I Built a Live AI Web App With a Working Paywall in One Weekend — Zero Coding Experience. Here's What Broke.

#webdev #ai #beginners #tutorial

My only prior technical experience was opening game files in Notepad++. Last weekend I built and deployed a working AI-powered web tool — complete with a paywall, access codes, PDF download, and a live URL. I wrote zero code. Claude wrote all of it.

What I actually did was describe, test, and report back when things broke. Turns out that's most of the job.

Here's what stopped me cold and how each one got fixed:

The Netlify timeout — Claude takes 15-25 seconds to respond. Netlify's free ti

er kills functions after 10 seconds. Every request timed out. The fix was changing the architecture entirely: call the API directly from the browser instead of through a server function. Not the "correct" way. The way that works.
The silent Formspree bug — The feedback form showed a success message every time. No emails ever arrived. One inverted condition in the JavaScript. The UI lied. The lesson: test that outputs actually arrive somewhere, not just that the interface says they did.
The paywall anyone could bypass — First version used ?paid=1 in the URL. Anyone could just type it. Replaced with an access code system — customer pays, receives a code, enters it to unlock. Obvious in hindsight.
The PDF that opened a blank window — Modern JavaScript syntax in one section conflicting with older syntax elsewhere. Entire script block failed silently. Rewrote the function using only older syntax. Ugly but it works everywhere.
The JSON that got cut off mid-word — Claude's responses were hitting the max_tokens limit for complex inputs. The JSON was being truncated mid-sentence. Parser crashed. Fix: one number change. Hours to find, seconds to fix.
The payment processor rejection — After building the full integration, Lemon Squeezy rejected the store. Personalised AI outputs are classified as a "service" not a digital product. They won't act as Merchant of Record for services. Nobody tells you this until after you apply.

The whole thing took about 20 hours. I documented every obstacle, what I tried first, and what actually worked — including the business side (VAT handling, API key security trade-offs, the access code paywall architecture).

I turned it into a guide for anyone else trying to build their first AI tool without a coding background. Link in the comments if anyone wants it.

Happy to answer questions about any of the obstacles — some of them were genuinely non-obvious.