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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!]
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Maybe you could move most operations to local WASM? That way, you could save on most server costs.
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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.
Thank you, my first language was LOGO.
But oh noes! Now it's w/o its "fancy" ".io" TLD!
now it's all about the .chat TLD haha
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