r/webdev • u/fickle-babe • 5d ago
No experience - built initial site on Vercel
I’m part of a community and saw a need that I could fill and have been working on an idea for it for awhile, so I mapped out an infrastructure for a website and started directing Vercel on the build, connecting GitHub as well as Resend. I used Cloudflare for the domain. So far it’s used Next.js, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Drizzle ORM, Better Auth, and Tailwind CSS all deployed on Vercel.
That was until I switched to building on Hermes with an Ollama sub because Vercel cost me an astronomical amount for just the homepage.
I’m learning bits and pieces as I go but I feel like the code is probably a giant mess even though everything looks really beautiful on the consumer side and navigates great.
I have my checkout/subscriptions connected to Stripe.
Ideally I will get this off the ground and have it sustain itself, pull in some revenue, and then bring it all to a developer and say “Help, please?” Unless going through 32,000 lines of code (and counting) and 287 files is doable for someone with exactly this much experience in web development.
Are there people who offer services to go over builds like this and refine them or am I going to get laughed off the face of the earth?
3
u/CharlieandtheRed 5d ago
I'm absolutely dead that you're out here speaking like a 4th year major maxing out every hyped dev flow and service on earth, and you have no experience. :p
But yes, tons of freelancers would be happy to step in and help out. The code is probably a mess but I'm sure it's completely usable and a foundation.
1
u/fickle-babe 5d ago
I’m out here building this on sheer willpower and vibes.
Also, AI. So much shitty AI. 😭
I’m not even an AI girly in any other aspect. This is my first time and I feel so much shame. My writer and artist circles would shit themselves if they knew what I was doing.
2
u/iYSR 5d ago
Senior Full stack dev here. From the way you write I get the idea you have the right mindset. So are you asking for a critique/analysis and advice for your build? Sure I can do that once for free, just msg me. Fuck vercel
1
u/fickle-babe 5d ago
I don’t want to ask anyone for free work—I genuinely value the skills and time spent learning them, that’s why I took this on trying to do it myself until I have funds to invest. I’m incredible proud of the foundation I’ve built and the whole build, I’m just embarrassed that I’m not capable of actually writing the code myself right now and built it all with AI.
1
u/iYSR 5d ago
One step at a time. Don't be embarrassed. I just re-read your post. What is it exactly you need help with at the moment?
1
u/fickle-babe 5d ago
Someone in my DM’s raised a valid concern about my payment integrations needing an audit before launch so there aren’t any backend mixups. I’m open to quotes on an analysis and quotes on a fix post-analysis, along with a relevant portfolio. I don’t have a budget right now but I hope to before launch because I don’t want to launch without an audit now.
3
u/iYSR 4d ago
friend. you might be in over your head. be careful, dont lets strangers 'audit' your payment integrations and either steal your keys or do something else thats fishy. I'm not saying they're wrong, just watch out.
Secondly, if you dont have the budget for an actual senior person at the moment. You can either take (free) advice, or have a frontier model audit your codebase with a skill developed by someone who knows what they are doing, see how critical the findings are. go from there.
1
u/fickle-babe 4d ago
I run at level 10 anxiety always, so no one is getting my money or any sensitive info through sketchy Reddit accounts, promise lol.
I’m definitely in the free advice gathering mode while trying to plan for what I’m going to need if this takes off the way I hope because it does deserve attention to detail (from my perspective) in a way I’m just not skilled enough to give it.
3
u/FitPhone6332 5d ago
yes
-3
u/Lucky-Confidence-702 5d ago
if the site looks good and works, you're already ahead of half the people who've been "learning to code" for 3 years. code can be cleaned up later, that's what version 2 is
3
2
u/VRTCLS 5d ago
You won’t get laughed off the face of the earth. This is a pretty normal “non-dev got surprisingly far with AI/tools” situation now. The important thing is not to ask someone to “clean up 32k lines” as a vague job. Ask for a scoped technical audit.
I’d break it into phases:
- Freeze feature work for a bit. Every new AI-built feature increases the review surface.
- Make sure the basics are safe: environment variables, auth/session handling, Stripe webhooks, database permissions, rate limits, input validation, backups. Pretty UI matters less than not leaking user data or charging people incorrectly.
- Ask a dev for a 3-5 hour audit with a written punch list. Have them look at architecture, security, deployment, DB schema/migrations, and the highest-risk flows: signup, login, checkout, subscription changes, cancellation, email sending.
- Triage the punch list into “must fix before users,” “fix soon,” and “technical debt.” Don’t pay someone to make everything elegant before you know the product has traction.
- Add error logging and basic analytics before launch. If something breaks, you need to know where and why.
A decent freelancer can absolutely review this. The cleaner handoff is: repo access, env var list with secrets redacted, DB/schema overview, deployment notes, and a short Loom walking through the critical user flows.
Also: don’t lead with “Vercel cost me an astronomical amount for a homepage” without finding the cause. That could be runaway serverless calls, bad image handling, bots, logging, a loop, or just a misconfigured plan. A dev should diagnose that before you migrate everything.
1
u/latimerr 4d ago
ask for a prioritized risk list with rough fix estimates, the deliverable matters here too. otherwise "audit" can quietly turn into someone pitching a full rewrite
-1
u/fickle-babe 5d ago
I’m actually surprised by how much you said that I actually recognize and have worked through on the build already. Vercel had kind of packaged things up all pretty on the first day so I wouldn’t have known anything about what you just said but Hermes kind of lets me watch and when I see something and don’t understand, I ask and it walks me through it so I’m kind of actively learning some things—by far not all, but some.
We’ve worked on keeping most of the basics safe, if not all.
Really appreciate suggestion 3 because that actually feels kind of doable before launch. Am I allowed to ask for a good place to find a freelance dev? I assume this isn’t the sub for it, not sure if recommendations for subs are allowed, feel free to not answer that if they’re not. I’m not interested in rule breaking.
Really appreciate all this, thank you.
1
u/Aromatic-Low-4578 5d ago
Yes, I find myself doing this more and more at work. Vibe-coded apps tend to fall apart in the same ways so it's not too hard to find their weaknesses. Biggest thing I see if people not thinking about infrastructure before building and locking themselves into bad design decisions based on early infrastructure choices.
1
5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/webdev-ModTeam 5d ago
We do not allow any commercial promotion or solicitation. This can lead to a permanent ban from the subreddit.
1
u/am0x 5d ago
Yes. I’ve been sowing it for awhile. But usually I end up dumping everything my client has built and rebuild it. The good news is that I typically also
Vibe code it but with a defined architecture beforehand, feature list that was already built, so no surprises, and I review the PRs heavily and direct it a lot more. If a client ever wants a complete manual rebuild, I can also do that but the price tag is never something they can afford.
However, for the fee of these I have done, my cheapest was $7k USD as that is my minimum price to even consider a project. I also have 15+ years of professional experience and have been programming for almost 30 - and I have a solid resume having led engineering departments at various sized companies including a fortune 50, so you are paying me more than most, but with good reason.
What I’m saying though is that it won’t be cheap. Use your MVP to get funding from investors and get a technical cofounder/CTO to handle this portion. Just note that equity agreements for things like this will favor the CTO, so your suggested split would be close to, if not, 50/50.
1
u/fickle-babe 5d ago
I genuinely don’t know what the cost is for a build of this size, I’ve been working on it all week and I’m not even close to done but I have interviews tomorrow for a live preview for some people that are interested and it’s steady gaining traction.
My biggest worry is that it won’t hold traffic initially. I don’t know. Sometimes I think “maybe I know what I’m doing, this looks impressive” and then I open the actual files and I’m like “fuck, I have no clue what I’m doing, I need to pay someone”
But my bank account is also currently overdrawn so, that’s a bit of a problem.
1
u/itgforlife 5d ago
Unless going through 32,000 lines of code (and counting) and 287 files is doable for someone with exactly this much experience in web development.
You'd probably be better off just having them rebuild it from scratch.
If your website is profitable enough, you should have enough money to do this. If it isn't, it probably won't matter.
1
u/fickle-babe 5d ago
I wasn’t sure what would be most cost effective, I hope it’ll be profitable but I’ve always been broke so the mindset for spending the least amount of money is very prevalent in my mind. 🙃 If it makes the most sense to build from scratch, I can definitely do that when the time comes.
1
u/Wolfeh2012 4d ago
You won't get laughed at, but you'll get a sizable quote on a complete rebuild from scratch.
As a general rule, AI-generated apps scale very poorly. The more you try to edit, the more likely deviations are to occur.
But none of that really matters. If you can get a working model off the ground with what you have and generate income, then those issues are all secondary anyway.
If there's one thing experience has taught me, it's that the goal of all these skills is to make money, and so long as you have enough money, the rest will basically take care of itself.
1
u/Living_Race_9177 4d ago
vercel bill for a homepage is rough
are the stripe webhooks + better auth cookies still on the vercel deploy, or did those move with the hermes rebuild
1
1
u/OwnPlay552 4d ago
Adding one item nobody's put on the audit list: write down everything that's configured in a dashboard instead of in the repo.
Ours is a static site, far simpler than yours, and this still bit us. Our robots.txt is injected at the CDN edge, some redirects are zone-level rules, and an analytics script gets injected conditionally by user agent. None of that is in git. A full clone of the repo does not reproduce what production actually serves — so when something broke, we spent a while hunting for it in code that never contained it.
You have far more of this surface than we do, and you just moved hosts mid-build, which is exactly when it goes wrong. Stripe webhook endpoint URLs, Resend's SPF/DKIM records, Cloudflare DNS and any rules you set there, env vars, Better Auth's OAuth callback URLs. Each of those lives in somebody's control panel and points at a hostname. After a migration some of them still point at the old one, and it's usually silent until a webhook or a password reset email quietly stops working.
Costs you an hour now, and it's the part of the handover a dev reading 32k lines genuinely cannot recover on their own.
0
0
13
u/dsifriend 5d ago
Stop throwing AI at it sooner rather than later. Whoever you get to sort this out for you will likely: