Hello everyone,
I’m fairly new to Replit and have been using it for just over a month. However, after reading several community discussions—like the “Summary of Replit Issues” post from last year—I’m feeling a bit concerned. I completely agree with many of the issues raised by users there, especially since I’ve begun experiencing similar problems myself.
One major challenge has been the rapidly increasing agent costs caused by repeated failures on the agent’s part. On several occasions, I’ve had fully working features suddenly stop functioning properly after a few weeks, forcing the agent to spend significant time trying (often unsuccessfully) to fix them.
My latest and most urgent issue is that my pane preview has disappeared entirely and now only shows a blank screen—making it impossible for me to continue my work. I’ve opened a support ticket and was promised human assistance, but after several days, I’m still waiting for a technical support person to connect through a private join link to access my system.
Understandably, this has me a bit worried, especially when even small, simple tasks are failing. For example, just last week, the agent had trouble performing basic edits like changing a text title, adjusting a background color, or updating an image—often requiring multiple attempts before succeeding, if at all.
I truly see the great potential in Replit and want to continue using it, but it’s becoming confusing and frustrating to deal with new issues appearing almost daily. I’d really appreciate hearing how the Replit team is addressing these problems and what improvements we can expect moving forward.
It is very unusual what you are saying. I’m not doubting you, just saying it’s very unusual. Sounds like an early version of Agent, that used to make mistakes like that.
A.few things.
-
Are you using element selector when making small changes to highlight the specific are you are trying to fix.
-
Are you using Screenshots? At least 50% of my prompts are screenshots. I cannot begin to explain how helpful they are.
-
Are you using Skills for repeatable tasks? Once you have enough Skills, you can simply upload the SKILL.md files and give a very basic prompt and it will literally get the build exact within a few percent.
-
What do you mean about not seeing the Preview Pane? Sometimes Preview gets stuck and needs a refresh. I don’t know what you mean by you can’t see it?
-
Try to ONLY use the browser version of Replit. Both the desktop App and Mobile App aren’t always reliable. I build a lot on my phone and constantly have to refresh. But I only do this when I don’t have access to my laptop. Always use browser, never desktop App. I believe it is no longer being supported anyway?
-
My costs run at circa $80 - $100 for every 10,000 lines of code, give or take. With Opus 4.6 I have noticed an increase. Maybe $100 - $120 for every 10k LOC. But I’m building complex business software. I can still build a small website before optimising for around $10 - $20. Then another $80 finishing it off, ready for publishing.
I usually average $60 - $120 per day, so circa 10k-20k LOC per day. My Replit plan invoices me every $60.
Occasionally I’ll hit $180 per day, but that’s if I’m doing a heavy session.
Can you open your app a new pane? (Basically so it opens in your browser?)
I’ve run into something similar to this when the ports get screwed up.
TFS
Hello Andrew, nice meeting you. I was probably a bit overwhelmed by that post I mentioned, plus dealing with my own Agent troubles at the same time. But don’t get me wrong—I definitely love Replit! It’s a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to build websites and the ultimate app. Unfortunately I have zero coding skills, so building an app was just a dream. Now I can create unbelievable things I never could’ve imagined. Your Agent spending matches mine—not in the first weeks, but now for sure! I follow lots of tips for good prompts and upload tons of screenshots when things go wrong.
Sometimes the Agent builds a perfect multilingual tool. But after weeks of adding new pages, elements, etc., it forgets the translation rules I saved in the MD file. So I need a complete re-translation run right now. The Agent even called sub-agents to do the whole app—that’s expensive and takes 45 minutes. It’s complex but costs extra. Still, for my full app completion with all the tools and technical stuff, I’m probably spending €1,000-1,500 max. A developer would’ve charged €30K easy—that’s insanely cheap!
Glad to hear it’s kind of sorted.
Yeah I build software as you said, so circa $1000 - $2000 that would have other wise costs anything from £35,000 - £135,000 thereabouts. So it’s still ridiculously cheap. It can just feel expensive when you’re the one paying for it.
If the client is paying for it, it’s all kind of irrelevant anyway. Just charge your fee + token costs and be transparent about that.
Glad to hear you’re sorted though.
Still odd that it’s forgetting stuff, especially if its added to its md file. You can always add additional reference files and in the md file tell it to also always reference those. It uses a few more tokens reading the additional files, but it’s not that much in the grand scheme of things.
I agree with my brother @ablumson‘s reply - we do a lot of experimentation builds together, and even when pushing the boundaries, I’ve personally never encountered a problem I couldn’t resolve. But I haven’t done multilingual, so I don’t know what that brings to the challenge.
I would advocate learning and applying engineering, systems and design principles. It’s still a ton of knowledge to acquire, and learning by doing will come with its own challenges because you don’t know what you don’t know, but over time the problems you’re encountering now will probably become foreseeable patterns that you can ensure you never encounter again.
Can you open your app a new pane? (Basically so it opens in your browser?)
I’ve run into something similar to this when the ports get screwed up.
TFS
Just tell the agent to Clear vite cache, then your preview will load again.