← All guides

How to secure a Lovable app before launch

You have a launch date and a working app. This is the order we would work in — highest consequence first, so that if you run out of time you have run out of it in the right place.

7 min read · Updated September 2026 · Vibestruct

The instinct before launch is to do everything at once. That is how people end up with a half-finished migration and a delayed launch. Work in consequence order instead: each of these steps leaves the app in a safer state than it was, and stopping after any of them is a legitimate decision.

Step 1 — Get the keys out of the browser

Open your deployed app, view source, and search the bundle for key-shaped strings. Then list every key your app uses and sort them into two piles: safe to publish (Stripe publishable key, Supabase anon key) and not (anything named secret, service or admin).

For each key in the second pile: rotate it, then move whatever needed it into a server-side function. Rotate first — if it has been in a public bundle, treat it as known.

This step alone closes the most severe category of problem in most AI-built apps, and it rarely takes more than a day.

Step 2 — Make the server decide who someone is

Find every place your app decides what a user can see or do, and check whether that decision happens in the browser. If the interface reads a stored flag, that is not a decision, it is a display preference.

Practically: use a real auth provider if you are not already, verify the session on the server for every request that touches data, and derive roles from the server’s copy of the user record rather than from anything the client sent.

Test it the way an attacker would: sign in, edit the stored values, reload, and see what you can reach.

Step 3 — Close the database

If you are on Supabase, go table by table. Row-level security on. A policy per table that scopes rows to auth.uid(), or to membership of whatever grouping your product uses. Then re-test every screen, because features built while the tables were open may quietly have relied on that.

The check that matters: two accounts, each with data, and a deliberate attempt to read one from the other by changing an ID. If that comes back empty, this step is done.

Step 4 — Make payment real

Move the moment of truth from the browser to a webhook. Your server should grant access when the payment provider tells it the payment succeeded, with the signature verified against your signing secret, and should record that entitlement against the account.

Then handle the events nobody builds first: payment failed, subscription cancelled, dispute opened. Each needs a decision about access, and making those decisions now is much cheaper than making them under pressure.

Step 5 — Separate live from everything else

A second environment with its own database and its own keys. Changes go there first. This is less urgent than steps 1–4 on the day of launch and more valuable than all of them in the month after, because it is what lets you keep changing the product without gambling.

Step 6 — Be able to see failure

Uptime monitoring and error reporting, both usually free at your volume. The goal is simply that you learn about problems from a tool rather than from a customer. Add a plain log of what happened when, so that when something does go wrong you can answer “when did this start”.

What not to do before launch

Do not rewrite. Do not switch frameworks. Do not restructure the database schema because it is inelegant. None of those things make the app safer for the first hundred users, and all of them consume the time that would have.

Do not add a security tool to a problem that needs a fix — a scanner that reports the same exposed key every week has not removed the key.

And do not treat launch as the finish line for this work. Dependencies age, providers change defaults, and the features you add after launch are written under more time pressure than the ones before it.

Common questions