Where to Host an App You Built With AI in 2026: Lovable, Bolt, v0 and Replit

The app works. That is the part nobody quite prepares you for. You described what you wanted, an AI built it, you spent an afternoon nudging it into shape, and now there is a real thing on your screen that does a real job.

Then the questions start. It lives on somebody else’s subdomain. The builder wants a monthly subscription to keep it online. You want your own domain on it, and possibly you want to know what happens to the whole project if you stop paying. That is the moment most people go looking for hosting, and it is where the advice gets unhelpful fast, because almost everything written on this subject is published by a company that wants to be the answer.

This guide is not. We review hosting for a living and we have no platform to sell you. So here is what you actually built, what it will cost to keep it somewhere sensible, and the three honest paths out of the builder. The short version is below.

First, understand what you actually built

This is the single most useful thing to get straight, and it takes two minutes. Nearly every app that comes out of Lovable, Bolt, v0 or Replit is made of two separate pieces, and they do not move together.

The first piece is the frontend. This is the part you can see: the pages, buttons, forms and styling. In Lovable’s case the documentation is explicit that projects are “standard Vite + React projects built on open-source technologies”, and Bolt and v0 produce much the same shape of thing. A frontend is just files. It is small, it is cheap to host, and almost every free hosting tier in existence will serve it happily.

The second piece is the backend, which usually means a database plus login and file storage. Lovable uses PostgreSQL through Supabase for this, which also handles authentication, storage and edge functions. This is the part with your actual data in it, and it is not sitting in the files you download.

Here is why that matters more than anything else in this guide. When you move your app to a new host, you are moving the frontend only. Your database stays exactly where it is. Lovable’s own documentation puts it plainly: if your project uses the built-in backend, “it can stay there while you host the frontend anywhere”. So the mental model to carry around is that you are rehoming the shopfront, not the warehouse. The shopfront just needs to be told where the warehouse is, which is a matter of copying two or three environment variables into your new host.

People who do not know this try to move everything, panic when the app loads with no data, and conclude that hosting is broken. It is not. The connection details simply did not come with the files.

What each AI builder gives you, and what it charges

Before deciding where to go, it helps to know what you are leaving and whether you need to leave at all. The four common starting points differ more than you would expect.

Lovable

Lovable is the most generous of the group about letting you leave, which is genuinely to its credit. Every project can be synced continuously to GitHub or GitLab, two ways, so your code is never trapped. Its own hosting supports custom domains with automatic SSL, so if you are happy with the platform there is no urgent technical reason to move at all. The documentation even names Netlify, Cloudflare Pages and Vercel as sensible places to put the frontend if you would rather host it yourself, alongside the big cloud providers.

The reason people still move is cost and control. Once you are running several projects, paying per project on a builder plan stops making sense compared with one host that takes all of them.

Bolt

Bolt publishes to its own hosting by default, and also offers a direct Netlify integration: you authorise Netlify in your account settings, then pick it as the hosting provider for a project. You can alternatively export the code to GitHub or download it as a zip and deploy it yourself.

The detail worth knowing before you commit is that using a custom domain through the Netlify integration requires a paid Netlify plan, which means paying Bolt and Netlify for what feels like one job. If you export to GitHub and connect the repository to a host yourself, you skip that overlap entirely, and it takes about the same amount of time.

v0

v0 is Vercel’s builder, so it deploys to Vercel, and that path is about as frictionless as this gets. The thing to watch is not technical but contractual: Vercel’s free Hobby plan is for non-commercial use. If your app takes payments, serves a business or otherwise makes money, the fair-use terms expect you on a paid plan. Plenty of people miss this and only find out later, so if your project earns anything, budget for it or host the frontend somewhere with no such condition.

Replit

Replit is the one where hosting costs escalate quickly, because it sells deployment as a separate product from the editor. As of its price cut in August 2026, static deployments are free to host with data transfer charged at $0.05 per GB, and Autoscale costs a $2 monthly base fee plus usage, scaling to zero when nobody is using it.

The expensive tier is Reserved VM, which is what you need for an app that must stay awake all the time. That starts at $15 a month for a shared half-core machine with 2 GB of memory, and runs to $35 for a dedicated core with 4 GB. Those are per app. If you have three always-on projects, you are looking at $45 a month before anything else, which is where a single server that hosts all three starts to look very sensible indeed.

The three honest paths

Once you know whether your app is frontend-only or has a server component, the decision is genuinely simple. There are three destinations and the right one is usually obvious.

Path one: a free frontend host

This is where most AI-built apps belong, and it surprises people that it costs nothing. If your app is a React frontend that talks to Supabase, it is static files plus some API calls, and the free tiers from Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare will serve that on your own domain with automatic SSL, with no card required to start.

The differences between them are small but worth knowing. Cloudflare Pages is the most generous on bandwidth, serving static assets without metering it, which makes it the safest choice if your app might get a spike of attention. Netlify moved its free tier to a monthly credit allowance, which is fine for a modest project but can pause your site if you burn through it. Vercel is the smoothest experience of the three, particularly for anything Next.js shaped, with the non-commercial condition noted above.

For a personal project, a portfolio piece, an internal tool or a launch you are testing, this path is correct and you should not overthink it. Point the host at your GitHub repository, add your Supabase environment variables, attach your domain, and you are done. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes and costs nothing per month.

Path two: an app platform

If your app has a piece that needs to keep running, this is your path. That means an Express or Fastify server, websockets for anything live, background jobs, a queue, scheduled tasks, or an API you wrote yourself rather than one Supabase generated for you. A static host cannot run those, and no amount of configuration will change that.

App platforms take a GitHub repository and run it as a live process, handling the servers for you. Railway is the one we recommend most often for people coming out of an AI builder, because the deploy flow is the least intimidating in the category: connect the repository, and it builds and ships in under a minute, with managed Postgres, Redis and MySQL a click away if you decide to move off Supabase later. New accounts also start with credit rather than a bare trial, which is enough to run something real while you decide whether it fits. We go through the platform properly, costs and warts included, in our Railway review.

Render is the main alternative and deserves a mention, because its free tier will genuinely run a Node server without a credit card, at the cost of the service sleeping after fifteen minutes of inactivity and taking around a minute to wake. That is fine for a demo and irritating for real users. We compare the whole field, including the platforms whose free tiers cannot run a server at all, in our guide to the best free Node.js hosting.

Path three: your own server

The moment this becomes the obvious answer is when you have more than one app. Builder hosting and app platforms both charge per project, so three always-on apps on Replit’s Reserved VM tier is $45 a month, and a few services on a usage-billed platform adds up in a similar way. One small virtual server hosts all of them for a single flat price, and the price does not move when your traffic does.

The numbers are not close. A Hostinger VPS runs about $6.49 a month for a single core with 4 GB of memory on a long term, and $8.99 for two cores and 8 GB, which is more memory than most people’s first three projects will use combined. You get root access, so you run whatever you like: Node apps under a process manager, a database on the same box, cron jobs, several sites behind one Nginx configuration.

The honest counterweight is that you own it. Operating system updates, the firewall, SSL renewal and uptime are yours now, and if you have never touched a Linux server that is a real learning curve rather than a small one. It is narrower than it used to be, because Hostinger includes an AI assistant in the server terminal that will run commands, read logs and explain what broke in plain English, which takes a lot of the fear out of the first week. But it is still a different kind of commitment from clicking deploy, and you should choose it deliberately rather than because it is cheapest on paper.

How to actually move it

The mechanics are the same wherever you are going, and there are only five steps. None of them require you to write code.

First, get the code into GitHub. In Lovable this is Git sync from the project menu; in Bolt it is the export option, either straight to a repository or as a zip you upload yourself. This step alone is worth doing today even if you never move, because it means your work exists somewhere you control.

Second, connect your new host to that repository. Every platform mentioned here does this from a dashboard: sign in with GitHub, pick the repo, accept the detected build settings. The first deploy usually takes under two minutes.

Third, and this is the step people skip, copy your environment variables across. These are the Supabase project URL and the anon key, plus any API keys your app uses. They live in the builder’s settings and need to be pasted into your new host’s environment settings. If your app deploys successfully but loads with no data and a login that does nothing, this is always why.

Fourth, point your domain at the new host. You add the domain in the host’s dashboard, it gives you a DNS record, and you add that record at your registrar. SSL is issued automatically within a few minutes on every host named in this guide.

Fifth, leave the old deployment running for a day or two. Check the new one on a phone, on a different network, logged out. Then turn the old one off and cancel the subscription, in that order.

The mistakes that cost people money

Four things account for nearly every bad outcome we see, and all four are avoidable.

Paying twice for the same job is the most common. If you are on a builder plan for hosting and also paying a host for a custom domain, one of those is redundant. Decide which side you want to keep and cancel the other.

Buying an always-on plan for an app nobody visits yet is the second. Scale-to-zero options exist precisely for this: Replit’s Autoscale and the free tiers on app platforms cost nothing while idle. Move to always-on when you have users who notice the delay, not before.

Assuming free means free forever is third. Vercel’s Hobby plan is for non-commercial projects, Netlify’s free credits can pause a site mid-month, and free app-platform tiers sleep. None of that is dishonest, it is just worth reading before you build a business on it.

And migrating the database when you did not need to is fourth. Your Supabase project can stay where it is indefinitely. Moving it is a real piece of work with real risk, and for most people there is no reason to do it at all.

Frequently asked questions

Do I own the code an AI builder wrote for me?

With the mainstream builders, yes, and you should verify it by exporting rather than trusting a marketing page. Lovable syncs projects to GitHub or GitLab continuously and produces standard Vite and React code, and Bolt lets you push to a repository or download a zip. The output is ordinary code using ordinary open-source libraries, which is exactly why it runs anywhere. Getting it into your own repository is the single best insurance policy against any future pricing or policy change.

Can I host a Lovable app for free on my own domain?

Yes, if it is a frontend talking to Supabase, which most Lovable apps are. Sync the project to GitHub, connect the repository to Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages, add your Supabase environment variables, then attach your domain and add the DNS record they give you. The hosting costs nothing on those free tiers, your Supabase project keeps running where it already is, and you only pay for the domain itself.

What happens to my database when I move the frontend?

Nothing, and that is the point. The database lives in Supabase, not in the files you export, so moving the frontend does not touch it. Your new host needs the Supabase URL and key in its environment settings so the app knows where to look, and that is the whole connection. If the app loads but shows no data, those variables are missing or misspelt.

Is Replit hosting expensive compared with the alternatives?

For an always-on app, yes, mainly because it is priced per app. Reserved VM starts at $15 a month for a shared half-core machine with 2 GB of memory, so three always-on projects is $45 a month. A single VPS at around $9 a month will run all three with memory to spare. Replit’s static and Autoscale tiers are much cheaper and genuinely competitive for idle or bursty projects, so the answer depends entirely on whether your app has to stay awake.

Do I need to know how to code to move my app?

No, but you do need to be comfortable following instructions carefully. The five steps above are dashboard work: authorise GitHub, pick a repository, paste some environment variables, add a DNS record. Nothing requires you to edit code. A VPS is the exception, because that genuinely does mean using a terminal, which is why we suggest it only when you have several apps or a specific reason to want your own machine.

Should I put an AI-built app on shared web hosting?

Usually not. Traditional shared hosting is built for PHP and WordPress, and most AI builders produce JavaScript apps that either need a static host or a Node runtime. A static frontend can sit on shared hosting at a push, but you gain nothing over a free host built for the job. If you specifically want a WordPress site alongside your app, that is a different conversation and our best web hosting rankings cover it.

The bottom line

The honest answer to where you should host an app you built with AI is that it depends on one question, and it is not a technical one: does anything in your app need to keep running when nobody is looking at it? If the answer is no, and for most of these apps it is, put the frontend on a free host, keep your database where it is, attach your domain and spend nothing. If the answer is yes, an app platform is worth the five or ten pounds a month it will cost you. And once you are running several projects, one small server is cheaper than all of it and teaches you something useful along the way.

What you should not do is stay on builder hosting by accident, paying per project for something you never chose, because moving felt complicated. It is a fifteen minute job, the code is already yours, and the database does not move. Export it to GitHub today even if you do nothing else, and the decision stops being urgent.