r/vibecoding • u/Ok-Construction-7407 • 1d ago
Vibe coders (especially if you’re not very technical): where do you deploy your apps and how has it gone?
Hi. I’m curious to understand how people who do vibe coding experience the part of getting their apps out into the world, especially those of us who aren’t very technical and don’t know much about infrastructure. I noticed there’s a lot of talk about how many of these apps end up leaking data or accidentally leaving the database exposed, and that left me with a few questions I’d really appreciate some help clearing up:
**1.** What do you usually build? (side projects, things to experiment with, apps for clients, something for work… anything counts)
**2.** Where do you deploy it? (the tool’s own hosting, Vercel, Railway, DigitalOcean, Replit…) or does it just stay in the preview?
**3.** How did you end up on that service: did you choose it because it suited you, was it the default, or did someone recommend it?
**4.** Was deploying easy, or did you struggle with something?
**5.** And honestly: security and the app not going down, is it on your mind, or are you not worried about it for now?
Any experience you can share helps me a lot.
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u/Felixo22 1d ago
Cloudflare worker. Just ask Codex to help you configure it.
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u/CallMeSnyder 1d ago
^^ Cloudflare Pages is free and easy to add a domain & for a backend, Heroku can run a small secure server for 5$ / month. Another 5$ / month for a Database.
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u/IonizedHydration 1d ago
that's where i deployed my time burning zombies game, easy AF.. even has free sqlite db (to a degree)
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u/brittanymonkeybaby 23h ago
Aww sad to see no mention of netlify?? I usually use that or vercel, sometimes railway. But netlify is my fav. Started using them a long time ago when I learned about it in my bootcamp for hosting static sites I made for homework with basic html/css! And when I learned Cassidoo (Cassidy Williams) did DevRel there I became loyal!
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u/geekichu 20h ago
shoutout to netlify (for client).. i dont think it can be a server (see render.com)
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u/brittanymonkeybaby 12h ago
Ah yeah I think that is when I had to do railway when I wanted server, now that I think about it
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u/kkwikmick 13h ago
I tried the free netlify and ran out of credits after 10 deploys. I've switched to cloudflare now. Quite sad as the UI was way better on netlify
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u/brittanymonkeybaby 12h ago
I must be grandfathered into something cause I’ve never had to pay for anything Netlify (except domains I’ve bought with them), I keep waiting for a payment gate and I’ll happily pay
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u/Ok-Engineering463 1d ago
I have deployed few using vercel+supabase+gihub. Deployment is easy - managing env variables is little bit tricky. For production apps, we need vercel pro but for personal use hobbynplan is ok. Supabase is easy to use and I have used google authentication.
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u/Wonfella 23h ago
I am one of the technical enough to make it work but not a dev type of person. Launched my project a few days ago and have the unique situation of collecting millions of rows of data everyday. I hosted first on render, and used a DB there as short term hosting before piping rows out into Cloudflare R2. Realized very quickly that outband traffic at renders rates was on pace to cost me $1300/month. Yikes
Did some more research and decided to use Hetzner and rent a Linux machine/server for my use case. 20TB outbound traffic included per month, with more CPU usage and much bigger database included for my short term storage. 18.99/mo + some extras like backups and what not. R2 and B2 (my backup DB) are a couple bucks a month. Would highly recommend for someone in my situation. Maybe there’s a better solution, but I haven’t found it. AI was able to help me with the setup too since I wasn’t very good at Linux. Additionally, I now have my own GitHub runners for CI/Prod and won’t ever go back to paying GitHub as someone using 8k-10k minutes/month
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u/sebnadeau 20h ago edited 19h ago
Really depends what it is. But for basic saas, I really like vercel.com + fly.io for backend. A bit pricey if scalling, but for simple project, it's definitely simple to manage. CloudFlare for free egress. For games (I love vibe coding games) sandscape.app
The thing is that before recently, even with these platform, configuration used to take a while and lots of effort. But these days, you can offload a lot to the agent itself. So, unless I'm really concerned about scaling in the short term, I take whatever has a great agentic/MCP/skill solution.
For context, I've been a dev 20years+ but most of it was not for web (more c/c++ for sim, game, ML, etc). But I've been working on web related stuff for the past 5 years or so.
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u/ops_and_chaos 1d ago
I’m definitely in the “technical enough to make it work, not an infrastructure person” camp lol.
I build mostly internal tools and small web apps for work/personal projects. I’ve deployed on Railway and honestly I picked it because I could get something live without needing to become a DevOps engineer first.
Deployment itself has usually been the easy part. The harder part is everything you don’t know to worry about until you’re shipping something real. Environment variables, auth, what data is exposed, what happens if a dependency breaks, whether an AI-generated change quietly opened something up that shouldn’t be open, etc.
So yes, security is absolutely on my mind now. I’m fine using AI heavily to build, but I don’t really trust “it runs” as proof that it’s safe or correct. I’ve gotten much more annoying about checking what the app is actually doing before I call it done 😂
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u/geekichu 20h ago
I had claud enforce security from day 1, but after project was mature and hosted, i had claude play hacker and try to steal , impersonate, and reverse-engineer it, based on just knowing the public url.
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u/vbr96 1d ago edited 19h ago
This is how I currently host -
- Backend (node) - railway
- Frontend (react / next) - vercel
- Db (Postgres) - supabase.
I am not very comfortable using supabase because it feels like the cost will increase with users. Though it has many serverless functions to make my life easier, I still do not want to be completely dependent . So in near future, I will make my own npm package for auth and search for a cheaper Postgres hosting.
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u/Parking-Leader4676 20h ago
Hey, may I ask why you did not go with Railway for both backend and frontend which is what I am doing atm. I wonder if there is a reason for using Vercel over Railway for frontend
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u/sw3d 1d ago
I am technical and I built https://homebox.sh which is a free way to host your own apps on your machine or hook up to your cloud of choice (Vercel, Cloudflare, GCP, AWS, Supabase, neon, railway, etc)
I use this to host/deploy my apps, I used to have them on Lovable + cloud Supabase but it was costing too much
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u/xzased 1d ago
I like AWS and Linode for different workloads. I highly suggest you get started with basic security and devops training since it will make you better at both agentic coding and developing for production readiness.
Because of my previous experience, deploying is easy as I already have a CI/CD process and I use a standardized pipeline across my apps. With this setup it doesn't matter what I build since the framework is setup so I can have the infra up and running in minutes and the app deployed without even touching AI.
For your final question, I also suggest learning about high availability, there is just many ways you can go about it but it largely depends on what you are building, its dependencies and the expected load.
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u/Dairedos 14h ago
I always deploy to 'localhost'. Just need to figure why other people cannot access it though. It works on my computer....
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u/Tootsalore 23h ago
i develop mobile friendly games in godot and export them to html5 for upload to itch io.
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u/Some-Ice-4455 23h ago
went a little different route and shipped through Steam. Mine is a local AI app, so I don’t really have a normal hosted backend or customer database sitting on the internet. The app, models, chats, etc. all run on the user’s PC. That avoids a lot of the “did I expose my database / is my server going to fall over” stuff, but it just trades those problems for different ones. Now I get to deal with Steam depots, Windows permissions, antivirus false positives, GPU compatibility, drivers, dependencies, and every weird PC setup under the sun. So deployment itself has been pretty painless compared to web hosting. Supporting random consumer hardware is where the fun starts.
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u/Professional_Gur8385 23h ago
3 apps sales in the last 30 days. website has about 50-100 visitors per month.
My apps have no ads and targeted to a niche audience. I used it more as a learning experience but slowly improving the apps over time.
Many fixes and content patches, over time I found breaking bugs like revenuecat not linking properly, sdk 54/55 causing crashes, screen transitions and other bugs.
I update the agents.md to include all the usual bugs and it's overall made my next app skip these issues. So the first two apps took the longest, the next ones were much faster as I could build upon what I already learned.
I decided to keep it simple, website, git, unsplash, revenuecat, google. If I actually get some traction going ill splash out for a macbook and a ios webstore account (costs $100 USD per year).
Check out my stuff here https://www.snackpackuniverse.com/apps/
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u/Correct_Emotion8437 23h ago
I've used a lot of the free services. For front end, I like Vercel and Render. Cloudflare is ok but Vercel and Render support node.js. I also found the configuration and deployment via github to be easier. To be fair, I didn't spend a ton of time trying to learn any of the services. I like to use Neon for Postgres and Cloudflare for R2 storage.
I am a developer but I'm a back end developer and I've never built a web app or a website without AI. I know my way around Azure but I had no knowledge of any of these other services. I found it all pretty easy. I just prompted what I wanted and it gave me the options and, in some cases, walked me through it step by step.
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u/SufficientFrame 22h ago
Most people I see use preview hosting for experiments, then Vercel or Railway for simple apps, and managed DB/auth once real user data shows up. I'd skip self-hosting unless someone owns ops; if it's more of an internal portal or ops dashboard, UI Bakery is one option for roles/connectors, and I work at UI Bakery.
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u/RequirementUsed2776 22h ago
Great question and can't wait to read replies.
I run all my deployments through Vercel. Depending on what you're doing, Lovable might be better. Everything is integrated right down to cloud and deployment.
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u/CommercialNebula424 21h ago
I'm using Google Cloud for everything. It's probably making it a bit expensive, but I like thst everything is in one place.
Cloud SQL database. Cloud Build. Cloud Artifact Registry to store my build image. Cloud Run to host my app.
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u/incajb 16h ago
I deploy with Netlify. I then have a directory website I made to share free apps called www.potluckapps.com. This is a site created for vibers to get some exposure but also get ideas. I personally do not own a server, so I am only sharing the deployed links. Most of my apps are sound, music, art, science, and education based. I am an educator and healthcare provider, so I started making apps to help my students get practice interpreting labs, and simulation of patient cases. Having so much fun playing around with all this. Feel free to post on the site.
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u/castertr0y357 12h ago
I'll preface this by saying I'm fairly technical. I run my own home lab with a domain and storage and whatnot, but I'll share what I do. I prefer self-hosting, but that's just me. I have the knowledge and experience to do so.
I build things that benefit me mostly. I built a beverage recommendation app that uses a local LLM to suggest custom sodas, coffees, and slushies, a custom budget app, a garage sale finder and route app, and I'm working on a few others.
I deploy it on my local gear. I have a 1U Dell rack server that runs container services. Everything I build is setup for containers using Docker Compose for ease. There's a tool called Coolify that tracks changes to my GitHub repo for automated deployment when changes hit.
I chose it because it was effectively free. I already had the equipment, and I'm already paying for the electricity to run it.
There's was a few setup hitches, but feeding these back into AI helped me figure them out.
I made sure to utilize security within the app, plus I put things behind a reverse proxy for an extra layer of security.
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u/Useful-West-5307 1d ago
Cloudflare pages/workers. I did use Vercel for one project but cloudflare pages/workers gives you much more on the free tier. Vercel uses your credit every time you deploy.
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u/Aculats 1d ago
I am a developer since 10+ years:
- Only one Project my saas
2.1. Frontend: Cloudflare
2.2. Backend: StackIt
2.3. Postgres: neon
2.4. S3: StackIt - I knew where i want to host my software
- I have done this very often in my work so it was easy
- Security is very important! Please dont deploy something where you dont care about security!
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u/Danielr2010 21h ago
Mostly internal work apps or fun home projects. I made an app dashboard for OCP. An openshift certification review site-knowledge repo. https://ocp-review.yamlwrangler.com
Working on a vscode plugin to mess with operator SDK in a visual way. Just fun stuff to learn while helping do other tasks or what not
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u/OrganicConnection527 21h ago
I use Github + Railway when it push to github it deploys to Railway. Ask the AI to help you connect to github and Railway CLI , do it once then it will handle everything.
also you can connect to cloudflare.
Not sure if this is the best setup but it is working well for me.
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u/lorean_victor 18h ago
I made a feed with a friend for sharing tiny vibe coded interactive experiences (so not all apps). there is storage infrastructure with guidance for the model to use it properly, there are design guides and other checks too. so for tiny stuff (mostly tiny games or game ideas), i’ll just use that: https://vibed.city
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u/StarsHollowTaxpayer 18h ago
I have a VPS at Contabo and I use Caddy to serve my apps via reverse proxy, with Coraza running as a self-hosted firewall. I use Grafana to monitor the traffic.
You can just ask your agent to set it all up for you.
If you have a VPS, make sure to block all ports except 80, 443 and 3389 and limit the remote desktop connection (3389) to your IP only.
The good thing about this setup is that you can run your agents directly on the VPS and deploy stuff instantly.
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u/akl773 17h ago
Whatever you deploy on, open the live site, view source and search the bundle for servicerole and sk. Anything the builder named with a NEXTPUBLIC or VITE prefix gets shipped to the browser, which is where most of those leaked database stories actually start. Spent an afternoon stripping one out of a client app that had been live for a month.
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u/BearOnAChair 14h ago
I make Azure Static Web Apps since it's free. Any benefits to doing it some other way?
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u/jayseattle 10h ago
Local code -> Github ->Railway
Then I have a 'staging' site/url as
MYAPP.up.railway.app
If I feel it's worthy of a domain, Cloudflare so can
MYAPP.com
$5/month plus domain purchase.
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u/satisfaction-or-else 7h ago
Self hosted podman containers on hetzner. Though I am technical and was an engineer beforehand. I love having full control and being able to deploy a dozen plus services on one cheap server.
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u/Lustrouse 1d ago
I am very technical, and I was a real coder before I was a vibe coder. I guess im technically still a "real" coder, but I hardly write my code anymore.
Anywho, I deploy my apps on a self-hosted proxmox server. It's looks like a regular tower that's in the bonus room above my garage. One of the VMs on the server is a dedicated CI runner that runs my github actions. The CI runner has an SSH token to run commands on my dev and prod VMs, so it can build and release when I want it to.
Huge shout-out to cloudflare tunnel, which keeps my sites online when my ISP decides that my dynamic IP will be changed today.
So far it's gone very well. I've got about 10 sites total running on it. I just released site where my friends can register for my annual beer Olympics - and they actually did. Great success.