Module 8 · Go live

Put your site on the internet

Stage 7, part one. This is the short module where the thing you built stops being a file on your laptop and becomes a website anyone in the world can open. It takes about ten minutes. First, the honest version of what it costs — because the free-hosting story you have probably heard is not true for a law firm.

What hosting a firm’s website costs

Vercel is the company that will hold your site and serve it to visitors. Their free plan is real, and you will use it in the next few minutes to publish and test. But their terms limit the free plan to personal, non-commercial projects, and a website that advertises legal services is commercial by any reading. Once this is the live site of a working practice, it belongs on their paid plan — $20 a month, as of this writing.

That is the honest number, and it is a good one. Twenty dollars a month is less than most firms pay for a single line item on an agency invoice, it includes the security certificate and the global delivery network, and nothing about it locks you in: your site lives in your GitHub account, and you can move it somewhere else in an afternoon.

Those prices were checked against Vercel’s own pages as this course was written. Prices change; the principle — free for personal projects, paid for business ones — has been stable, and it is the part that decides which plan you belong on.

Publish it

1. Go to vercel.com/new.
2. Sign up (or sign in) using your GitHub account. That single choice is what connects the two services, so don’t create a separate email-and-password account here.
3. When Vercel asks for access to your repositories, approve it. Then find your website in the list and select it.
4. On the settings screen, leave everything as it is except one section: open Environment Variables. In the Key box type NEXT_PUBLIC_WEB3FORMS_KEY. In the Value box paste the Web3Forms access key from Module 5 (if you don’t have it handy, ask Claude: “What’s my Web3Forms key in .env.local?”). Check that both boxes are filled in before you go on.
5. Click Deploy.
6. Wait about a minute. You get a live address that looks like your-firm.vercel.app. Open it, fill in your consultation form, and check that the message reaches your inbox.

Please install Vercel's plugin for Claude Code (npx plugins add vercel/vercel-plugin), then use it to deploy
my site to Vercel and give me the live link. Before deploying, add NEXT_PUBLIC_WEB3FORMS_KEY from my .env.local
as an environment variable in Vercel so my contact form works on the live site, then remind me to send a test
message through the live form. I'm not technical — tell me exactly what to click if you need me to approve
something in my browser.

The update loop, from now until forever

Vercel watches the GitHub copy you made last module. When it changes, your live site changes. So updating your website is now one sentence to Claude, followed by about a minute of waiting:

Please save a snapshot of our changes and push them to GitHub so my live site updates.

This is the habit that outlasts the course. A fee schedule changes, you add a practice area, a paragraph reads badly on a phone — you fix it yourself, the same afternoon, without emailing anyone and without waiting on anyone’s queue.

Watch this step

This shows the same connect-and-deploy you're about to do, on the same kind of project, from repository to a live link in a few minutes. It’s from an independent creator — credited below, so go give them a follow.

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