Back to HN Trinket.io shutting down, so we saved it and hosted it a trinket.strivemath.orgby apulkit6 | 100 points | 12 comments | 2026-06-16 04:30:58 Central Open Source Link | Read Source Here Open on Hacker News Commentsapulkit6
Trinket.io is shutting down in August 2026, and they made
their code open source in March 2026. No one was hosting
the open source version since the server costs are so
high. So using our YC Bookface discounts, we decided to
host it for free for the entire education community.So
trinket now lives on a trinket.strivemath.org and it's
free for everyone. It's the best alternative to
trinket.io.I saw so many other companies try to push their
own paid coding editors, most of which are 2x to 10x more
expensive than trinket. So we decided that a free
platform, hosted by an education company that follows all
data privacy rules is better for the education industry.
| > paulsampson90
It is great you're doing this, teachers will
appreciate it.Questions:
- All paid plans say "Get started", but clicking those
buttons does not lead to the paid features. Will there
be paid plans? I can't access any teacher focused
features like courses
- Is this a fork? (based on the above it seems like it
is, and help page is different) Will you accept
community contributions? The github link at the bottom
points to https://github.com/trinketapp/trinket-oss
- If no open source contributions, will this be
updated? The Java version is version 8, for example
- What's the relationship between the hosted trinket
and https://strivemath.org/ide? Will these be
merged?Again, thanks for hosting, looking forward to
answers
| > > apulkit6
Great questions! This is indeed a fork of the open
source version. We're going to create an open
source version of this fork when we've got it
stable.
The plans page has been kept for older users to
know that those plans are free, and will continue
to be free forever, we can make that more clear on
that page.
strivemath.org/ide will indeed be merged into this
trinket version.Trinket was first built more than
10 years ago, it's actually really interesting
seeing how gpt 5.5 and Opus 4.8 are
managing/struggling with modernizing the stack
| > > > em-bee
i thought the plans were a clever jab at
commercial services, but i also found them a
bit confusing. now i see where you are coming
from and that does make some sense. though
maybe instead put one box in the center and
write: all plans are merged and free.i would
also make clear what changed, if anything. are
you really letting users host private courses
on your servers? the middle plan says self
host at the bottom, which is probably not what
the original plan was about.i'd also like to
see a way to use the code editor without
login. no server features. only save in the
browser and allow downloading.
| > maxloh
Maybe you could move most operations to local WASM?
That way, you could save on most server costs.
| > > apulkit6
Ahh good idea. The front end is still very server
side heavy, so we'll move that first, then the
compute can be moved over too
| zellyn
My kid was using trinket at school, and the fact that
Python 2 was free but Python 3 was paid was so weird and
annoying that I created trifling.org (disclaimer: hosted
on a tiny Linux box in my laundry room over WiFi, on
residential internet!)It was the first thing I coded
entirely with Claude, and absolutely blew me away.
(Mostly, it turns out other people already did all the
hard parts -- the inspiration was running across a reddit
post where someone said they wired together pyiodide and
the Ace editor in a few hundred lines of javascript).This
was my first experience of "if you know what you're doing,
LLMs can build things well and incredibly quickly". I
think MVP took one evening, and then two more rewrites
pushed it out to a week or so. (One after I realized fully
offline was a worthwhile idea, the second after I realized
the backend could be a dumb key/value store with only
prefix iteration.)As mentioned, it's local-first:
everything should work perfectly offline after loading it
once. Saving is limited to my kid's school domain at the
moment, but it's super simple to host: just compile the Go
binary and put it behind Caddy or something.Code (which I
literally have not read) is at
https://github.com/zellyn/trifling[Edit: p.s. try the
avatar editor!]
| > haeseong
The free Python 2 versus paid Python 3 split you ran
into wasn't arbitrary pricing. Trinket ran Python 2
entirely in the browser through Skulpt
https://skulpt.org, a JS reimplementation that costs
nothing to serve, while Python 3 needed real CPython
on their servers because Skulpt never fully covered
3.x. Pyodide compiling actual CPython to WASM is what
changed that math, which is exactly why your trifling
rewrite can offer real Python 3 offline for free.
| > > zellyn
Ah, interesting. Yeah, I looked at Skulpt a bit,
and it looks really nice, although not as
compatible as pyiodide, especially for python3. I
did consider using it as a fallback if wasm is
disabled.
| ajdude
I really appreciate it when services open source their
software when they shut down. There's so many amazing
sites, software, games, or other neat solitons that are
gone forever because there's no way to access it or
replicate it.
| delduca
Thank you, my first language was LOGO.
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