Before creating Replit, Amjad Masad worked in engineering roles at Yahoo and Facebook, where he built development tools.

In 2011, prior to Haya Odeh’s involvement, he produced an early open-source version of this concept, called “JSRepl”.

As Replit was taking shape, Masad and Odeh wanted to have "a real environment and not something emulated in the browser."

[12] This decision was met with backlash and criticism from the Replit community, which eventually calmed down after bugs and major issues were addressed.

From 2022 to 2024, Replit offered Teams for Education as a free product to assist computer science teachers in the classroom.

[14] In 2024, it was announced that Replit would be moving from its SoMa headquarters in San Francisco to a new location in Foster City.

[15][16] In August 2024, the site's free or "Starter" plan was changed, limiting users to creating a maximum of three public projects.

Replit uses the Debugger Adapter Protocol to provide debugging services in Java, Python, Node.js, and C++ for all users connected to a Repl.

[28] Users could also import projects from Glitch, which provides a similar service to Replit, though it is unknown if this feature is still officially supported; as of July 2022 it is functional.

All public code hosted on Replit is subject to the MIT license and may be used to train machine learning models.

In order to prevent code from being used to train Replit algorithms, users must make their Repl private.