Setting up Replit for app building - Replit Tutorial

As we get started with Repl.it, let me briefly introduce you to the interface and show you a few key features that are useful to be aware of. First of all, when you come to Repl.it, you're either using it with a personal account or a team or a company account. And the only meaningful difference between the two is that in a team's account, you have team features like collaborative work and managing who can access what and things like that. Now, speaking of personal accounts, when you first sign up for Repl.it, you get the free option. and Repl.it tells you that you can build an entire app for free. My recommendation to you is to purchase one month of Repl.it Core, the for-pay version, because there are so many additional features you get with Repl.it Core that aren't in the free version, that working in the free version is going to be very frustrating. And maybe the most important of those features is the plan agent. You see, when you use Repl.it to build apps, you are paying for the agent use. And the build agent can be quite expensive because it's doing a lot of AI work and you're paying through AI tokens for all of that work. And that's where the plan agent comes in. When you activate it, it'll lay out a detailed plan based on your original prompt and then ask you to review the plan before you execute it. That way you get the AI to figure out how to implement what it is you're trying to build before it actually does anything. So you're not leaning on the expensive agent to do the planning work. You let the planning agent do the planning work, and then you let the expensive agent actually do the things it is good at without spending so much money. This makes a significant difference in how much it costs to actually build out an app. And on the topic of cost, after you've set up your core account, go to the Usage tab, Go over here to Additional Usage, open up Manage, and set, first of all, a Usage Alert, so you know when you're hitting certain limits of usage. And second, open up the tab down here and set a Service Shutdown Limit. This is to avoid accidentally overspending on Repl.it, because once you start working with Repl.it, you have $25 to spend, and if you go over that limit, it'll start charging you for the extra use. You can buy more credits in bulk, $100 per set, and the system will also charge you incrementally, not only for your agent use, but for any of the apps that you have currently running. If you don't set a usage limit, the system may run over what you are willing to spend without you being aware of it. So set a usage limit, then if you hit it, you know how much money you're spending and you can then increase it or change your spending habits accordingly. But this is a really good strategy to avoid accidentally suddenly having to pay a lot extra for something you were not prepared to pay for. And one final thing, when Repl.it builds apps, it uses a framework and components within that framework. And when you build apps, you'll quickly notice that everything looks the same. That's because by default, the style theme for the Repl.it apps is set to auto. You can change that if you want to. Click on the auto button, then select one of the existing themes or select Manage Themes to go in and look at the existing themes and build your own. Here, you can see what the different components are going to look like, because these are standardized components that are used in most websites. There's a page full of card components. There's a typography page where you see what the fonts and relationships look like. And there's a colors page. From here, you can use the dropdown to pick any of the existing themes as a starting point. And then you can click new to create your own custom theme and make any changes you want. Now, just to be clear, you can't change everything. There are some style attributes that are baked into the framework that is being used in Repl.it. And to change them, you have to go in and mess around with the code or be more directive in how you want to change it later on in the process. But building your own app theme still gives you a much higher level of control of what the app looks like out-of-the-box than if you just use the auto setting. For example, in this course, I've created my own theme called Scandi Minimalist because I like this minimalist style and it didn't exist in one of the templates. All I did was just take out a lot of the background colors and make the outlines a lot stronger and then only pick two main colors instead of a whole bunch of them. And I'll be using this theme throughout the rest of the course. But really this is all extra stuff you can play around with whenever. The only thing I care about is if you set up a core account, you also set a spend limit so you don't accidentally go over, okay?