Replit Turns 10: Free Agent Day on May 2, 2026, $100K Buildathon and Slides on Replit Launch

Replit on May 2, 2026 celebrated its 10th anniversary by giving every user a 24-hour window of free, uncapped access to Replit Agent — its full-stack AI app builder — and simultaneously launching a $100,000 Buildathon and a new product called Slides on Replit. The promotion ran for one day across all account tiers, including free accounts, with no usage caps and no credit card requirement.

What Happened

Founded in 2016 by Amjad Masad, Faris Masad and Haya Odeh, Replit has grown from an in-browser code editor into one of the most-used AI coding platforms in the world. The 10-year anniversary was anchored by three announcements that landed together on May 2:

• Free Agent Day: from 00:00 to 23:59 PT on Saturday, May 2, every Replit account — free, Core, Teams or Enterprise — could use Replit Agent without consuming any usage credits. Replit's official blurb on its birthday page read: "10 years of Replit. One day of free vibe coding for everyone. Build anything, anywhere. The idea is yours. The build is free."
• $100K Buildathon: the company opened the Replit 10-Year Buildathon on its BuildHub platform, with more than $100,000 in prizes for the most impressive projects shipped during the 24-hour window.
• Slides on Replit: a new AI-powered presentation builder rolled out on the same day, extending Replit beyond pure code into productivity workflows. Slides on Replit generates a deck from a prompt, then lets users edit slides directly in the IDE.

Replit also teased a new Enterprise livestream series during a live "Replit 10 Showcase" the day before, signalling a deeper push into B2B sales on top of its self-serve developer base.

Key Details

• Founded: 2016 by Amjad Masad, Faris Masad and Haya Odeh.
• Free Agent window: 24 hours on May 2, 2026 — no caps, no credit card, all account tiers.
• Buildathon prize pool: $100,000+, judged on projects shipped during the 24-hour window.
• New product: Slides on Replit — AI-generated presentations created from a prompt and edited inline.
• Underlying agent: the same Replit Agent 4 that powers the company's ongoing Agent 4 Buildathon series.

What Developers and Users Are Saying

Reaction across X, Reddit and the Replit community forum was overwhelmingly positive in the first 24 hours. Replit's own announcement post on X racked up thousands of replies within the day, with developers sharing screen recordings of full-stack apps, internal tools and games shipped during the free window. Threads on r/webdev called the promotion one of the more generous "birthday" gestures from a paid AI coding platform — reasonable comparisons were drawn to Cursor and v0, which have not run anything similar at this scale.

The most common critical comment, repeated on Hacker News and the Replit Discourse forum, was about queueing latency: as global demand spiked, several users reported Agent runs taking noticeably longer to start. Replit's status page acknowledged elevated load mid-day and added capacity. A second recurring comment was that the announcement of Slides on Replit, while neat, felt less core to the platform's identity than the Agent itself.

What This Means for Developers

For developers who have been Agent-curious but unwilling to spend, May 2 was a low-friction way to ship a real prototype end-to-end on Replit's stack. The Buildathon extends that incentive: even after the free day ended, the prize pool gives small teams a reason to keep iterating on what they shipped during the window. For Replit's competitive position, the bigger signal is the Enterprise livestream series — Replit appears to be moving deliberately upmarket while keeping the consumer/student funnel wide open.

For builders who already rely on Replit, the addition of Slides on Replit is the start of a clear pattern: the company is extending Agent into adjacent productivity surfaces (presentations now, plausibly docs and dashboards next), and that has implications for how teams think about which tool owns which workflow.

What's Next

Replit has not committed to repeating Free Agent Day on a fixed cadence, but a follow-up Enterprise livestream series is scheduled in the weeks after the anniversary. The Buildathon submission and judging window runs through May with winners to be announced afterward. Slides on Replit is generally available to all paid tiers from launch and is rolling out to free accounts in stages.

Sources

• Replit Birthday landing page — Replit's official announcement of free Agent Day on May 2, 2026.
• Replit 10-Year Buildathon on BuildHub — official Buildathon site with rules and prize details.
• TipRanks — Replit Marks 10th Anniversary With AI Features, Developer Buildathon and Enterprise Focus — independent coverage with detail on Slides and the Enterprise series.
• Replit Community Forum — Replit Agent is free on May 2nd — official community announcement and thread.
• YouTube — Replit Turns 10: Free Agent for 24 Hours + Slides + Enterprise Series — Replit's official 10-Year Showcase walkthrough video.
• @Replit on X — "10 years of Replit. One day of free vibe coding for everyone."