Keep It Running — Maintaining Your AI-Built App Through Its First Ninety Days (PDF Guide)

You shipped something by describing it to an AI, and now real people use it — some of them with real information, or real money, inside. Nobody warns you about the part that comes next: you are responsible for code you did not write, and almost nothing has been written for you. Maintenance advice is either vendor marketing or essays for career engineers.

Keep It Running is a 24-page field guide to the first ninety days after launch, written for owners rather than engineers. It teaches five small skills — reading logs, keeping backups you have actually restored, making small fixes without making things worse, and updating dependencies and AI models calmly — and folds them into one weekly half hour that prevents most emergencies. The tone throughout is stewardship, not emergency: a live app is a small shop, and you are its keeper.

WHAT'S INSIDE

• The steward's notebook (Chapter 1): a plain-text facts page and running diary — steward.md — that answers the only three questions maintenance ever asks (is it up, can a user do the main thing, is the data safe) and becomes the evidence behind every later decision

• Reading logs without reading much code (Chapter 2): where your logs actually live — the browser console, your hosting dashboard — the three parts of a log line, and a real error trace walked through line by line until a scary block becomes one plain sentence

• Backups that actually restore (Chapter 3): where your data really lives (a hosted database, a single SQLite file, a spreadsheet, or only your users' browsers), the one-command backup, and the restore drill that proves the copy works before you need it

• Small fixes in code you didn't write (Chapter 4): the four-rule method — reproduce, smallest change, verify, commit — plus the two-strikes rollback move and the one rule with no exceptions: never edit the live app in a panic

• Updating without fear (Chapter 5): security fixes promptly, everything else on a monthly window, and the dependency nobody lists — the AI model name written into your code that its vendor will one day retire

• The weekly half hour (Chapter 6): a thirty-minute routine, minute by minute across six slots, that you can adopt as-is, plus one free uptime monitor for the days between

• Paying down the mess (Chapter 7): one small refactor at a time, chosen by pain, never mixed with a fix

• Repair or rebuild (Chapter 8): the honest decision framework with worked time-and-cost math, and the third option nobody mentions — retiring an app well

• What growth breaks first (Chapter 9): free-tier quotas, slow queries, support load, and the single point of you — a calm look ahead

• A plain-language glossary of every maintenance term the book uses

HONEST NOTES

Almost everything in this book leans on tools with real free tiers — hosting, a database, backups, an uptime monitor — and the book names them. The caveats we put in writing: the examples work through an AI coding assistant (the one the companion build guide sets up), which may require a paid plan from roughly $20/month as of July 2026, and free-tier alternatives that work with the prompts are noted where they exist. Where a paid tier matters, the book says so plainly — for instance, Supabase includes daily backups on its Pro plan at $25/month while free-plan projects export their own data (which the one-command backup covers), and UptimeRobot's free plan is for personal, non-commercial use while a commercial app needs a paid plan from a few dollars a month. Prices, free tiers, and platform screens (Supabase, UptimeRobot, Render, GitHub, and AI model vendors) were last reviewed July 2026 against the vendors' own pages; where a dashboard has moved, the book tells you exactly what to search the official documentation for. A routine improves your odds; it does not remove them.

Guidance, not gospel — this is a practical field guide, not professional, financial, or purchasing advice.

Drafted with AI assistance and then reviewed and curated by a real person who keeps apps running this way.

Instant download. A5 pages, designed for screen reading; prints cleanly on A4 or US Letter. Personal use only.

First Edition — July 2026.

Questions? Reach us at calmkitco.com.