Generally it's entrepreneurial types who would have gone to an agency to get something built, or would have wanted to go to an agency but couldn't afford the costs involved. These platforms are far cheaper and quicker, and if we're really honest not necessarily worse quality than what they would have gotten from the vast majority of those agencies, especially the cheaper ones.
This is not a comment on whether this is a good thing or not, and I have all sorts of concerns, but it's undeniably something I'm seeing, and the nearshore/offshore agencies are certainly starting to feel the impact.
With the advent of vibe coding, pretty much everyone has dozens (or hundreds) of early-stage side projects now.
But you're mad cause it's no longer useful for you.
Um, is that a good thing?
Having used lovable.dev as well, I must say Lovable is a much better product.
Replit is easily one of the worst products and platforms I'd use. I wouldn't even recommend it to my enemies.
1) they were inexperienced or just hesitant to use even managed infrastructure
2) they started with a small Replit footprint and kind of got stuck there out of some niche convenience
3) it started free* and was thought of as a cost cutting measure to use this temporarily VC subsidized service (we've all been there)
Their inexperience has definitely cost them as they continuously tack on half baked features but I took some of their prompts, got the project code, and tried Claude with far greater results and quality. That got me digging deeper and left me feeling like Replit is a border line fraud. They asked to support markdown in a JS app. Replit opted to build a Regex based markdown parser that barely worked. No one prompted it to roll its own. They just asked for markdown support. They then spent numerous sessions trying to get it to work never understanding why it didn't. All the while Replit was printing money from them.
There was so much that wasn't done, it was basically an Airbnb-like service and it lacked any capacity to register users, pay for or disburse payments, create or manage listings, notifications, administration. They went from expecting to launch in a couple weeks, to looking at my roadmap and quote of about 3 months more development work which wildly exceeded their budget or commitment to the project.
I don't know how much of this was Replit's fault but some of it certainly was, like despite being a monorepo the frontend had no connectivity with the backend, there was no barriers between user data and most endpoints were not secured.
Replit's later attempted pivot to B2B or enterprise was odd. I didn't see them succeeding per se, but I had assumed they probably built a generic code execution backend, and probably figured they can resell it to some businesses doing patch processing or whatever have you. I have built many of these "execute this piece of (potentially malicious or untrusted) code for me" platforms in my career. They all end up looking more or less the same on the backend, but their characteristics are different depending on the particular consumer. I saw a billboard about a Replit + Plaid ad which was odd.
I wonder what ecosystem replit exists in that seems to completely not overlap with any of the other AI technologies and companies....