Why I Built YoAmigo

I spent five months rebuilding the same platform from scratch. Four different architectures. Dozens of prototypes. Early users whose sites I couldn't fix fast enough. And a slow, stubborn realization that almost everything I was building already existed somewhere else.

This is the story of how I built YoAmigo, what I got wrong, and why the thing I landed on looks nothing like what I started with.

It Started With a Belief

In November 2025, I started exploring how to build the best vibe coding platform. The idea was simple and ambitious: give people the power of actual code, not just drag-and-drop configurations.

Every website builder you've used, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, they all work the same way. You pick a template, you toggle settings, you drag blocks around. It's easy to get started, but you hit a ceiling fast. Want something custom? Too bad. Want logic that the builder didn't anticipate? You're stuck.

I wanted to blow that ceiling off. If an AI writes real code, then the user has the same possibilities as a professional developer. No limits. No "upgrade to enterprise to unlock this feature." Just... everything.

The problem is that more options create more confusion. Configuration-based builders are popular for a reason. They're constrained, and constraints make things easier. Giving someone unlimited power also gives them unlimited ways to get lost.

I knew this going in. I just underestimated how hard the balance would be.

The Architecture Odyssey

I started with the Lit framework. Web components, static HTML, deploy straight to a CDN. Fast, simple, no build complexity. It worked great until a user needed a contact form. There was no server. No API. Nowhere for that form submission to go. Static sites can't process data. I needed a backend.

So I moved to a React SPA with an API. Now users had interactivity and server logic. But I wanted to give people real database access. Not some limited shared database where everyone's data lives in my tables. I wanted each user to have their own database, their own schema, full control. That meant a custom backend.

That's when I went deep. Custom full-stack React. I explored Cloudflare Workers for edge compute. Supabase Edge Functions for serverless database access. Deno functions for lightweight server logic. I was stitching together a deployment platform from scratch. Build pipelines, routing, serverless functions, database provisioning, CDN configuration.

I was reinventing Vercel. From scratch. Poorly.

I had to get out of my own ego. I was so focused on building the infrastructure that I lost sight of why I was building it. The value of YoAmigo was never going to be another hosting platform. The world doesn't need another Vercel. It needs better tools for the people who use platforms like Vercel.

Around this time, I had my first early users. Reality hit hard. When something broke on their sites, it was taking me hours to fix things that should have taken 1 to 10 minutes. I was debugging my own infrastructure instead of helping them build. I was the bottleneck, and the bottleneck was a problem I created by insisting on building everything myself.

Using What Already Works

I swallowed my pride and looked at what was already out there.

Vercel has been shifting to a completely pay-for-use model. No fixed server costs. You pay for what you use. This made it genuinely affordable as the deployment layer for YoAmigo's users. And it handles everything I was trying to build: edge functions, serverless APIs, static hosting, automatic scaling, SSL, CDN. All of it. Battle-tested at massive scale.

For version control, GitHub. If something breaks on a user's app, I can go in, read the code, understand the problem, and push a fix. Standard tools. Standard workflows. No proprietary lock-in.

I don't need to worry about whether my deployment pipeline can handle traffic spikes at 2 AM. Vercel's can. I don't need to build a git hosting service. GitHub exists.

Now I can focus on the thing that actually matters: how people build. Not where their code runs. Not how it gets deployed. How they create it. That's where the real value is. That's the experience I want to design. A tool for the new builder. Not a dumbed-down drag-and-drop, but a tool that gives people the stability and capability of professional development without requiring years of experience to set up.

The Problem With Web-Based Vibe Coding

Here's where every other vibe coding platform makes the same mistake.

They run everything in the browser. Your code lives in a VM on some server. You edit through a web IDE. The AI agent runs on their infrastructure using their API keys, and they charge you a massive markup for it.

I got this working. It's kind of magical the first time you see it. But the more I used it, the more frustrated I got.

The tools inside these web VMs are limited. You can't easily use the best coding agents. You're stuck with whatever the platform gives you. And the AI costs are brutal. These platforms are calling the same APIs that Claude and ChatGPT use, but they're charging you 10x per token. You're paying a premium for a worse experience.

I kept asking myself: why am I building an agentic coding solution that's more expensive and less capable than Claude Code or Codex?

The differences between these custom agent frameworks and the tools from Anthropic and OpenAI are not substantial. Maybe one is a tiny bit better at some specific task. But Claude Code and Codex are built by companies that can subsidize their costs. You get the best value. And they're genuinely excellent agentic tools. Entire engineering teams use them daily.

So why would I build a worse version and charge more for it?

The Desktop Revelation

This question led me somewhere unexpected: your computer.

Think about it. Every vibe coding platform is trying to sell you a VM in the cloud. But you already have a powerful machine sitting right in front of you. Your laptop or desktop has more than enough power to run a full development environment. That's literally what professional developers do every day.

VMs on servers cost real money. The pricing is confusing and only makes sense at scale. They cause network latency issues. They're hard to debug when something goes wrong. You're SSH-ing into a remote machine to figure out why your local preview looks broken. It's a lot of hoops.

Now, I'll be honest. This would be easier if OpenAI and Anthropic let third-party developers authenticate against their users' existing subscriptions. OpenAI actually does allow device-specific subscription use, which is great, but the UX isn't as smooth as something like Google Sign-In. It's getting there, but it's not seamless yet.

So I leaned into the desktop. If the code is on your machine, everything gets simpler. No network issues. No VM costs. No debugging through three layers of abstraction. You use Claude Code or Codex directly, with your own subscription, at the best price available. And you get the full power of tools that billions of dollars of R&D have gone into building.

YoAmigo becomes the layer that makes all of this easy. Not a replacement for these tools. A companion.

The UX That Almost Didn't Survive

Once I stopped building infrastructure and started building the actual experience, the first thing I wanted was obvious: I should be able to click on text in the preview and change it.

That's it. You see your app. You see a headline that says "Welcome to My Site." You click on it. You type something else. Done. No hunting through code files. No finding the right component. No asking the AI to change a string. Just click and type. It's the most intuitive editing experience possible.

There's a reason most platforms don't do this. It's hard.

Edit hover effects overlap with the page's own hover effects. Buttons that should be clickable in the preview become edit targets instead. UI elements that are small on the actual page become nearly impossible to select in an editor. Text inside complex layouts breaks when you make it editable. The cursor jumps. Selections bleed across elements. Every component framework handles contentEditable differently.

I almost ripped inline editing out twice. Both times, it was causing glitches that made the whole experience feel broken. It would have been easier to just give people a sidebar form with text fields. That's what most tools do. It works fine. Nobody would have complained.

But I kept coming back to the same thing: if I'm building the best tool, inline editing has to work. It's the difference between editing your app and editing a form about your app. One feels direct. The other feels like paperwork.

So I'm making it work. It's still hard. But the UX matters more than my convenience as a developer.

What YoAmigo Actually Solves

If all I did was tell people to install Claude Code and figure it out, that wouldn't be a product. The reason most people don't build web apps isn't that they can't write code. It's that there are a dozen things around the code that are each individually painful enough to make you quit.

YoAmigo is opinionated about the hard stuff so you can focus on the product.

Authentication. User login with email, social providers, or passkeys. This should take minutes, not days. It's handled.

Database. Connecting to a database, defining your data models, running migrations. Handled.

Authorization. This is the one that keeps me up at night. Even professional developers routinely ship apps where one user can see another user's data. A query forgets to filter by the current user. An API endpoint skips a permission check. These bugs are subtle, hard to test for, and catastrophic. Working at a security-first startup, I learned how to deterministically ensure queries are done securely. YoAmigo wraps every database query in an authorization layer. You define your security rules in a config file, and the system enforces them automatically. You don't hope the AI wrote the right WHERE clause. You know it did.

Asset management. Images, audio, video — this is a massive part of the web that most vibe coding tools completely ignore. Changing a logo, cropping an image, clipping audio. I've been using BeFunky as my go-to graphic design and image manipulation tool for years now and love it. I want to bring that kind of thinking into YoAmigo. There are real gotchas here too: serverless platforms handle large uploads differently, audio has clicks and pops that need smoothing, image optimization affects both speed and cost. Assets need to be a first-class citizen, not a footnote.

Payments. Payments are tricky because of webhooks. When a user pays, Stripe sends your server a background notification. Your server has to verify it's actually from Stripe, then update your database. Mess up the verification and attackers can fake payments. Mess up the database update and users pay but get nothing. None of this should be your problem. YoAmigo handles Stripe integration, webhook verification, and database updates automatically. You think about what to sell.

Publishing. Getting from local to live is where web developers historically lose a lot of time. DNS, SSL, build pipelines, environment variables, CORS. YoAmigo handles this with opinions. One good way, made seamless. Eventually, I want to support self-management too — deploy to your own infrastructure if you want. But understand you take on more responsibility that way.

This setup can get you to 10,000+ monthly active users. That's not a toy. That's a real business. If you need to scale to a million, we can help. And when you outgrow that, you take your code, it's all standard Next.js, hire professional developers, and re-architect for the next stage. But when you're starting out, you don't need microservices and Kubernetes. You need one solid path to your first 10,000 users or 10,000 sales.

That's where YoAmigo lives.

Aligned Incentives

This is the part I care about most.

Most vibe coding platforms make money by upcharging you. They mark up AI tokens. They mark up hosting. They sell you credits that expire. Their business model depends on you using more, spending more, staying locked in.

That creates a misalignment. They want you to burn through credits. You want to build efficiently. Those goals conflict.

I want YoAmigo's incentives to align with yours. So here's how it works:

No hosting upcharge. I deploy at cost to you. Whatever Vercel charges, that's what you pay. I don't take a cut.

No credits. No "you've used 47 of your 50 monthly builds." Build as much as you want.

No AI middleman. I don't sell AI. I don't resell API tokens at a markup. I encourage you to have a ChatGPT or Claude account and use the best tools directly. They're better and cheaper than anything I could repackage.

You pay YoAmigo a subscription that helps us pay the bills. In return, we deliver the best tool that gives you the ability to build the best web app possible. Full alignment.

If our incentives are aligned, the relationship works. I help you build something great. You tell people about it. We grow together. I'm not trying to make you buy more credits. I can focus entirely on making the best platform.

Why Me, Why This

I've been building for the web for over 10 years. Web development is my expertise. It's what I'm best at. I've worked at startups, I've built production systems, I obsess over the details. The off-by-one pixels. The micro animations that make an interaction feel right. Layout shifts that break the flow. The stuff most people skip over but users feel.

I see a gap that my specific experience lets me fill. The vibe coding revolution is real, but the tools are either too expensive, too limited, or not built to help new builders succeed.

Musicians have Ableton Live. Filmmakers have DaVinci Resolve. Developers have IDEs. These are premium production tools that feel incredible to use and let people do their best work.

I want to build that for the new wave of web builders. Not a dumbed-down drag-and-drop. Not a web IDE running in a VM. A real desktop application with a premium feel that runs locally on your computer, handles the hard problems, and gets out of your way for everything else. The IDE for vibe coders.

That's YoAmigo. That's why I'm building it.

Want to build something real? YoAmigo is a local-first vibe coding platform for full-stack web apps. Use your own AI tools, no markup on hosting, aligned incentives.