Your Vibe-Coded App Will Break at 100 Users. Here's Why.

I talk to a lot of founders who built their app with Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, or Replit Agent. Every single one of them says the same thing:

"It worked great until it didn't."

The app was live. The demo was impressive. Maybe they even had a few paying users. Then they pushed past about 100 concurrent users, or tried to add a real feature, or an investor asked to see the codebase. And everything fell apart.

This isn't a knock on vibe coding. These tools are genuinely incredible for getting from zero to something. But there's a gap between "something" and "a product." And that gap is where most founders lose months and thousands of dollars.

What vibe coding actually produces

When you prompt an AI to build your app, it's optimizing for one thing: making it work right now, for you, in a demo. That's it.

It's not thinking about:

• What happens when 50 people hit the same API endpoint at once
• Whether your database queries will still be fast with 10,000 rows instead of 10
• How to structure code so a developer can actually modify it later
• Error handling beyond "it crashed, here's a generic message"
• Security beyond the bare minimum

This isn't the AI's fault. It's doing exactly what you asked. The problem is that building a demo and building a product are two completely different disciplines.

The five things that break first

After working with dozens of founders who hit this wall, I see the same patterns every time.

1. The database is a mess

Vibe-coded apps almost always have a flat, denormalized database structure. Everything in one table. No indexes. No relationships. It works fine when you have 50 rows. It falls over when you have 5,000.

I recently looked at an app where every single page load triggered 14 separate database queries. The founder couldn't figure out why the app was "slow." It wasn't slow. It was doing 14x the work it needed to.

2. Authentication is held together with tape

Most AI-generated auth flows handle the happy path: user signs up, user logs in, done. But they miss the edge cases that matter in production.

What happens when a session expires mid-action? What happens when someone opens two tabs? What about password reset tokens that never expire? I've seen vibe-coded apps where the JWT secret was hardcoded in the frontend.

Not edge cases. Security holes.

3. There's no error handling

When something goes wrong in a vibe-coded app, the user usually sees a white screen or a cryptic error message. There's no graceful degradation. No retry logic. No logging that tells you what actually happened.

This means when your app breaks in production (and it will), you have zero visibility into why. You're debugging blind.

4. The architecture doesn't support the next feature

Vibe-coded apps tend to be monolithic. Everything in one file, or everything tightly coupled. Adding a new feature means touching everything.

A founder asked me to add team accounts to their app. Should have been a two-week feature. But the entire app assumed one user per account. The data model, the API routes, the frontend state management. All of it. We were looking at a partial rewrite just to add a dropdown.

5. No tests, no CI, no deployment pipeline

The app goes from laptop to production via git push. No tests. No staging environment. No way to know if a change broke something until a user reports it.

This is fine when you're the only user. It's terrifying when you have paying customers.

The real cost of waiting

Here's what I tell founders who are in this situation: the cost of fixing these problems goes up every single week you wait.

At 10 users, refactoring is a weekend project. At 100 users, it's a two-week sprint. At 1,000 users with paying customers and data you can't lose, you're looking at a careful, expensive migration.

The worst case I've seen: a founder with $15K MRR who had to freeze feature development for three months to rebuild the foundation. Three months of no new features while competitors moved. That's not a technical problem. That's a business problem.

You probably don't need to rewrite everything

This is the part that surprises most founders. The answer is usually not "throw it away and start over."

Most vibe-coded apps have a solid 60-70% that's perfectly fine. The UI works. The basic flows work. The business logic is mostly correct.

What you need is someone who can look at the codebase and identify the 30% that's going to cause problems. Fix the database structure. Add proper auth. Set up error logging. Create a deployment pipeline. Write tests for the critical paths.

This is surgical work, not a demolition project.

What to look for in technical help

If you're a non-technical founder with a vibe-coded app that's starting to strain, here's what you actually need:

Not a junior developer. They'll look at the code, not know what's "AI-generated weird" vs "intentionally weird," and either leave it alone or rewrite things that didn't need rewriting.

Not a dev agency. They'll quote you $50K for a full rebuild because that's how they make money. Nine times out of ten, you don't need a rebuild.

What you need is someone senior who's seen this pattern before. Someone who can audit the codebase in a day, give you a prioritized list of what to fix, and either do the work or guide someone else through it.

The technical assessment should take hours, not weeks. If someone needs two months to tell you what's wrong with your code, they're stalling.

The vibe coding sweet spot

I'm not anti-vibe coding. I use AI tools every day. They're insanely good at getting from zero to a working prototype.

But there's a moment in every product's life where you need to transition from "move fast and prompt things" to "build something durable." The founders who recognize that moment and get help early save themselves months of pain.

The ones who wait until the app is on fire in production? They spend a lot more. In time, money, and stress.

If your vibe-coded app is starting to show cracks and you want an honest assessment of what needs fixing, let's talk. I'll tell you what's fine, what's not, and what to prioritize. No sales pitch, just clarity.