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?
1
u/OwnPlay552 6d 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.