Vibe Coded App Audit — Is Your AI-Built App Safe to Take Money Through?

What a vibe coded app audit actually is

It is a person reading your code. One of our senior engineers goes through the application and the services it depends on — your database rules, your authentication, where your keys live, what happens when someone sends your app something it wasn't expecting — and writes up everything that would matter if a stranger went looking. You get back a report where each finding is rated by severity, explained in plain English, and paired with a specific fix and a rough estimate of the effort involved.

The review covers four areas: access control (who can reach which data), secrets (where your keys are and who can see them), data and input (what your app accepts and whether it checks), and production readiness (what happens under real load, and whether you would find out if something broke).

What it is not

• Not an automated scanner. Lovable and Bolt already ship those and they are free. Run them.
• Not a formal penetration test or a compliance certificate. If you need SOC 2 or a signed pen-test report for an enterprise customer, that is a different, much more expensive engagement.
• Not a code-quality or performance review. We are not here to tell you the code is ugly. We are here to tell you whether it is safe.

Why AI-built apps fail in the same four ways every time

AI coding tools optimise for code that runs. Nothing in that objective rewards code that refuses the wrong person. The result is that independently built apps fail in a strikingly consistent pattern — one review of 62 Lovable apps found 63% carrying critical or high-severity issues, averaging ten findings each. These four account for most of them.

1. Your database has no row-level security

Your app talks to your database using a key that ships inside the page — it is meant to be public. What is supposed to stop a stranger using that key to read everyone's records is a per-row permission rule on each table. AI tools frequently create the tables and never create the rules. When that happens, anyone who opens your site can request the entire table: every user, every email address, every order.

This is not hypothetical. It is CVE-2025-48757 — 303 endpoints across 170 Lovable-generated apps were found readable through the public key because row-level security had never been switched on. A December 2025 audit put the rate at 10.3% of Lovable apps carrying data-exposure flaws. The fix is usually a few lines of SQL per table — the hard part is knowing which tables are exposed and what rule each one actually needs. That is the first thing we check.

2. Your secret keys are sitting in the browser

Some keys are safe to publish. Others — your Stripe secret key, your OpenAI key, your database service key — give whoever holds them the ability to charge cards, spend your API credits, or bypass every permission rule you wrote. AI tools put keys wherever makes the feature work fastest, and that is often directly in the front-end code. Anyone can open browser developer tools and read them in about ten seconds. (Formally this is CWE-798, hard-coded credentials; practically it is somebody else's bill.)

Moving a key is easy. Working out which of your keys were exposed, for how long, which need rotating, and what was done with them in the meantime is the part people get wrong — and it is in the report.

3. Your permission checks only run in the browser

Your admin page is hidden unless the logged-in user is an admin. That looks like security and isn't. Hiding a page in the front end only hides the button — the underlying request is still there, and anyone can send it directly without ever loading your interface. The same applies to changing an ID in a URL to view someone else's record. The check has to happen on the server, where the user cannot reach it.

This one is rarely a single fix. It usually means deciding, for each action in your app, who is genuinely allowed to do it — and then enforcing that somewhere the user cannot edit. We map it out for you.

4. Nothing checks what people send you

AI writes the validation into the form: the price field only accepts positive numbers, the quantity has a maximum, the file must be an image. All of that lives in the browser and all of it can be switched off by the person using it. Without the same checks running on the server, someone can submit a negative price, order ten thousand of something, or upload a file that is not an image at all. The same gap is why unlimited requests can be fired at your expensive AI endpoint until your bill arrives.

We identify every entry point that trusts the browser, and what a realistic abuse of it costs you — then close them.

This is a moving target, not a settled one: Georgia Tech's Vibe Security Radar recorded 35 new CVEs caused by AI-generated code in March 2026, up from six in January.

Is my app affected? A 5-minute self-check

You can do all three of these yourself, right now, without us. If any of them comes back badly, you have a real problem and you should deal with it this week.

1. Search your own site for a service key

   Open your live app in Chrome, press F12, go to the Network tab and reload. Then press Ctrl+Shift+F to search everything the page loaded, and search for service_role, sk_live and SECRET. Any hit is a key that should never have left your server. Rotate it today.

2. Check your database for tables with no rules

   In Supabase, open Advisors → Security. Any warning that reads "RLS Disabled in Public" names a table that anyone on the internet can currently read. Do not turn the warning off — that is the mistake that caused CVE-2025-48757. On Firebase, the equivalent is a Firestore rule of allow read, write: if true.

3. Try to open somebody else's record

   Find a URL in your app with an ID in it — an order, a project, a profile. Change the ID to a different one and load it. If you can see data that isn't yours, so can everyone else. Do the same while logged out.

These three cover the externally visible failures. They will not tell you whether your payment flow can be charged twice, whether one customer's data can bleed into another's, or whether your app survives its first busy day — which is the part that needs someone reading the code.

What you receive

A severity-ranked report in plain English

Findings are ordered Critical, Important, then Worth Fixing — so you know what to do before launch and what can wait. Each one states what it is, what somebody could actually do with it, and roughly how much work the fix is. No jargon in the summary; the technical detail sits underneath for whoever implements it.

A copy-paste fix prompt for every finding

You built the app by prompting an AI, so the fixes come as prompts too. Several findings are things you can close yourself in an afternoon by pasting the prompt back into the tool you built with. We would rather you fixed the easy ones for free than paid us to do them.

A sample finding, so you know what you are buying

Every audit service on the internet describes its report. Here is what one of ours actually looks like:

How it works

1. You send us access. Read-only access to your repository, or an export if you would rather not add us to it, plus two lines on what the app does and where it runs. NDA signed first if you want one — just ask before you send anything.
2. A senior engineer reviews it. Manual review of the code and the services it depends on, with targeted testing against the running app where that is the only way to confirm a finding.
3. You get the report, and a call. Within 48 hours of us having access. We walk you through it, answer questions, and agree what happens next — whether that is you fixing it, your developer fixing it, or us.

What it costs

Published, because you should not have to book a call to find out whether you can afford something.

The $149 comes off the price of whatever you do next. If the report leads to a Fix Sprint or a hardening project, the audit fee is credited against it. If it turns out nothing serious is wrong, you have paid $149 to stop worrying about it — which is the outcome we are happiest to deliver.

Should you audit, refactor, or rewrite?

Founders arrive at this page braced to be told their app is worthless and needs rebuilding from scratch. That is usually not true, and it is worth saying plainly, because the fear itself stops people getting the app checked at all.

Fix what's there — the common case. The findings are configuration and missing enforcement: permission rules never switched on, keys in the wrong place, checks that only run in the browser. Your product is fine; the settings around it are not. Days of work, and nothing your users will notice.

Refactor part of it — when the structure is sound but one area was built in a way that can't be secured as-is. Typically permissions scattered across dozens of places with no single point of enforcement, or a payment flow assembled without the checks that stop double-charging. You rebuild that one area, not the app.

Rebuild — genuinely rare. The real trigger is a data model that cannot keep customers apart: everyone's records in one undifferentiated pile with no reliable way to say which belongs to whom. If you are heading for paying business customers, that has to be fixed at the foundation. We will say so if that is what we find, and we will also say so when it isn't — a rewrite you didn't need is an expensive way to solve nothing.

The audit exists to tell you which of these three you are in, before you spend anything — and to tell you plainly when the answer is "nothing serious". If your question is launch timing rather than security specifically, say so when you get in touch and we will scope it that way.

Who does the audit

You are about to hand your source code to a stranger, so you should know who the stranger is. CodeChoicez is four engineers. Our names, our code and our work history are public — check them before you send us anything.

• Arslan Khan

  Founder & CEO

  LinkedInGitHub

• Toheed Ahmed Qureshi

  Co-Founder & CTO

  LinkedInGitHub

• Hamid Aurangzeb

  Co-Founder & COO

  LinkedInGitHub

• Hussain Ali Javed

  Co-Founder & Team Lead, Development

  LinkedInGitHub

Apps we've actually shipped

The reason we can tell you what to fix is that we build the same things properly, for money, and have to live with the consequences.

• An AI recruitment platform we built on Supabase — three distinct user types, each able to see only their own data, with row-level security doing the work rather than hidden pages. This is the problem that breaks most vibe-coded apps, at a scale where it has to actually hold.
• BeanFlow, a Firebase-backed SaaS we shipped — subscription billing through Stripe, passkey sign-in, and Firestore rules written so the public config in the browser gives an attacker nothing. The same architecture people accidentally leave open, closed properly.
• A B2B marketplace running live in Belgium — Stripe payments, three separate user roles with their own portals, and company VAT numbers validated against the EU registry. When we say "production ready", this is the standard we mean.

Frequently asked questions