Right, I don't think anyone would recommend using Cloud9 as in c9.io, but AWS Cloud9 (https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/) is still a perfectly valid option and does get updates.
For my usage, AWS Cloud9 has turned out far cheaper since the EC2 instance shuts down when I'm not using it. I can actually keep it within the free tier, which is a long way from $20/mo I was paying before.
But if you have anything on there that you want to keep, doesn’t it charge you something?
I would think the lowest grade machine is the equivalent of $5/Mo.
In cloud9 I like to have a node machine, a python machine, a rails machine and one to experiment on the front end, one for Data science. Basically I want to muck about on a clean machine.
They haven't updated any of the ubuntu images since 14.04, and you cannot update them yourself.
They really want you to move to Amazon's pay as you go scheme instead of one flat rate. (I think).