggest auditing the code to ensure these NPCs aren’t backed by LLM prompts or agents, as that could inadvertently drive up agent-related costs. Ideally, they should be code-managed, not agent-managed.
Attack system: The attack mechanic seems to be very high-frequency. If every roll is making an API request/response, that might explain the elevated compute costs.
Game depth: For a text-based game, the inventory, economy, and marketplace systems are impressively robust. You’ve packed in a lot of features.
I am not 100% sure as to what is the root cause of your charges. It may be a perfect storm scenario of factors causing it.
PS: looks like each attack is an API call. I noticed when auto attacking and I get knocked out, the rolls continue and there is a toast with a 400 and a timer duration response. Probably should stop the auto roll sequence when knocked out, and the local client tracks the timer/disabled the attack button until timer is up. No sense in the client spamming the API in a situation where the action is blocked until the timer is up.
Thank you so much for the advice and kind words I really appreciate it, I worked really hard on this and put alot of hours in working with the agent, as a result ive gotten alot better at communicating with it. I will try to implement those changes to get costs down and increase security. Thank you
This is just a small fraction of what I could create with ai because im limited with cost. I could create an entire universe with unlimited options if I could afford it. I wish replit would let me truly unleash its power in the gaming world, I would make us both money. Game of War grossed over a billion dollars and its a very simple concept game with low graphics. I could definitely do something better with replit. My brain was built for this, I could pump games out at a lightning rate with replits speed.
We are on the cusp of a new era, creative genius will be able to make phenomenal games and other things with ai to do the heavy lifting, instead of coders and the technical genius people being the gate keepers. Those people are still amazing and very much needed but the part of the brain that controls what they are good at is often not the same part that fuels raw imagination.
