Glitch is building a premium tier for power users of its user-created micro apps.
The rather eccentric developer tools platform launched in 2017, combining a coding workspace with a community of users sharing and customizing web apps. With more than 5 million apps and bots now on its platform, the team is launching paid subscriptions today, eliminating some of the barriers that plagued coders that were pushing the platform’s limits.
The $10 per month (or $96 annually) service is geared toward juicing the service for power users, allowing paid users to choose five of their apps to run continually, stripping rate limits from all of their apps, doubling the free tier disk space allotment to 400MB and quadrupling memory to 2GB. The service is all designed around giving power users something worth paying for.
Apps on the platform are bite-sized and generally pretty limited in scope, but can fulfill niche tasks that other apps can’t or won’t. Apps exist for tracking your focus, visualizing COVID-19 data or — on the sillier side — comparing turnip prices in Animal Crossing with your friends.
CEO Anil Dash tells TechCrunch he sees the new subscription plan as a step further toward letting its users create deeply unique and useful tools that might not have been created otherwise. Dash says the company’s offering represents “a more consumerized version of cloud computing.”
“[Glitch] eliminates all the barriers between getting your idea out in the world,” Dash says. “It’s a different view of what coders are and how much better the internet is when it’s made by people rather than the five big companies people talk about.”
The New York company already has built a Teams product in free beta, though paid plans are also on the horizon, the company says. The firm raised a $30 million Series A this past July from Tiger Global.