I've been a long-time Glitch user and am now looking for good alternative platforms. My primary use case involves online coding with a Node.js backend using Express and some React apps. If anyone has recommendations, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Me and a buddy built https://pico.sh to make it easy for developers to prototype and share their projects. In particular we have a static hosting service (https://pgs.sh) and a tunnel service (https://tuns.sh) that should cover most apps in the prototype phase.

It's not nearly the same experience, but I'd argue a bit nicer of one, I'd recommend giving coolify a shot https://coolify.io/

You have to bring your own server to selfhost but it's dead dead easy.

If you have a nodejs app you can basically just click "new project from github", select the repo, and click deploy. Then it'll be there on your domain (or a free one) and auto redeploy any time you push to master.

I pair program JS-based games with my nephew remotely using the glitch editor. In the end, it’s just static files. Can anyone recommend another place to do that? What we needed from glitch was the collaborative editing and instant update.

I could stand up a server if there’s some open-source glitch-like for just static HTML and JS.

Is it more small temporary projects you need to make and throw away, or large projects you keep working on?

I'd recommend, unfortunately, buying a cheap $200 netbook and running cloudflare tunnel on it. As long as you're relying on other people's computers for hosting you'll keep looking forever

...are you averse to just doing this stuff over a cheap VPS? Here's an affiliate link if you're interested.

    1 GB RAM KVM VPS
    1x vCPU Core
    1 GB RAM
    20 GB SSD
    2 TB Bandwidth
    Price: $10.96/Year

I don't work for Racknerd, but my business uses them for our clients. Most of them have low-end requirements. I mean that's less than $1/month right there.