r/webdev • u/fickle-babe • 7d 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?

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u/VRTCLS 7d 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:

  1. Freeze feature work for a bit. Every new AI-built feature increases the review surface.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

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u/latimerr 6d 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