Trinket.io shutting down, so we saved it and hosted it a trinket.strivemath.org

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!]

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.

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!

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