It works on my laptop. Now what?
· The Launchpad crew · 3 min read
There's a particular moment we hear about constantly. You've been building with Claude for an afternoon. The app works. You can see it in your browser, you can click around, it does the thing. And then you try to show it to someone else, and you realise it only exists on your laptop.
Welcome to the gap. Here's what's on the other side of it, and how to cross it without learning a new profession.
What "live" actually needs
For an app to work at a link that other people can open, four things have to exist and keep existing:
- Somewhere for it to run that isn't your laptop, because your laptop closes.
- Somewhere for its information to live, so bookings or requests don't vanish.
- A web address, with the security certificate browsers expect.
- Someone to keep it running: updates, backups, the occasional restart.
None of this is hard for people who do it every week. All of it is a wall for everyone else, and the wall is made of unfamiliar words: hosting, provisioning, DNS, TLS, environment variables, deploy pipelines.
The usual options, honestly
Ask a developer friend. Works once. Now they own it.
Sign up for a cloud provider. You'll be looking at a console with four hundred services and a billing page that can surprise you. Claude can drive it, but now Claude has the keys to an account where mistakes cost money.
Use a "deploy from chat" preview. Fine for a demo, but previews expire, don't keep data, and aren't yours.
What it looks like with Launchpad
Launchpad's answer is to give Claude a private server that's already set up, and to make "put it live" a thing you say rather than a thing you do.
With the Launchpad connector installed in the Claude desktop app, you open your project in Claude Code and say:
Launch a Launchpad server and put this app live.
Claude asks Launchpad for a server. A few minutes later it exists, with everything an app needs already installed. Claude moves your app onto it, sets up the database, makes the app start automatically, connects it to a web address, and checks that it's working. If something's off, Claude reads the error and fixes it, the same way it fixed things while you were building.
Then it hands you a link. Same app, now online, on a server that's yours alone.
What happens after
- Changes work the way building did: describe the change, then say "update the live app". The link doesn't change.
- Data lives in a database on your server and is backed up automatically.
- Mistakes stay on your server. Ask Claude to fix them, restore a backup, or start fresh.
- Bills don't surprise you. It's one flat plan, and you can cancel any time.
If you're at that moment right now
Reserve a slot, install the connector, and say the sentence. The guide Taking your app live walks through it step by step, and a person at mission control is on hand for your first launch.