Your vibe-coded app is live. Now what?

Developers who use AI tools to rapidly build applications often end up with a live URL but lack true ownership of their code. Without the ability to move, debug, or explain the stack, the application remains a hosted prototype rather than a deployable product. To achieve full control, developers must integrate seven core AWS services, including S3 for hosting, Lambda for backend logic, and Cognito for authentication.

Your vibe-coded app is live. Now what? Getting to a live URL is the easy part now. The harder question is whether you actually own what you built. Can you move it? Can you debug it? Can you explain the stack to a client? Can you protect your API keys? If the answer is "No 🙂↔️" or "I'm not sure 🥹" → your AI app is still a hosted prototype. Here are the 7 things you need to deploy your vibe-coded app and own the whole stack on AWS: 1. Frontend host → S3 + CloudFront Your frontend needs to live somewhere. S3 stores your files. CloudFront serves them fast, globally and with caching built in. This is what hosting a static site on AWS means in practice: 2. Custom domain → Route 53 Already have a custom domain? Great. Route 53 is AWS's DNS service. It's how you point yourapp.com at your CloudFront distribution instead of some auto-generated URL: 3. Backend API → API Gateway + Lambda API Gateway is the front door to your backend. Lambda is the function that runs your backend code when a request comes in. Together they give you a serverless API with no server to manage: 4. Deployment framework → AWS SAM AWS SAM is how you deploy your backend in code. You describe your Lambda functions and API Gateway in a template and SAM handles the deployment: 5. Auth → Cognito Cognito manages your users: - sign up - sign in - tokens - password resets Your API Gateway can use Cognito to protect your backend routes automatically: 6. Login UI → Amplify UI Amplify has a pre-built login and signup UI that wire directly into Cognito. You drop <Authenticator / in your code, configure your Cognito user pool and the login flow works: 7. Database → DynamoDB DynamoDB is AWS's serverless NoSQL database. And yes, NoSQL is a hill I'll die on 🗣️ No connection strings. No idle charges. Scales automatically and integrates cleanly with Lambda: Full overview Click any AWS resource in the diagram below to highlight how it connects to the rest of the stack: Summary Seven AWS services. That's the whole map. You don't need to understand all of them on day one. But you do need to know they exist and what each does. My upcoming course Ship It walks you from vibe-coded AI agent to deployed AWS app, step by step: frontend, backend, auth, API, database and deployment. Join the waitlist: If you'd rather walk through your specific app: what it does, where it lives, what it needs next Grab a free 30-min call ↗ https://calendly.com/braine-ai/free-30-minute-ai-brainstorming-session I'll help you map it to the serverless AWS stack.