Why I'm Telling Replit, Lovable, and Bolt Users This
If you're vibe coding with Replit, Lovable, or Bolt, you're going to love this video because I'm going to show you a new platform that has huge advantages over using these other applications for vibe coding. And they're hidden, they're not easy to see. But once I show them to you, you won't be able to unsee them. So let's talk about the context here. Now, vibe coding is exploding, but the stack underneath is what almost all people who are coding with these AI apps don't think about. And this is sneaky because in the beginning, it's easy to use Replit, Lovable, or Bolt to just create an application, create a little website, and then you keep paying indefinitely on it, thinking, that's awesome, look how easy this was.
But for the long term, there's a lot of hidden problems. So we're going to go into this.
The Hidden Problem With Building on the Old Web
The hidden problem is that most AI app builders still deploy on the old web. This is rented infrastructure, central points of failure, costs that run forever, and these lack security. Especially if your application gets popular and can very easily crash. If you're just playing around and want to do a little website to test something out, if you're just having fun, then Replit, Lovable, and Bolt are just fine. However, if you want to build a serious business, if you want to actually make money, which a lot of us that are out here building stuff online, making full time incomes, like, I want to build stuff for money, not stuff to just play around and have fun.
If that sounds like you, then Caffeine AI is something to learn about. Because if you're building with these vibe coding apps, there's serious problems with the data ownership, the security, and the monetization. Where Caffeine AI is different, it's because the entire infrastructure behind the application is different. It's built on Internet Computer Protocol, which is a blockchain that puts the entire tech stack fully on chain. So if you've heard of Bitcoin, imagine Bitcoin, except you can actually put the whole website and all the data and everything on a blockchain. Fully on the blockchain, which is absolutely incredible. So let's look at what the big difference is so you can understand what I'm saying.
I unpack this Bitcoin comparison in much more detail in Bitcoin Is a $1.6 Trillion Spreadsheet. ICP Is the World Computer. if you want to understand why putting the whole stack on chain is such a leap.
The bottleneck here is that the old stack, what most internet is built on today, gives you fast iteration, cloud databases, managed sign in hosting, et cetera. It feels really easy to get started with, but the problem is as you continue using it, and if you want to scale it, it gets more expensive and it's not secure. And then trying to monetize it outside of selling it to a VC is difficult. What these, if you haven't thought about this before, there's some really important things to think about. Because if you're building on these AI app builders, there's a platform in the middle. Now, most of the time you wouldn't think this is a problem.
You're just building your business, your website, and you just take for granted that there's some middle company that could censor you, that could keep raising your hosting bill, that could be creating in a way that's insecure and allows your app to easily get hacked. And then you have to keep updating this all the time too. So if you want a real business, you want infrastructure that's durable, audible, and auditable, and harder to tamper with. You want your cost to tie more directly to the actual usage. You want an easier path to build your app to have a functional product to a community owned network. Bolt, Replit, and Lovable can absolutely help you get something live.
But where they're weak is the trust and the ownership model after launch. And that's the problem. That's the trap. These apps essentially trap you into their infrastructure. And most people don't know there's an alternative, which is why I'm doing this video.
How On-Chain Hosting Changes the Business Model
So Caffeine changes the entire business model here with on chain hosting. Because with these apps like that, I've said their name several times, you have to pay a fixed cost. And the more you want to use them, you may have to start paying a lot of money to use them, regardless of how much actual traffic you get to your website. ICP is different because everything is fully on chain built in canister smart contracts. That means these are guaranteed to run. Their state is on chain, audible, and cryptographically verifiable. That means you don't have to have firewalls or security teams. I've seen people talking about how easy these vibe coding websites are to hack.
Hackers out there making fun of people's vibe coding because they can just go in and destroy their website very easily. That's a weak foundation that then leads to fear and anxiety. And spending more and more money and feeling like you don't have something really valuable or just giving up all the way. Plus, if you have a lot of usage, you need usage based economics, especially if you have variable usage. Because what if you build your website up? And if I'm hosting that on one of these AI apps that are built on centralized infrastructure, then I have to pay all the time, even if nobody goes to my website.
Why I Only Pay for Actual Traffic
What I love on ICP, I've had my website on ICP and I'm going to do a demo how I rebuild it with Caffeine AI instead of how I had it on ICP before. And then I only pay for actual traffic to my website. This is awesome for entrepreneurs and startups because if nobody's going to your website, your hosting bill is near zero. And then if you get a whole bunch of people and you go viral, you have a huge traffic spike. You can be ready for that with ICP on Caffeine AI. Whereas in my experience, when you're using centralized hosting that's based on very fixed limits, right when you get all that traffic and you go viral and you've been trying so hard to make this happen, your website will crash.
I've had it happen multiple times. And that's why I love ICP as a hosting stack. If your traffic spikes, you just pay more for all the traffic. And as soon as the traffic spike stops, your hosting costs are right back to where they were. It's instantaneously scalable and massively scalable. The viral upside is huge. Now, entrepreneurs should care because you can launch just as fast on Caffeine AI as you can on some of these other platforms, but from the very beginning you can keep control of the logic and the costs. And this means for tiny experimentation, it could end up being much cheaper. How silly would it feel to put all this time into vibe coding and building this application up that you are so proud of?
I go deeper on the whole ICP story across my my ICP Crypto playlist if you want the bigger picture behind why I keep building here.
And then you're sharing that you don't care about the digital world and you're glad that and you're trying to get traffic to, and then it gets hacked. Because when you get popular, you'll get hacked if there's a way in that is where people will target you. Or if you start making a profit, you'll get hacked, or your website will crash, or your cost will suddenly go up. So it's not that nothing can ever go wrong, it's that ICP, it gives you a much more sovereign, tamper resistant, and on chain runtime with usage based resource billing. Thus, this is the best model that I see for vibe coding in a way that's sustainable into the long term.
The Monetization Feature I Saved for Last
This, and the feature I've saved that I should have teased more before, is the monetization.
Turning Your App Into a DAO
The hidden killer feature with ICP is that your app can easily transition into a DAO because it's built already into a blockchain infrastructure. Most AI app builders help you create software, but how are you going to monetize that? Well, you're gonna have to do payments through Stripe and set up a Stripe account or PayPal account, and then that infrastructure, introduce another third party, and then if you want to sell that, how are you going to sell that to somebody? You're gonna sell them your account, a VC's gonna try and buy you out. The monetization is limited and difficult, and will definitely require you doing things like verifying your identity, having payment fees, and all that can be avoided on ICP because it's directly built on chain, and you are able to turn this into an SNS or a DAO project, which is ICP, and you can do that.
It's ideal for scaling. You can transition once your application gets popular and people start using it. You've got everything you need already in place to turn it into a DAO. Imagine setting up an app on Caffeine AI that then you ended up getting thousands and thousands of users for, and then you could just go in the app and post directly on your site and say, hey, everyone, I want to turn this over to the community. We're going to launch a coin for this. The coin can be.. It can be built into the exact same infrastructure, and everything is already set up in ICP to support you with that, and then you could launch a coin, potentially raise thousands, if not millions of dollars if your application is popular directly from the community, and then it can all be controlled with a DAO.
You also have all different kinds of micro monetization models possible with this, and you could avoid even setting up payment applications if you wanted to. Now, I could easily still have people book appointments and use the app, but I don't want to do that. I could use existing payment solutions with Caffeine AI by linking to other platforms if I wanted to, the same as you have to in existing AI builders, but I also could do all kinds of micro transactions. You could build apps where you could do giveaways. We already see apps like this on ICP, like OpenChat, where you can just do a giveaway to 1 000 people and give 1 000 people a really small amount of a coin, which it can be ICP, Bitcoin, all stable coins.
There's lots of different things you can use, but this means there's.. There's deep, deep features, and they're going to release a more advanced version of Caffeine AI and keep evolving it, which means there's so many more things you can do to interact with the community, monetize, and to expand your possibilities. Plus, you're not excluded from.. You could still sell this to a VC. If anything, this would be more attractive to sell to a VC because it's much more sustainable for the long term infrastructure. Now, most people don't know this yet because they don't know about internet computer, and they've just heard about AI app builders through marketing, and user interface convenience.
Most people aren't asking the questions. These are so new that a lot of the problems are not very obvious yet. Most people that have been building on these haven't been building on them long enough to run into a bunch of problems, but you can go see people's experiences where they built things with vibe coding and got them hacked, or had scaling costs with them, or it got popular, and they had to pay a bunch of extra money to actually keep using it. And then once you scale up, it can be difficult, to cut that cost down. So this is just so new that people don't know about it yet, which is why I'm here sharing this with you. If you want to learn how to build on this with someone who is figuring it out right alongside you, you can book a private call with me and build it with me on our call.
Why AI Agents Need ICP's Trust Guarantees
Finally, if you are excited about AI agents and you want an application that's able to be there and be ready for AI agents, AI agents need stronger trust guarantees than normal applications. If you're building your apps with the existing vibe coding platforms, then you have, the credentials are scattered all over the place, the backend changes could break your agent from functioning, there's security risks, the code updates can mess things up, and it's harder to prove, if not impossible, to prove what actually executed and what data changed. Thus, if you want to be able to incorporate AI agents in your application, you need ICP's functionality. Because if you can guarantee through smart contracts that the code will execute successfully, then you can plug an AI agent into your application and feed it data back and forth, with other programs.
And as more people are building on Caffeine AI, people are going to continue to build things in the marketplace that you can just copy off their applications yourself. Thus, ICP with the canister software on chain and everything governed by the protocol execution, you've got a much stronger integrity guarantee and a cleaner base for agents doing important tasks like handling money, identity, or high value actions. Thus, if you're on an ICP builder, you can, because it's on blockchain, if you want to pull in Bitcoin and Ethereum and a lot of other cryptos, you can also do that as well. So you can build things on here that you just couldn't build anywhere else.
For example, you could build something that swaps different cryptos for each other automatically, whether it's your own wallet or a wallet for other people. And it's done in an environment that's trustworthy because it's fully on chain and secured with cryptography, which to me means Caffeine AI is the number one, one vibe coding app that I would try today and that I am the only vibe coding app I have any interest in using. I am taking my first leap into vibe coding myself and I've never even used any of the other apps because I looked at all these risks and problems up front and I said that there's no way that I want to build my app on an old cloud stack with all these issues I just described.
And then with Caffeine AI, I'm like, yes, this is where I'm building my website so that I can have, have my website function however I want to in a trustworthy environment and I don't have to keep paying hosting costs unless I get actual traffic to my website. If you want personal feedback on which stack actually fits the app you're trying to build, you can set up a call with me and we'll talk through your specific project on our call.
What Hosting Actually Costs Me on ICP
In the last version of my website that I had on ICP, the entire cost to host a website for more than a year with tens of thousands of visitors was less than $10 in ICP. This infrastructure is very cheap to use if you make fairly basic websites and you can advance it. Now, if you do heavy computation directly on the chain in your website, that could cost more to pay but most of you are not going to be using the computation to that degree. And in most cases, you'll find from what I see that ICP is much cheaper to host basic websites and mid level websites and gives you the chance to build things you couldn't build anywhere else.
For more on why I pair this hosting approach with my coding workflow, see ICP and Claude Code Is the Best Web Hosting Setup Online.
So this is something that you should know about today which is why I created it. Now, if you're new here, I'm Jerry Banfield. I'm a full time YouTuber. This is on my Jerry Banfield ICP channel and I do videos about ICP so you can watch them. Watch those to learn what's different if you're new here. And this, if you want to explore caffeine, the website is caffeine ai. You can just immediately jump in and start remixing apps that other people have made on the marketplace. And this, there's 150 apps on the marketplace that people have shared right now. And from here, this app is very early.
If you want to follow along step by step, I walk through building on Caffeine in Caffeine AI Tutorial: Build Apps on the Blockchain by Chatting.
It's still just in the second version. A new, more powerful version will be coming out soon. And this, to me, is the place to be learning and building right now because the more you know how to use this specifically, the more you are going to be able to create more and more powerful applications and you're in a community that's rapidly growing as well and you're well positioned for the future. In the future soon. And I'm reading all the comments on my videos as well. Would love to hear from you in the discussion.