DEV Community: Alexander Björneheim

I built an app with ChatGPT or Claude. How do I put it online, with a database and logins?

Alexander Björneheim — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 07:22:02 +0000

Connect the AI you built the app with to LIIVO, then tell it to "Deploy to LIIVO". Your AI puts the app online with its own link, sets up the database and user logins the app needs, and you never open a terminal. It is free to try, and 15 EUR a month to keep an app online all the time.

The rest of this post walks through it step by step, including what it costs and what can trip you up.

Why does my app only work on my computer?

When ChatGPT or Claude builds an app, it usually runs inside the chat preview or on your own computer. It looks finished, but nobody else can open it. To share it, the app needs a home on the internet: a link people can visit, a place to keep its data, and a way for people to sign in. That home is what people mean by "hosting".

LIIVO is that home, and it is built for people who don't write code. You keep using the AI you already have. LIIVO puts what it builds online and keeps it running.

What do I need before I start?

You need three things, and none of them is a LIIVO sign-up form.

A computer. The setup happens in the Claude or ChatGPT desktop app. Once your app is live, anyone can use it on a phone.
A ChatGPT or Claude account. A paid AI plan works best. Free AI plans have tighter usage limits, and on Claude's free plan you can build in the regular chat but not in Claude's Code mode.
An idea, or the app your AI already made. A booking page, a tracker for the family chores, a small shop. Whatever you were going to describe anyway.

You don't create a LIIVO account first. When you connect your AI, it sends you to a sign-in screen. You sign in with Google, Apple or email, and that sign-in is your LIIVO account.

How do I connect ChatGPT or Claude to LIIVO?

Your AI talks to LIIVO through one address: https://my.liivo.ai/mcp. You paste it into your AI's settings once.

In Claude (desktop app): open Connectors from the chat box, choose to add a custom connector, name it LIIVO and paste the address. Claude opens your browser so you can sign in, then sends you back to the chat.

In ChatGPT (desktop app): open the ChatGPT menu and choose Settings. Under Integrations, click Plugins, open the MCPs tab, click Add and then Add MCP server. Set the name to LIIVO, the type to Streamable HTTP and the URL to https://my.liivo.ai/mcp, leave the token fields empty and click Save. Then start a new chat so the connection is picked up.

If you get stuck, LIIVO's connect page shows each step with pictures.

How do I actually put my app online?

Tell your AI what you want, the way you would tell a friend, and end with "Deploy to LIIVO". For example:

Make a simple booking page for my yoga class. People pick a time, enter their name and email, and get a confirmation. I want to see all bookings in a list. Deploy to LIIVO.

Your AI writes the app and sends it to LIIVO, and LIIVO puts it online. A few minutes later you get a link you can open, send to people, or put on your Instagram.

If the app already exists in a chat, say "Put the app we just made on LIIVO so other people can use it." If something goes wrong, tell your AI what you see. It can read what happened and try again. And if your app was built somewhere else and you have its code, open that code in Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to deploy the app to LIIVO.

Can my app have a database and user logins?

Yes. LIIVO has the pieces most real apps need, ready for your AI to wire up: databases, logins, file storage, email, visitor stats and video. You don't pick them from a menu. You describe what the app should do, and your AI chooses.

Let people create an account and log in, and save each person's bookings so they can see them next time. Deploy to LIIVO.

Each app gets its own space. Its logins, its data and its keys are not shared with any other app on LIIVO, so if something breaks somewhere else, your app keeps running.

What does it cost, including the AI?

There are two separate bills, and it helps to see both.

The first is your AI plan. That stays with ChatGPT or Claude, and LIIVO charges nothing for the AI. There is no fee per prompt and no second bill for the same thing.

The second is LIIVO, for keeping your app online.

	Free	Creator
Price	0 EUR	15 EUR a month, excl. VAT
Card needed	No	Yes, billed from day one
Tokens	100, once	40 every day
Good for	Trying it and building a first app	Keeping an app online around the clock

Tokens are how LIIVO counts the time your app's pieces are running. Each running piece uses some tokens every day, typically between 10 and 100, so the 100 free tokens last days rather than months. They are a one-time start, not a monthly allowance. On the free plan, an app that runs out is paused, not deleted.

Creator is 15 EUR a month with 40 tokens a day, and you can cancel with one click; your plan stays active to the end of the period you paid for. There is no free trial of Creator. If you want your app on your own web address, like a name you bought, that needs the Professional plan at 69 EUR a month. Most people start with the link LIIVO gives them.

What happens if I want to leave later?

You keep your app. You can export the app and its data whenever you want and move it somewhere else, with no export fee. Every piece LIIVO runs is open code that anyone can run, which is why the move is possible.

Your app and the data it stores run in Sweden, in Stockholm, on Swedish-owned servers.

Is my app ready for real people?

Before you send the link to everyone, ask your AI to check it with you. Can a stranger sign up without your help? What happens if someone types something odd into a form? Does it work on a phone? LIIVO has a short list of prompts for this, Is your app ready for real users, and you can paste them straight into your chat.

Where do I start?

Open liivo.ai/connect on your computer, connect the AI you already use, and ask it for the smallest version of your idea. When it says the app is live, open the link on your phone. That is the moment it stops being a chat and becomes something people can use.

Plans and prices checked on 6 November 2026 on liivo.ai.

Which MCP servers can actually deploy infrastructure, not just read it? Five compared

Alexander Björneheim — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 07:21:36 +0000

If you want an AI agent to deploy and run infrastructure through MCP, five hosted MCP servers can do real write work today: Vercel, Render, Railway, Netlify and Eyevinn Open Source Cloud (OSC). They differ in what the agent can create, whether it can tear things down again, and what is actually running underneath when it does.

Every row below comes from each platform's own MCP documentation, read on 6 November 2026. Tool lists change month to month, so treat the table as a dated snapshot.

What is the difference between an MCP server that reads and one that deploys?

A read-only server lets your agent look: list projects, fetch logs, search documentation. Most cloud MCP servers started there.

A deploying server lets the agent change things. It can create a database, ship your code to a public URL, set environment variables, restart a service and delete what it made. That needs more trust, so check which write actions a server exposes before you connect it to an agent that acts with your credentials.

Which hosting platforms have an MCP server that can deploy?

Platform	Remote endpoint	What the agent can create or change	Tear down from chat?
Vercel	`https://mcp.vercel.com` (OAuth)	Deploy code to a new or existing project (`deploy_to_vercel`, announced July 2026). Tool categories for projects, environment variables, domains and storage.	Not stated on the pages we read
Render	`https://mcp.render.com/mcp` (OAuth or API key)	Web services, static sites, cron jobs, Render Postgres and Key Value instances. Trigger deploys, update environment variables.	No. Render's docs send other changes and deletions to the Dashboard or REST API
Railway	`https://mcp.railway.com` (OAuth, or through the Railway CLI)	Create projects, redeploy, accept staged changes. The local server (`railway mcp local`) adds services, variables, domains and volumes.	Yes, on the local server, with a preview and an explicit confirm
Netlify	`https://mcp.netlify.com/mcp`	Create, manage and deploy projects. Environment variables and secrets, forms, extensions.	Not stated in the README
OSC	`https://mcp.osaas.io/mcp` (OAuth, or a personal access token)	Any of the 198 open-source services in the catalog, databases (PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Valkey, CouchDB, ClickHouse), your own app from a GitHub repository, backups, config changes, restarts.	Yes, behind a confirmation step

How should I read that table?

Vercel, Netlify and Render are at their best when what you deploy is a web app or a frontend with a managed database beside it. That is what those platforms are built around, and their MCP servers expose it well. Vercel's server added code deploys this summer, so older articles that call it read-only are out of date.

Render is explicit about its limits. Its MCP server does not support every configuration option at creation, and it leaves scaling changes and deletions to the dashboard and API. That is a defensible safety choice, and it is better to know it up front than to discover it mid-task.

Railway splits its tools in two. The hosted server is the default and the narrower one. The local server, run through the CLI, can create and remove services, volumes and domains, and Railway marks destructive actions so that clients ask before acting.

What does the OSC MCP server do that the others do not?

Two things, and both come from what OSC is rather than from the MCP layer.

The first is the catalog. OSC runs managed open-source services, and the MCP server can create any of them. When we checked today there were 198 published, from PostgreSQL and MinIO object storage to Keycloak for user logins and Uptime Kuma for monitoring, plus a long tail of media tools. Your agent is not limited to a web app and a database. If the project needs full-text search, a message queue or a video transcoder, it is the same create-service-instance call.

The second is what runs underneath. Every catalog service runs the unmodified upstream open-source container. A PostgreSQL instance on OSC speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol, MinIO speaks S3 and Keycloak speaks OIDC, with no proprietary OSC API between your app and the service. If you leave, you run the same image on another cloud or your own servers and point your app at it. We wrote up that exit as a script in The Exit Test. This matters more when an agent makes the choices, because nobody stopped to read the exit terms.

The services your agent creates on OSC run in Stockholm, on Swedish-owned infrastructure.

Where OSC is the wrong pick: if your project is mostly a frontend and you want the preview-deploy-per-pull-request workflow, the platforms built around that workflow will fit better.

How do I connect the OSC MCP server to Claude Code?

You need an OSC account. The free Basic plan is enough to try it and asks for no card. Then run one command:

claude mcp add --transport http osc https://mcp.osaas.io/mcp

Start Claude Code and type /mcp. A browser window opens, you sign in, pick the workspace the tools should act on and approve. The server implements OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, so there is no key to paste. Claude Desktop, Codex and ChatGPT use the same browser sign-in.

How do I connect it to Cursor?

Create a personal access token in the OSC console under Settings, API, and add this to .cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "osc": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.osaas.io/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <personal-access-token>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Keep that file out of git, since the token acts as you.

What can an agent actually do once it is connected?

Three prompts that work, and the tools the agent picks for them:

Create a Postgres database called appdb and give me the internal connection string.

This is create-database with type: postgres. Credentials are generated for you, and the database is internal-only by default, so apps in the same workspace reach it over internal DNS without exposing it to the internet.

Deploy github.com/me/my-api as an app and connect it to appdb.

create-my-app builds the repository (Node.js, Python, Go, .NET, PHP or WebAssembly) and gives it a stable HTTPS URL, and wait-for-app-ready reports when it is live. The app has to listen on port 8080.

Back up appdb, then show me everything I have running.

That is create-backup and list-my-services. The agent sees your own workspace, not a generic catalog, so it can manage what already exists.

Deleting is deliberately slower. delete-service-instance first returns a confirmation token and acts only on a second, confirmed call, so an agent that mistakes "stop" for "delete" does not remove a database on the first try.

Can I use my existing Claude subscription instead of buying platform credits?

Yes. The MCP server is a connector, so the AI runs on whatever Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor plan you already pay for. OSC tokens pay for running services, not for prompts, and you are never billed per prompt or for an AI mistake.

What does OSC cost?

Basic is free, with 100 tokens granted once and no card. Personal is 15 EUR a month excluding VAT and adds 40 tokens a day. A single running service typically uses 10 to 100 tokens a day, so size the plan against what you keep running rather than what you try once. Paid plans bill from day one, there is no trial on any plan, and you can cancel any time. Custom domains start at the Professional plan.

Which one should I pick?

Pick by the job, not by the protocol. If the agent's job is to ship a frontend, use the platform you would have picked without MCP. If the job is to assemble a backend out of open-source pieces and keep the option to take every one of them with you, try OSC: create a free account, run the one command above and ask your agent for a database.

Setup for VS Code, Windsurf, Codex and ChatGPT is on the OSC MCP page. A longer walkthrough: The MCP server that provisions a full backend your AI agent can deploy, and you can walk away.

If a platform's tools have changed since 6 November 2026, tell us in the comments and we will update the table.