Replit Hosting Guide: Deployment Types, Domains and Costs

Hosting on Replit means pressing Publish inside the same project where Agent built your app. Replit supplies the server, the SSL certificate and a free name.replit.app address, and publishing works on every plan. The bill depends on the deployment type: since August 2026, Autoscale, the default, charges $0.60 per million compute units plus $0.40 per million requests, while a Reserved VM stays on for $15, $35, $50 or $130 per month depending on its size. Static hosting is free but cannot run the full-stack apps Agent produces. Everything is paid from the account owner's monthly credits first. Core at $20 per month, billed monthly, is the realistic floor, because the free Starter plan keeps a single app online and its link goes down after 30 days.

The mechanics are simple. Your preview URL is private and temporary, so publishing creates a separate production deployment at its own address, and each republish ships a new release to that same URL. Replit runs five stages (provision, security checks, build, bundle, promote), which usually take a minute or two, and every artifact in the project goes live together. Older tutorials say deploy; Replit renamed it Publish in September 2025. One trap catches newcomers: the published filesystem is not persistent, so anything users save must live in a database or App Storage.

What your plan unlocks before the first publish

Starter can publish exactly one app, built with Lite build or the Design Canvas. That link goes down automatically after 30 days, though you can publish it again, and the page carries a Made with Replit badge holding your referral link. Free accounts publish only to North America, and the production database is capped at 1 GiB. Starter does include monthly cloud credits that cover publishing on Autoscale or Static, but Replit publishes no amounts for them. Our guide to the free Starter plan covers the rest of its limits. It works for a demo. It does not work for a business.

Core removes the one-app cap, so you can keep unlimited apps published, and it adds badge removal, custom domains, a choice of publishing region, built-in logging and analytics, and uptime checks. Core is $20 per month billed monthly or $18 per month billed annually, with $20 of monthly credits that also pay for hosting. Pro starts at $100 per month, billed monthly, and keeps the same 100 GiB monthly allowance for deployment transfer, while raising storage per app from 50 GiB to 256 GiB and letting you choose a production database restore window of up to 28 days. Hosting rates do not change between the two. Replit offers no time-limited trial of Core or Pro.

Four deployment types and how each one bills

The publish screen offers four ways to run an app, and each meters something different: machine time, requests, data served or a fixed monthly machine. Replit's deployment-types page names Autoscale the recommended choice and says most builders never need to change it^[1]. The rates in the table have applied since August 2026, and all of them draw on monthly credits before any usage fee appears^[2].

Compute units translate machine time into a meter: one RAM-second counts as 2 units and one CPU-second as 18. Because Autoscale scales to zero, the first visitor after a quiet spell waits a few seconds for a cold start, and these deployments restart regularly by design. Set Max machines in the machine configuration, since your app never scales past that number and it caps the maximum cost. That one field matters most.

Static deserves its own warning. Replit says it is not compatible with apps created by Agent, which need a backend, so pick Autoscale or a Reserved VM for those. Size limits are 8 GB for Autoscale and Reserved VM apps and 1 GB for Static. Both server types accept only a single external port, and a homepage that takes more than five seconds to answer can fail the health check at the last publishing step.

Deciding who can open the app

Every published app gets one of four access levels: Public, Password protected, Workspace only or Invite only. Until May 2026 the private options were reserved for Pro and Enterprise. Since then private and password-protected publishing has been open on every plan, Starter included^[3]. Visitors to a password-protected app type a shared password and need no Replit account, while Workspace only and Invite only make people sign in through Replit. Apps in a personal workspace start as Public and organization apps start private. Replit says private publishing blocks unauthorized requests at the network level, before they reach your code.

Three practical details follow. Switching the access level of a live app means unpublishing it first, so choose before launch. Scheduled deployments have no access options at all, and workspace admins can switch off password protection. When a webhook, a CI pipeline or a service like Slack needs to reach a private app, you mint an external access token with an expiry between one hour and five years. No token lasts forever. Before you announce anything, check the published app's secrets in the Publishing pane. A security scan runs before every publish, and a setting decides whether critical findings block it.

Putting the app on a domain you control

The free replit.app subdomain is derived from the project name, and it can change if you unpublish and publish again. Replit cannot hand back a released subdomain. A custom domain is the permanent fix, and connecting or buying one needs a paid plan, from Core upward. Once a domain is linked, search engines index the custom domain rather than the replit.app address. The certificate is free, issued through Let's Encrypt for each domain and subdomain separately, so www is its own entry and wildcards are not supported.

To connect a domain you already own, the guided flow uses a third-party service called Entri to write the DNS records, with a manual route as fallback. You need an A record and a TXT record. AAAA records are not supported, Cloudflare's proxy breaks certificate renewal, and the replit-verify TXT record must stay in place for the life of the domain or the app becomes unreachable. Propagation can take up to 48 hours. Replit checks for about six hours, then marks the domain Failed. Retry if that happens.

Buying inside Replit is the shorter route. You pay the registration fee for one year, two for .ai names, plus an automatic renewal price, and Replit says it adds no extra fees^[4]. WHOIS privacy is included and you can add MX records for email. Registration fees are non-refundable. Purchasing works only for apps in a personal account for now; organization purchasing on Pro and Enterprise is still coming. A transfer to another registrar goes through Support after ICANN's 60-day wait, and unlinking a domain does not cancel its renewal.

Regions, traffic and who pays the hosting bill

Core, Pro and Enterprise builders can publish to North America, Europe, Asia, South America or Australia, while free accounts stay in North America. The choice is permanent. A published project cannot move to another region, and the database region stays fixed with it, so relocating means remixing the project and publishing the copy. Enterprise can also enforce one geography across a whole organization, which matters to teams with data-residency rules.

Every cost a live app generates lands on the owner's account. Compute units, requests, outbound transfer, the production database, App Storage and any AI Integrations the app calls come out of the owner's monthly credits first, then fall to pay-as-you-go rates. Core and Pro each include 100 GiB of outbound deployment transfer a month, and beyond that it costs $0.05 per GiB. The production database bills compute and storage separately, which our database guide explains. Visitors pay nothing. You do.

A Replit budget is a hard cap: once it is reached, Replit emails you and temporarily suspends all usage-based services, hosting and databases included. Deployments do not restart on their own after a billing hold lifts, so you must publish again, and repeated payment failures can also suspend published apps. Since October 2026, Replit says eligible top-up customers can keep apps running at zero credits up to an overage limit, without defining who qualifies. Our pricing breakdown covers alerts, credit packs and refunds.

Watching the live app and undoing a bad release

The monitoring view tracks requests, status codes, durations, CPU and memory, and Replit keeps deployment logs for 30 days. Uptime checks need a paid plan and skip Scheduled deployments. Monitoring Agent, added in October 2026, investigates alerts from logs and metrics and tries a fix; publishing that fix automatically requires the experimental auto-republish setting, and its runs can incur Agent charges. On Core and up, Project Analytics shows visitors, pages, sources, countries and devices once you enable it and republish. After each publish, a Lighthouse audit rates SEO as Healthy, Needs Work or Weak, and the SEO Agent on paid plans fixes technical issues without writing content.

When a release breaks, revert by rolling the project back to an earlier checkpoint and publishing again. That restores code, not customer data. A code rollback never restores the production database, which needs a point-in-time restore within 7 days by default, or up to 28 days if you choose that on Pro, and a restore replaces the whole database. Republishing older code against a newer schema can also fail, so check that the two still match before you publish the earlier version.

The bottom line

Replit hosting suits builders who want the app, the server and the address in one account and are willing to watch a meter. Start on Autoscale with Max machines set, choose the access level and region before the first publish, and attach a custom domain on Core so the address never changes. Move to a Reserved VM only when something must stay awake. Set a budget early, but remember that hitting it takes the app offline until you raise the cap or the cycle resets. Starter suits a 30-day demo. Nothing longer.