Publish it — and show it off

Your project works. Now it needs a URL — because "you can come over and see it on my laptop" has never once impressed anyone. Publishing sounds like the technical part, but in 2026 it's genuinely the easiest step in the whole path.

Step 1: Deploy (get a real link)

If you built in an app builder (Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit): there's a Publish, Deploy, or Share button in the interface. Click it. You'll get a URL like your-project.lovable.app within a minute. That's it — you're deployed. These platforms host your app for you.

If you built with a coding agent or editor (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.): you'll deploy to a hosting service. Vercel and Netlify are the common choices for web apps, both with free tiers that are plenty for a first project. The flow is: put your code on GitHub (your AI tool can walk you through it — literally ask "help me put this project on GitHub and deploy it to Vercel"), connect the repo to the host, and it builds and deploys automatically on every change. Ten minutes the first time, automatic forever after.

A custom domain (yourproject.com) is a nice later upgrade — covered in Shipping for real — but the free subdomain is completely fine for launch day.

Step 2: The pre-flight check

Before you share the link anywhere, three minutes of diligence:

1. Open your URL in a private/incognito window. This is what strangers see — no logged-in state, no local files. Click through everything once.
2. Open it on your phone. Half your visitors will be on mobile.
3. If your app has accounts, secrets, or a database — pause and run through Security before you launch. A public URL means the whole internet can poke at it, and vibe-coded apps have a well-earned reputation for leaking API keys and exposing databases. Fifteen minutes of checking beats a very bad morning.

Step 3: Give it a face

Projects get judged by their link previews. Worth five minutes:

• A real title — "Encore-O-Matic", not "my-test-app-7".
• A one-line description that says what it does. This shows up in search results and link previews.
• A screenshot or social image. When someone pastes your link into a chat, this image is your entire first impression. Ask your AI tool to "add an Open Graph image and meta description" — it knows what that means.

Step 4: Submit it to the gallery

This is the step people skip out of modesty, and they're wrong to. Submit your project to VibeStar — it takes two minutes:

• Paste your URL, add a title, description, and at least one screenshot.
• Tag the AI tools you built it with, and fill in the How it was made section — the prompts and process. This is the part other builders genuinely love reading; it turns your project from a demo into a lesson.
• Published projects show up in Explore where the community can star and discuss them. The best get picked up as Staff Picks and featured on the homepage.

Shipping in public does two things: it closes the loop — the project is done done, witnessed by strangers — and it quietly builds you a public portfolio of things you've made. A profile with three small finished projects is more convincing than any bio.

You've finished the path

That's the whole beginner arc: what this is → pick a tool → build → publish. From here, the Level Up guides are à la carte — grab git basics before your projects get big enough to lose, and the rest as you need them.

Now go hit submit. We'll see you in the gallery.