Vercel is excellent. Netlify is excellent. If you're an engineer with a repo, a build pipeline, and a framework, these are the right tools and you should use them.
But that's not who's building AI apps.
The AI-built app workflow is: open a chat interface, describe what you want, get a complete HTML file. There's no repo. There's no framework. There's no build step. The output is a single self-contained file.
The mismatch
Static hosting tools are designed around a deployment model that looks like this:
- Push code to a git repo
- Connect the repo to the hosting service
- Configure build settings
- Wait for the build pipeline to run
- Get a URL
That's the right model for a React app or a Next.js project. It's overkill, and genuinely confusing, for a single HTML file that an AI generated in 20 seconds.
Netlify Drop gets closer: drag a file, get a URL. But then what? There's no data store. There's no access control. There's no way to give an app to specific people. There's no dashboard to manage your apps. And there's no update flow. You have to re-deploy from scratch every time.
What the right tool actually needs
For AI-built apps, the deployment experience needs to match how they're made:
- One file in, live URL out. No config, no pipeline, no git
- A built-in data store so apps can save things
- Access control without requiring accounts (link-only, group invite, public)
- Easy updates. Redeploy a new version without changing the URL
- A dashboard to manage what you've built
Vercel and Netlify are for engineers. ShipLock is for everyone who can now build with AI. The distinction isn't complexity. It's fit.