Important changes are coming to Glitch
By Anil Dash

May 22, 2025

Important Changes are Coming to Glitch

Today, I sent out an email to the Glitch community, and I wanted to include it here for everyone to reference, because it’s an important milestone for the community. This is a big change, but it’s not an “Our Incredible Journey” post about how our corporate overlords made us shut down the app hosting infrastructure for Glitch. It’s a story about recognizing when an ecosystem has changed, and evolving to reflect reality, and to respect our users and community by making the right choices when it’s time. As bittersweet as it is, this is a choice I stand behind, and I also am thinking deeply about what the Glitch community becomes, and what it means, going forward.

I hope you’ll share your thoughts about that topic, too. Either in the forum here, or by emailing me at [email protected]. I’m still as inspired as ever by seeing what you all create.

-Anil

We’ve got an important update for the Glitch community today: We’ll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch. In this message, we’ll explain what that means for you and for the Glitch community.

On July 8, 2025 Glitch project hosting and user profiles will be shut down. Your Glitch dashboard will remain available as usual through the end of 2025, with access to download all of your code for your projects, as well as a new feature to set up redirects for your project subdomains so your URLs keep working.

There are a couple of reasons we’re making this decision right now. It takes a lot of time and money to run millions of apps, and that has greatly increased as the platform has gotten older and bad actors try to misuse the platform. But while that is true, there’s also another motivation that made it clear that it’s time for a bigger change.

In the last few years, we’ve seen a lot of amazing new platforms that have raised the bar on how we create and run apps, just as Glitch first did almost a decade ago. Some of the teams behind these new platforms have even told us they were inspired by Glitch. ❤️ We love what we built with our teammates with Fastly Compute and tools like Fastly Fiddle, of course, but there’s also the broader ecosystem, with platforms like Fly.io, Deno, GitHub Pages, Val Town, Netlify, Digital Ocean, and so many more that are still inspiring us to create. Last year, we built the ability for paid Glitch members to share their own apps that they built elsewhere on their Glitch profiles, and we’ll be exploring how we might be able to revisit those kinds of ideas with the Glitch community going forward. So with so many good options for easily making and running apps, Glitch’s legacy architecture hasn’t been providing something uniquely valuable to the developer ecosystem at this point, and we want to focus our efforts on serving our developer community where we can be most valuable.

Right now, our number one job is to take care of everyone in the Glitch community during this big change. Here’s what we’re doing first:

This is obviously a big change for Glitch, and for the Glitch community. I know that personally, it’s a bittersweet transition, and any time we ask people to make an unexpected change with their apps, it can cause stress or frustration. I’m sorry for the time and effort that it takes to migrate or back up your apps if you weren’t planning on it, but I am also grateful for all the kind and supportive words from the community who’ve seen the challenges we’ve had in maintaining a large community of millions of users running tens of millions of apps.

We’ll keep updating you on progress towards these dates, and as always, you can join us in the community forum to share your thoughts or feedback and we’ll be watching closely. You can also personally reach out to me at [email protected].

Thank you for being part of the Glitch community.