Own the Code, Not the Platform: The Real Cost of Sandbox Lock-In

The sandbox shipped an afternoon. Then the invoice did too.

Lovable, Bolt, v0, and Rork did something real. Two years ago, going from "idea on a napkin" to "running URL a teammate can click" was a Friday of plumbing. Now it's a coffee. That collapsed the cost of validating an idea by an order of magnitude and expanded the number of people who can do it by the same factor. Worth saying out loud before anything else, because the rest of this post is going to be a balance to that win, and the win is real.

The part the demo videos don't show is what happens at month seven. The prototype is a product. The team is two people now. The sandbox bill is on a credit card someone has to remember to pay, and the only way to make a non-trivial change is to keep paying the sandbox forever.

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This is an excerpt. Read the full post at otf-kit.dev/blog/the-lock-in-math — full-stack kits your AI coding agent can actually ship to production. Browse the kits →