How to show someone your AI-built app before you deploy it (2026)

You described the app in a sentence, the tool wrote it, and now it runs in the preview pane — the form submits, the chart animates, the dark-mode toggle works. It's real. The next thing that happens is almost always the same: someone who isn't sitting next to you needs to see it. A client, a co-founder, a friend whose taste you trust.

And that's the moment the tooling goes quiet. The build works; sharing it is suddenly a separate project.

The gap between "it works" and "it's deployed"

A vibe-coded app — built in Bolt, v0, Replit, Lovable, Claude, or any of the prompt-to-app tools — lives in an in-between state for a while. It's past "idea" and not yet "product." It runs in a preview, or on localhost:3000, or inside the chat that produced it. None of those are a thing you can send.

The instinct is to reach for one of the two endpoints: a screenshot (too little) or a full deploy (too much, too soon). The in-between needs its own shape.

What a vibe-coded app actually is, as a file

Most of these tools can export the build. For a self-contained front end, that's a single .html file with the CSS and JavaScript inlined, or a folder you can zip — an HTML entry plus its assets. Prompting the tool to ship a single self-contained file usually gets the cleaner export; inlining the CSS and JavaScript makes it portable enough to open anywhere.

Once it's a file or a bundle, the share problem becomes a hosting problem — and a small one.

The three ways people share it — and what each loses

• Screenshot or screen recording. Fast, but it flattens the one thing that made it worth showing: the interactivity. The reviewer can't click through the flow, and you end up narrating instead of letting the work speak.
• Full public deploy. The right move once the app is finished and meant to be found. For a mid-build review it's more than the moment needs — and it puts an unfinished, half-tested build on a public URL anyone can stumble onto or index.
• The chat link to the tool that built it. Drags the whole prompt history along, ties the reviewer to an account on that platform, and shows them the construction site instead of the room. (For sharing during iteration specifically, per-round private links are their own pattern.)

The in-between wants a fourth option: the live app, at a private URL, that opens in any browser and is seen only by the people you sent it to.

The walkthrough — export to private link

1. Export the build to a self-contained file or bundle. A single .html if the app is front-end only; a .zip (HTML + CSS + JS + assets) if it ships as multiple files — typical for Bolt and Codex-style exports.
2. Drop it at the private-link host. The file goes up, the URL comes back. JavaScript runs, CSS applies, CDN libraries (Tailwind, charting libraries) load the same as they did in the preview.
3. Decide who sees it. The URL is 32 random characters and hidden from search by default — already private. Add a password if the build is sensitive; set an expiry if it's a single review window.
4. Send the link. The reviewer opens it in a browser, on a phone or a laptop, with nothing to install and no account to create.

The whole thing is closer to "send a file" than "deploy an app" — which is the right weight for a build that isn't a product yet.

When you actually want the public deploy instead

Honest scope: a private link is for the self-contained build — the front end, the prototype, the static export. If the app has a live backend — a database it writes to, authentication, server-side API routes, anything beyond what runs in the visitor's browser — that's not a file, and it needs a real deploy. Bolt, v0, Lovable, and Replit all publish to a live URL; Vercel and Netlify host the full app with its server side intact. For a finished AI-built landing meant to be found, public hosting is the right shape.

The private link covers the step before that — and the cases that never need a backend at all.

What this isn't

miinideck doesn't run your server. It takes a self-contained HTML file or a ZIP bundle and gives back a private URL — it's not a build platform, a backend host, or a place to run database-backed apps. Those are deploy-platform jobs, and the deploy platforms do them well. The private link is for the moment in between: the build works, it isn't public yet, and one person needs to see it exactly as it runs.