For years users have asked how they can support Glitch and how they can get more power for their apps. We've heard you loud and clear! Today we're excited to introduce Boosted Apps, which have all the goodness of Glitch but with more power. I’m going to share what Boosted Apps are and which of my apps I chose to boost.

What are Boosted Apps?

Boosted Apps are a paid subscription feature that allow you to grant up to 5 apps extra power in memory, space, rate limits, and uptime.

• Keep your apps awake 24/7 (usually Glitch apps go to sleep after 5 minutes)
• No rate limits, so if your app becomes super popular it can handle the traffic
• Extra memory, so memory hungry apps (I’m looking at you Webpack) work faster and better
• More disk space, which makes it easier to run non-Node apps on Glitch such as Python and Go. Or working with huge data sets.

What I Boosted

I was super excited to test Boosted Apps because there are a couple of apps I’ve built on Glitch to test that don’t work properly without 24/7 uptime.

The first app I boosted was my portfolio. I wanted visitors to see it right away rather than hitting a “waking up” screen. It also uses Webpack when I’m developing it and it’s much faster when boosted.

The second was my Twitter Bot, accessible-ascii, which generates an image with a caption for ascii memes. Before boosting it didn’t work most of the time. The reason why is that Twitter bots like this need to watch Twitter for replies. It couldn’t do that when asleep. Now it's watching Twitter 24/7 so it can always reply.

The third was my Discord Bot starter, which works in a similar way as the Twitter bot. It's now awake and ready to talk all the time.

The fourth was an App where I'm currently playing around with Vale, a prose linter written in Go. I needed to unpack some larger files and so it was very useful to have the extra space.

What will my fifth one be? I'm not sure yet but I'm excited to build it.

What Will You Boost?

We've seen our earliest subscribers boost everything from weather bots to crop monitoring applications. If you're interested in building and boosting apps on Glitch, go here. We'd love to see what you make so share in the comments or tweet us @glitchdevs.