Your AI-generated app runs on their cloud, and that’s the problem

AI app builders like Replit, Lovable, and Base44 make it easy to generate and deploy apps, but they default to running on the vendor's cloud. This creates serious problems for production use: no custom observability, no integration with your CI/testing pipelines, compliance and audit failures, and infrastructure drift. The concept of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) — already familiar from SaaS procurement — is now arriving at AI code generation. A comparison of major platforms shows a spectrum from tightly coupled hosting to cloud-agnostic artifacts. The recommendation is to evaluate tools based on where the app is actually going: managed hosting is fine for prototypes, but production apps with real users, regulated data, or long lifespans need portability, observability, and compliance controls before you start generating, not after.