I Built the Missing "Deploy" Button for AI-Generated Code

I kept watching people build great pages with AI and then quietly give up right before publishing them — so I built a Chrome extension to fix that last step

Hey IH, I'm the maker of HTML Deployer. Sharing the story behind it and looking for honest feedback — a lot of you are exactly the builders I had in mind.

The problem I couldn't unsee

Generating a decent landing page with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini stopped being hard a while ago. Ask, get HTML back, done.

What's not solved is the five minutes after: copy the code, open a new tab, create a repo or Netlify project, paste, configure, wait, hope nothing broke. For non-devs, that gap is where good ideas quietly die — not because the page was bad, but because "I have HTML" never became "I have a URL."

I watched this happen to people close to me enough times that it started bugging me.

First version was wrong, and I'm glad I noticed early

My first idea was to build a hosting platform — upload HTML, we host it, here's your link. Simple to explain. I killed it within a couple of weeks.

Reasoning: building my own hosting means asking people to trust a brand-new product with their uptime forever, and locking them out of hosting they might already pay for. That's not removing friction, just relocating it and adding lock-in on top.

The actual unlock

The fix wasn't a new destination — it was moving the point of action to where the problem happens: inside the AI chat itself, the moment the code appears.

That's HTML Deployer. A Chrome extension that watches ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in real time. When an HTML block shows up, a Deploy button appears next to it. Click it, preview across desktop/tablet/mobile, then push to Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, your own FTP hosting, or a self-hosted agent — or just export a ZIP. No account required, no forced lock-in.

What was actually hard to build

Not the button. The detection layer.

• Chat UIs weren't built to be scraped — the DOM shifts without warning across ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.
• Code still streaming in shouldn't trigger a broken deploy.
• Telling apart a full deployable page from a stray snippet in an explanation took more false starts than I'd like to admit.
• Credentials never touch my servers — everything runs client-side, straight to the destination picked. This mattered more than any feature: the people I built this for are usually responsible for someone else's site, and "what if this leaks something" outweighs "what if this is slow."

Who it's actually for

Three groups kept showing up: marketers/solo builders who just want a URL, freelancers/indie devs shipping demos without repeating manual FTP, and small agencies running campaign microsites who want juniors deploying safely without touching production.

The common thread isn't "I don't know how to deploy" — most could figure it out. It's "I don't want that step between the idea and the result."

Where I need help / feedback

• If you generate pages with AI regularly, where does your workflow actually break down after the code exists?
• For the freelancers/agencies here — is FTP/self-hosted deploy still the realistic default for your clients, or has everyone quietly moved to Netlify/Vercel already?
• Anyone here tried building something similar and hit a wall I haven't found yet?

If you want to poke at it: it's free — HTML Deployer on the Chrome Web Store. Genuinely more curious how other builders here handle the "AI output → live thing" gap — doubt HTML is the only place it shows up.