My inbox received a one-two punch in the form of notices that beloved Mozilla-owned read-it-later app Pocket and educational coding playground Glitch would be shutting down. More accurately, Glitch is discontinuing app hosting, and what remains to be seen is what Glitch will become without it.
Free/cheap web services come and go, but losing these two is harsh. I've used Pocket to collect stuff for years for my "Pocket Lint" series of link posts. Glitch will be missed as a free/cheap way to host a website, app, or "link in bio" page while learning how to do so.
It was, also, a cool place to host an ExpressJS + SQLite app that didn't need to be available 24/7. For the past twelve months I've been working off and on on a handful of low-traffic, indieweb-oriented CRUD apps that were designed to be chucked onto a platform like Glitch and embedded into any website, even those without a backend. Among them: a classic blog commenting widget, a webmentions service, and — mmm, savory irony! — a read-it-later link collection app to replace Pocket. Ha!
In the meantime, I've migrated my link-collecting from Pocket to Linkding, hosted for cheap at PikaPods. As for my Glitch projects, they're on hold until I can find another app host to deploy on.
If you have a recommendation, leave a comment on this post, which is using my aforementioned blog commenting app — developed and hosted at Glitch!