I’m away from my desk, but when it runs it looks just like what @seroteams posted on 1/26
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No issues here.
Ended up doing this through VSCode and honestly? Never looked back.
I was only using Replit at the end to push to build anyway, and after launching to a couple other sites this past week without it, I just pulled the plug. Saving $800-900/month and getting like 10x the output running pure Claude Max. The workflow was solid while it lasted but it got expensive fast.
One thing worth mentioning — if your app is database heavy, Replit will straight up penalize you on costs. There’s just a natural ceiling where you outgrow the platform, not because it’s bad but because the infrastructure isn’t built for real production volume involving intense data heavy apps. That’s where it started hurting for me. Build / compilation compute costs were killing me too, as well as autoscale it just became too much.
Built a similar setup myself — Claude just handles everything. izios.com is screaming fast now, running on my own physical server in my office with Cloudflare doing the routing and protection, own database, the whole thing.
I’ll still say Replit is a legit launchpad. If you don’t own hardware, don’t want to mess with Railway or Vercel, or you’re just learning, it’s genuinely great for that. No hate.
But if you’re ready to go deeper, use Claude through the CLI. Way cheaper, just as capable, and once it clicks you won’t go back.
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Jeff, thanks for the reply and I must admit I am getting close to outgrowing Replit.
So you moved to VSCode, and you connect that with Claude?
Then if you come up with need for updates or added databases/tables who is managing that? Is that you?
Sorry for a specific quesiton, as its the one reason I am aprehensive to move our of Replit.
Also for the publishing of the URL and pushing to Prod, how do you handle that?
Love your site and it’s looking great 
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thats what I do.
As of right now my 8core 64GB PCIE Mac Pro runs the database / server on a business connection with Cloudflare Tunnels. I setup a workspace in VScode with the claude addon, claude connects using MCP servers to my mac and cloudflare and it handles literally everything. It setup backups / replication to my home mac (as a failover / backups). It setup the dev subdomain, Honestly I have some understanding of all of this but its so good i can be hands off with about 80% of it now, I just check its work and approve anything thats a “core” change. Git is how everything is synced from my laptop to the office to the replicator so it handles that, it’s literally an ongoing convo and it just feels like magic now. I even setup some simple console monitors scripts and some other monitoring systems that let me keep and eye on my servers in real time. It took me about a week to plan the move, I actually have a post about it, at first I did the move and stayed on replit like you are, It can also handle replit, build initiate the restarts of the server etc but it still costs to deploy and run, so i said why and just moved to my server. The correct way to do it is to move to railway or another system thats cheap and let it handle all the deployments for you, it will help you set everything up its an excellent model.
I thought that UI would be an issue and I get that the newer design tools are attractive to alot of people, I have been comfortable using figma for design so I can give this a figma design and thats solves that problem for me, but on this i didn’t even do that - I mocked it up in chatgpt and explained I’m building a new frontend for my wordpress / woo site and I connected it through SSH on my siteground host and it built a full app that interfaces with my live site and pulls data dynamically and runs on Typescript which is so much faster than PHP and all the old tech that Wordpress runs on. I basically rebuild the front end and just use the database and wordpress to keep running the operations in our business (still in development so the jury is still out) but everything works on my test server its faster than I could ever get my Wordpress site to ever load without complex plugins and expensive hosting and i can control the visuals by talking with claude, it handles the nextjx and express server for testing and all that and I can host the the frontend wherever and just iterate.
The visuals on this site were built on claude just chatting and taking my screenshots as reference and studying the layout of our current live site. I think before Opus this was not possible, the model is smart enough now to run infrastructure at a high - very high level. For Replit this is their moat, but claude is getting dangerously close, all Claude needs to do is add a publish to web function like replit and its over.
It can even handle other agents, I have Gemma 4 running on my mac mini and it can talk to that so if you have access to other agents on other subscriptions its as easy as MCP that and let them chat and interface together. Lock in is real if you use their auth, I decided against it from the beginning it was probably the best decision i made or this would have been so much harder to do to be honest.
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Honestly?
It couldn’t be easier.
Download a zip of your app from Replit (any app, if you have a simple tester app - maybe something you were even just experimenting with?) and go over to Claude Code “Desktop” and tell Claude you built your app in Replit and want to explore hosting it externally.
At this first exploratory step I would stay away from VS Code (I use VS Code maybe 30% of the time) or Cursor or Antigravity (or whatever other IDE’s are out there at the moment) and just get a feel for how quickly you’ll feel comfortable working outside Replit.
NOTE: Claude Code “Desktop” only works from folders so the very first thing you’ll want to do is set up a folder on your computer called “Replit Transfer Test” or something like that (just so you know what it is - I use a master folder and then add all my projects in there) and then point the opeining chat to that specific folder. (Don’t worry though. If you haven’t set this up Claude will still remind you for a folder location when you start so even then you’re good!)
And then literally just type in “Hi Claude, I built this app in Replit and want to explore hosting and deploying it externally. What are my options and can you please run me through the complete set up process from here to deployment?” and that’s it.
(I’m sure you can create a much better prompt get all into markdown and all that gumpf but really, just start simply and feel it out as you go along!)
Claude will look at your app stack and run you through all your build options and then help set you set everything up. And I mean everything.
You hit a hurdle somewhere? Just take a screenshot and post it in the chat and Claude will say something like “Oh I see you did this here. Change that to this and hit Save” and bam it’s done.
You’ll start to recognise the individual processes from your time with Replit and then all that needs to be done is the one-time set up of these external services (and again, Claude will guide you through this) and then you’re golden.
Once you try this you can then start exploring CLAUDE.md files and “Skills” and MCP’s and the whole rabbit hole of seemingly limitless possibilities out there.
Give it try!
And again, having said all that, I still use Replit for quick testing of concepts (last app I built was a python-based app to help syncronise bookmarks across the 3 different browsers I use) but for the automated onboarding of new shops and custom themes for Shopify that I edit and push live to Shopify? That went straight to Claude.
TFS
Oh I get it, I feel like I’m re-training myself and the agent to how I worked with agent 3. My workflow broke on agent 4 so I figured it was a better time as any to just start from scratch and cut my costs down. I hate UI too lol, it’s my wife’s site so I have to do a good job on the UI, it’s our main money maker business, everything else is side projects and quests. I think you’re workflow is legit, Use Replit for what its good at, including design - then dump it to git, do the backend techincal and heavy lifting work on claude code, then push back to replit to avoid managing hardware or external hosting, for sure I recommend this for anyone still building - don’t do what i’m doing, I’m solving for very specific issues that were self inflicted by picking a project that eats way too much database usage 
I’ve been using Claude in Shell for a while and it was working well but it just stopped allowing me to login (can’t copy/paste the login code link any more). This just changed on 5th June. Anyone else had this issue and found away to fix it?