You Built the App. Now You Can't Deploy It.

I talked to a founder last week who built an entire SaaS product using Cursor and Claude. Full UI. Auth system. Stripe integration. Database. The whole thing worked perfectly on his laptop.

Then he tried to put it on the internet.

Three weeks later he was still fighting with Docker, environment variables, CI/CD pipelines, SSL certificates, and a Nginx config that seemed to break every time he touched it. He'd spent more time trying to deploy the thing than he spent building it.

This is the story I keep hearing over and over in 2026. The building tools got incredible. The deployment story didn't follow.

The Gap Nobody Warns You About

If you've built something with AI coding tools, you already know how good they are at generating application code. You describe what you want, it writes it, you tweak it, repeat. Within a few days you have something that looks and feels like a real product.

But "works on my machine" and "works on the internet" are two completely different things.

Here's what actually sits between your local dev environment and a production deployment:

Infrastructure: Where does this thing run? AWS? Vercel? Railway? DigitalOcean? Each one has its own config, its own conventions, its own weird gotchas. Pick the wrong one for your use case and you'll be fighting it for months.

Environment variables: Your app needs API keys, database URLs, secrets. Locally these live in a .env file. In production they need to be configured in your hosting platform, and they need to be different from your local ones. Miss one and your app crashes with a cryptic error that doesn't tell you what's actually wrong.

Databases: Your local SQLite database isn't going to cut it. You need a hosted Postgres or MySQL instance, migrations that run in the right order, connection pooling so your app doesn't run out of database connections under load.

CI/CD: Every time you push code, something needs to build it, test it, and deploy it. Without this you're manually copying files to a server, which works until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, you have no idea what version of the code is actually running.

DNS and SSL: You need a domain pointing at your server and an SSL certificate so browsers don't scream at your users. Sounds simple. It is not simple.

Monitoring: Once it's live, how do you know it's still running? What happens when it crashes at 3 AM? Who gets alerted?

None of this is optional. All of it is invisible to AI coding tools.

Why AI Tools Can't Solve This (Yet)

Here's the thing about Cursor, Claude, GPT, Copilot, all of them. They're trained on application code. They're great at writing React components, API routes, database queries, business logic.

Deployment is a different beast. It's not about writing code. It's about understanding how systems talk to each other, how networking works, how processes run on Linux servers, how DNS propagates, why your container is exiting with code 137 (it ran out of memory).

When you ask an AI tool to help with deployment, you get answers that look right but don't work. The Dockerfile it generates is missing a build step. The Nginx config it writes conflicts with your hosting platform's proxy. The environment variable it suggests doesn't exist in your provider's interface.

And the worst part: debugging deployment failures requires a fundamentally different skill than debugging application code. Application bugs show up in your browser. Deployment bugs show up in server logs you can't find, error pages that say nothing useful, and connections that time out with no explanation.

The Three Stages of Deployment Hell

I've watched enough founders go through this to see the pattern.

Stage 1: "It can't be that hard." You google "deploy Next.js app" and find a tutorial from 2024. You follow it. Something breaks immediately. You ask ChatGPT. It gives you a fix. That fix breaks something else. You're now three layers deep in a debugging chain that started with a simple deploy command.

Stage 2: "I'll just use Vercel/Netlify/Railway." Smart move, honestly. These platforms handle a lot of the infrastructure for you. But they're not magic. Your app still needs environment variables configured correctly. Your database still needs to be provisioned and connected. Your build process still needs to actually work in a container, not just on your Mac. And if your app does anything beyond serving web pages (background jobs, websockets, cron tasks, file storage), you're back to fighting platform limitations.

Stage 3: "I need help." This is where most founders end up. Either they hire someone to deploy it, or they find a technical partner who can handle this layer. The founders who figure this out early save themselves weeks. The ones who don't waste a month learning Docker from scratch only to realize they picked the wrong hosting platform anyway.

What Actually Works

I'm going to be direct here because I've set up production environments for dozens of SaaS products and the answer is boring but true.

Pick boring infrastructure. Vercel for Next.js frontends. Railway or Render for backends. Managed Postgres from your hosting provider or Supabase. Don't try to set up your own Kubernetes cluster. Don't try to configure a bare metal server. Use platforms that make the common case easy.

Get your environment variables right on day one. Make a spreadsheet. Three columns: variable name, local value, production value. Every API key, every database URL, every secret. When something doesn't work in production, check this spreadsheet first. Nine times out of ten that's where the problem is.

Set up CI/CD immediately. GitHub Actions is free. A basic pipeline that builds your app and deploys it on push takes 30 minutes to set up with someone who knows what they're doing. Without it you're deploying manually and that means you'll stop deploying, which means bugs don't get fixed and features don't ship.

Don't skip monitoring. Sentry for error tracking is free for small projects. Uptime monitoring (Betterstack, UptimeRobot) takes five minutes to configure. If your app goes down and you don't know about it, your users know before you do.

Budget for a production setup session. This isn't a months-long engagement. A competent technical person can get your vibe-coded app deployed, configured, and monitored in a day or two. It's the highest-leverage thing you can spend money on early because it unblocks everything else.

The Real Cost of Not Deploying

Every day your app sits on localhost is a day you're not getting user feedback. Not validating your idea. Not generating revenue. Not learning what actually needs to change.

I've seen founders spend two months building a beautiful product and then another two months trying to deploy it. By the time it's live, the market moved, their motivation dropped, or they ran out of runway.

The deployment gap isn't just a technical problem. It's a business problem. The founders who get their product live fast, even if it's rough, learn faster than the ones who keep polishing locally.

Your app doesn't need to be perfect to deploy. It needs to be live.

When You're Ready to Get It Live

If you've built something and you're stuck at the deployment stage, you're not alone. This is literally the most common problem I see with non-technical founders in 2026. The building tools outpaced the shipping tools.

The good news: getting from "works on my machine" to "works on the internet" is a solved problem. It just requires someone who's done it before.

If you want help getting your product deployed and production-ready, book a call. I'll look at what you've built, figure out the right infrastructure, and get it live. Usually takes a day or two. Then you can focus on what actually matters: getting it in front of users.