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Where people actually get stuck

Ranked by how often it comes up, from a corpus of real help posts rather than from guessing. Deployment is first by a distance, and the surprise is how much of the rest is money: an agent left running in a loop bills at machine speed. Find the spend cap before your first session, not after.

1. 1

   Getting it online at all

   the most common wall by a distance

   Your app has three separate homes: the preview inside the tool, the deployed build, and whatever your domain points at. A change to one does not reach the others.

   What to do: Before you debug anything, work out which of the three you are actually looking at. Most “it broke in production” turns out to be “I am looking at a different copy”.

2. 2

   The database

   second most common

   Usually not a hard bug — you do not know whether you have a database, where it lives, or who can read it. One person put it exactly right: the tool said it had connected to a database they had never signed up for.

   What to do: Find the actual dashboard for your data and look at the rows with your own eyes. If you cannot find it, you do not have one yet.

3. 3

   A bill you did not expect

   third, and the most expensive

   The usual story is not “my credits ran out”. It is an agent looping on one problem, billing at machine speed, while you are away from the keyboard. People have lost four figures in a single hour this way.

   What to do: Find the hard spending cap before your first long session and set it. If the only option is monthly, set it to about twice your normal spend so a runaway trips it mid-month.

4. 4

   Not being able to describe what you want

   fourth — higher than most guides admit

   The tool is not reading your mind; it is a very fast junior doing exactly what you said and nothing you meant. This is a writing problem, not a coding one.

   What to do: Write the spec as if handing it to a stranger: what the user sees, what they tap, what happens when they do something daft, what the error says, and what gets saved where.

5. 5

   Logins

   fifth

   Sign-up appears to work and verification emails silently never arrive, so you have far fewer real users than accounts.

   What to do: Register with an address you can actually check, on a different device, and complete the whole journey once.

6. 6

   Losing work

   hits non-technical builders hardest

   The checkpoint history inside a builder tool is not a backup. It is not yours, and it usually does not include your data.

   What to do: Export to a real repository on day one, and turn on database backups the moment you have data you would miss.

7. 7

   It worked, then it broke

   under-reported, not rare

   People rarely name this one — they report it as a broken feature or as credits vanishing. Adding the sixth feature quietly breaks the second.

   What to do: Write down the five things that already work before you add the sixth. Re-check that list after every change. This is the cheapest habit on this page.

8. 8

   The assistant going in circles

   more common among experienced builders

   Three attempts at the same error, each confidently described as a fix, none of them changing the error text.

   What to do: Stop at the third try. Revert and describe the problem differently — the loop will not break itself, and every lap costs money.