Do I need to keep paying to keep my site online?

It depends on the builder and hosting you choose. Base44 and Lovable can publish on a platform address on Free; connecting a new custom domain requires a paid plan. v0 deploys through Vercel, whose hosting plan and usage are separate from the v0 subscription; Vercel Hobby is for personal, non-commercial projects. Budget for domain renewal and any connected services. Upgrade when your workflow needs more usage or paid features, rather than assuming that every publication requires payment.

What is the difference between a preview link and being live?

A preview link is the builder's temporary address, meant for you. Live means your own domain, publicly reachable, indexable by search engines and safe to put on a business card. Plenty of finished sites sit in preview for weeks because nobody ran the last few steps.

What breaks most often at launch?

Payments left in test mode, emails that only worked in preview, and forms that send to an address nobody reads. All three look perfect on screen and fail silently with real customers, which is why this checklist tests them on the live site rather than trusting the preview.

Launch & Deploy

Put it live properly (custom domain and launch checks)

Go from "it works in preview" to "it's live and I'm not embarrassed."

Time: ~30 minutes, plus up to a day for the domain to settle Difficulty: Beginner Works with: Base44 / Lovable / v0

When to use this

When you're ready to publish on your own domain.

Before you start

A domain you own (~$10-20/year from any registrar). Buy it before this step so you can connect it in the same sitting.
A builder and hosting setup that supports your own domain. Check its plan requirements and usage limits before connecting; a paid builder subscription is not a universal requirement.
Access to wherever you bought the domain (you'll change a setting there).
30 focused minutes; don't launch between meetings.

The prompt

Get this site ready to go live and tell me exactly what I need to do myself.

First, run a full pre-launch review and list every problem you find, grouped by how serious it is:
- Any placeholder text, lorem ipsum, or example content I forgot to replace
- Any image slot still empty or holding a placeholder
- Links that go nowhere or to the wrong page
- Forms that do not send or do not store anything
- Pages that break or look wrong on a phone
- Missing page titles or descriptions
- Contact details that are wrong or missing anywhere on the site

Then make sure these are in place: a friendly page for addresses that do not exist, correct contact details in the footer of every page, the legal page links, and a page title that shows properly when someone shares a link in a message or on social media.

Finally, give me a short numbered checklist of what I have to do outside this app — connecting my domain [YOUR DOMAIN], and anything else that needs my accounts or passwords — written for someone who has never done it before.

Do not change my content or design while doing this; report and fix only what is broken.

Already building? Paste this into your project. Starting fresh? Open a free account with a compatible builder below.

Build it on

Start free with Base44 Read Review: Base44

Start free with Lovable Read Review: Lovable

Start free with v0 Read Review: v0 by Vercel

How we make money

What this creates

A prioritised list of everything still broken or unfinished
Fixes for the technical items
A friendly "page not found" page
A correct preview when your link is shared in a message
A plain-language checklist of the steps only you can do

Check it worked

Paste the prompt, wait for the build to finish, then confirm these — in plain language, no technical checks needed:

The problem list is short and you understand every item on it
No lorem ipsum or placeholder text survives anywhere
Every form you tested sends and stores
Sharing your link in a chat shows your title and description, not a bare address
Your domain shows your site, with a padlock in the browser bar

Something missing? That's normal — ask for it in one short follow-up message rather than re-running the whole prompt.

Next steps

Set up the share preview properly

Before you post the link anywhere

Make sure that when someone shares any page of this site in a message or on social media, it shows a proper preview: the page's own title, a short description, and an image. Use [DESCRIBE THE IMAGE, e.g. my logo on a brand-colored background] where a page has no image of its own.

You'll know it worked when: Pasting your link into a chat shows a title, description and image.

Know when something breaks

Right after launch

Set up basic monitoring so I find out if the site goes down or a form stops working, and email me at [EMAIL] when it happens. Keep it simple — I do not want technical alerts I can't act on.

You'll know it worked when: You receive a test alert and know what a real one will look like.

Take a backup you can trust

Once real customer data starts arriving

Show me how to export everything this app stores — all customer data and content — and set a routine I can follow monthly. Tell me plainly what is included in an export and what is not.

You'll know it worked when: You have downloaded one export and know exactly what it does and doesn't contain.

Watch out for

The padlock matters. If your domain shows a security warning, stop and wait — certificates usually finish setting up within an hour or so. Never announce a launch while the warning shows.
DNS delay is not a bug. Your site may work for you and not yet for a friend in another country. Give it a day before troubleshooting.
Test forms on the live domain, not just in preview. This is the most common launch-day failure.
Announce a day after you launch, not the same hour. Let the quiet traffic find the embarrassing typo first.

Platform notes

Base44 supports custom domains on Starter and higher paid plans. Connecting a new custom domain on Lovable requires a paid plan. v0 deploys through Vercel, so domain connection and hosting terms depend on that setup rather than a required paid v0 subscription; Vercel Hobby is for personal, non-commercial projects. Domain changes can take time to spread: follow your provider's stated wait time, which may be up to 72 hours, before changing settings that already match its instructions.

Spend fewer credits

Every builder charges you for the work its AI does — so the cheapest habit is thinking before you build. These six rules cut most of the waste, whichever platform you choose.

Plan in a free chat first. Sketch the whole thing in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini — pages, features, what each form collects, what it should look like. Thinking there is free; thinking inside a builder is billed.
Start from a written prompt, not a sentence. "Make me a website" is the most expensive sentence in AI building. A complete first prompt — like the ones on this site — saves dozens of correction rounds.
Don't be lazy with the details. Every detail you leave out comes back as a correction you pay for. Business name, colors, every page, every form field, what happens after someone submits — put it all in the first prompt.
One change per message afterwards. "Fix the header, and the form, and the colors" produces a tangle that costs more to unpick than it saved.
Stuck? Stop patching. If the same fix fails about three times, don't send a fourth correction — describe the whole section's desired end state in one fresh message instead.
Start free. Upgrade when you need more. Use the free allowance to build and explore your first version. Upgrade when you need more usage or paid features, and check any connected service costs before launch.

The prompts on this page are written to do most of this work for you — that's the point of them.

Read the full guide

Related playbooks

Related prompts

Part of these kits

launch domain checklist go-live

Last reviewed: 2026-10-09