How to Share an AI-Built App With Only Your Team

The two failure modes

Everyone lands on one of these.

You put it somewhere public. Static hosting is free and takes a minute, so the app goes up on an open URL. It works. It is also indexable, linkable, and forwardable. The draft pricing, the placeholder copy, the client’s name in a heading — all of it is now on the open web.

This is not hypothetical. A developer two months into using Claude Code as their main tool wrote up the incident under the title “Claude Code deployed my client’s financial data to a public URL”, alongside other failures from the same period. The thread drew more than twenty replies, most of them variations on the same experience.

You do not put it anywhere. You record your screen instead, or you zip the folder, or you say “let me walk you through it on a call”. Feedback arrives slower and thinner, because nobody clicked anything. A screenshot cannot tell you that the form breaks on submit.

The gap between “it works on my machine” and “someone else has opened it” is where a lot of this work dies. Four separate r/vibecoding threads in the past year ask a version of the same question — how do you host your projects, where do you host your vibe coded projects, where do you host your deployed code, and how are other non-technical people handling this. Every one of them has drawn several times more replies than upvotes. Nobody upvotes a question they feel they should already know the answer to. They answer it.

Both come from the same missing piece: a URL that is live for a named group and closed to everyone else.

What “private” actually means, option by option

“Share it privately” covers four different mechanisms with different costs. Worth separating them before choosing.

The last two rows are where most tools sit, and they are also where most friction lives. The reviewer’s willingness to look at your work is inversely proportional to how many steps stand in front of it.

What this costs on Vercel

Vercel is the default answer for deployment, so it is worth being precise about what its preview protection requires. From Vercel’s own documentation (updated 11 August 2026):

“If you don’t have deployment protection enabled, anyone with the link can view your deployment”

So protection is something you turn on, not something you get. With it on:

“The collaborator does not need to have a Vercel account, but will need to create one if they wish to view a deployment that is protected, use the toolbar, or leave comments.”

Your reviewer creates a Vercel account to look at your prototype. For a colleague who already has one, that is nothing. For a client, a founder, or the person in marketing whose opinion you actually need, it is the step where the review does not happen.

There is also a plan limit worth knowing:

“Hobby users are limited to one collaborator at any one time.”

One. If four people need to see the build, you are on a paid plan or you are sharing an unprotected link.

None of this makes Vercel a poor product. It reflects what it was built for: teams with a repository, a pipeline, and accounts already provisioned. If that is not the shape of your situation, the shape of the tool will show.

How VibeHost handles it

Sharing with only your team is the default state rather than a setting. Every deployment is private when it is created, so the closed state costs you nothing to remember and opening it up is the deliberate act.

From there you pick how the reviewer gets in, and neither option puts them on your bill.

A share link is the shortest path. You generate one for that app and send it. Whoever holds it opens the app with no account, no sign-in, and nothing to install. You can revoke it, and a revoked link stops working on the next request rather than at the end of some session.

An access grant is the tighter path. You grant a named email address, or a team, viewer access to that one app; the reviewer signs in with that same address and the app loads. They do not join your workspace and they do not take a seat — the grant is scoped to the app, not to the organisation.

What does not happen is a reviewer reaching a private app just because they are signed in. Without a share link or a grant they get an access-request screen, not your prototype. That is the point of the default, and it is worth knowing before you send the URL and assume the rest works itself out.

Getting there takes one instruction. Point your agent at VibeHost and ask it to deploy — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, OpenCode, Antigravity, Copilot CLI and Hermes Agent are documented, as are ChatGPT and Claude Desktop over MCP, and Gemini Canvas, Google AI Studio, ChatGPT Canvas, Claude Artifacts and v0.dev through the Chrome extension. Upload to working link is typically three to eight seconds.

Two things to be straight about:

Password protection is on the Business plan, not the free one. The free plan gives you 100 apps, 5 GB of storage and 3 members, and its previews are access-gated rather than password-gated. If a shared password is what your situation calls for, that is $20 a month for the whole workspace.

Members are unlimited on Business, and that is per workspace rather than per person. That covers 20 custom domains and 500 GB, with no seat count to manage — which matters when the people reviewing change every week.

The platform runs inside GNTC Inc.’s ISO/IEC 27001 information security management system, with the control plane on Google Cloud and edge delivery on Cloudflare. The security page has the specifics on encryption, upload validation and logging.

Choosing between them

Pick by what your reviewer already has, not by what you already know.

• Reviewers are engineers on your team with platform accounts, and you have a repository — stay with your existing pipeline. Protection is a toggle and everyone can already sign in.
• Reviewers are clients, founders, designers, or anyone outside engineering — account-creation is the step that kills the review. Choose access-gating that runs on an account they already hold.
• Nothing is built yet and the agent is doing the work — the deciding factor is whether deploying costs you a context switch. If publishing means leaving the tool you are building in, you will publish less often and review later than you should.

Sharing with only your team should be the cheapest thing you do that day, not a task you schedule.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start

Deploy one thing you have already built and send the link to one colleague. Watch what they have to do before the app loads. That number — steps between link and app — is the one that decides whether reviews happen.