Six short lessons

Getting a beachhead app onto Vercel Hobby

By the end you will have a Next.js app live on Vercel's free plan that can call a language model and query a Postgres database, with both credentials stored where they belong. Each lesson ends in one thing you can see working.

Lessons

The Hobby plan, your account, and the CLI
What free covers, the three rules that bite, and a working vercel whoami.
First deploy and the three environments
The app live at a production URL and again at a preview URL, with a probe that tells them apart.
How environment variables work
One name, three values, and why a changed value waits for a redeploy.
Your LLM API key
A model answering from production, with the key stored as a Secret and a separate key on your laptop.
A database without copy-pasting credentials
Postgres from the Marketplace, with its connection string injected for you.
Project configuration: what goes where
A vercel.json, a per-route time limit, and a map of where every setting lives.

Reference

These are built to be printed and returned to. The lessons you will do once.

Glossary	Every term the course uses, in one sense each.
CLI cheat sheet	The commands, checked against CLI 62.1.0.
Env var playbook	Where a value goes, how to change or rotate it, and what to check when it is `undefined`.
Hobby limits card	The numbers, the non-commercial rule, and the signs it is time for Pro.

How to use this

Do the steps, in order. Lessons 2 to 6 build one app. Tick steps off as you go; the page remembers.
Answer the recall prompts before opening them. Trying to remember is what builds memory. Reading the answer does not.
Spread it out. One or two lessons a day beats all six in an evening. Redo a quiz the next day.
Ask. Run /teach in Claude Code from this folder to ask a question, get unstuck, or request the next lesson.

What it is built on

Every factual claim links to the page it came from, mainly vercel.com/docs and nextjs.org/docs, read on 2 October 2026. The code was built and run on Next.js 16.3.8, and the commands were checked against Vercel CLI 62.1.0. Where something could not be tested without your account or keys, the lesson says so. The full source list is in RESOURCES.md.