How Portship produces what you see

1. Live route verification

When you wrap a deployment, your app keeps running wherever you built it — Replit, Lovable, Bolt, v0, and the rest. Portship sits in front of it as a proxy; we never copy, host, or modify your deployment.

To confirm a branded route actually works, Portship fetches your upstream URL server-side with a real-browser User-Agent and reads the response. From that response we:

• Check that the upstream answers with a success status (a 4xx or 5xx is surfaced to you rather than hidden).
• Detect the underlying framework from signatures in the page body (for example Streamlit, Gradio, or Plotly Dash).
• Run framework-specific compatibility checks where they matter — for instance, verifying that the proxy can satisfy Streamlit's origin allow-list so the page renders through your branded link.

This probe is read-only and time-bounded: it never changes any of your data, never affects visitor traffic, and aborts if your upstream doesn't respond within a few seconds (a common sign that a free deployment is cold-starting). If a check can't be completed, we say so instead of showing a falsely confident result.

Separately, Portship runs a builder-platform status page that reflects the health of the hosting platforms our users deploy on, so a widespread outage is visible rather than mistaken for a problem with your link.

2. Screenshots: how we capture and refresh them

The preview image on each portfolio tile is a screenshot of your live page, not a stored copy of your app. Captures are rendered at a standard desktop viewport (1280×800) and stored as JPEG thumbnails, then served through Portship's own proxy at /p/{handle}/{slug}.jpg so the underlying capture URL is never exposed.

How a capture is produced

Portship requests the screenshot from a third-party rendering service (Microlink) that loads your public page in a browser and returns the rendered image. We cache the result so repeat visitors don't trigger a fresh render every time, and we re-capture when you change the route so the thumbnail keeps pace with your work.

3. Visit & geography analytics

Every branded link carries built-in visit analytics. The counts you see are produced from server-side visit events recorded as traffic passes through the proxy — there is no third-party analytics tag injected into your app.

• Visit counts are running totals per link, plus daily counters that drive the trend sparklines in your dashboard.
• Geography is derived from the country signal provided by our CDN edge (Cloudflare) at the moment of the visit. We aggregate it into per-country counts; visits with no resolvable country are grouped as Unknown and excluded from country rankings.
• Trends compare recent windows (for example the last 7 days against the prior 7) using those same daily counters.

Visit counts are private to you. They appear only in your own dashboard — never on your public portfolio, and never in the public discovery directory. Visitors see your work and a simple live indicator, not your traffic numbers.

4. What “Live now” means

The “Live now” figure in your dashboard counts recent visit events across all your links within the last five minutes. It is intentionally honest about its limits:

• It counts events, not unique people. Portship does not store a per-visitor identifier, so we cannot — and do not — claim to show distinct concurrent visitors. Two views from the same person in the window count as two.
• It is a rolling, short-window signal meant to tell you “something is happening right now,” not a precise concurrency gauge.

We describe it this way deliberately. A “live visitors” number that silently counted raw events would overstate reality; naming it accurately keeps the signal trustworthy.

5. App-category classification

To power the discovery directory and aggregate market view, Portship classifies each public project into a single category — for example Developer Tool, E-commerce, Creative/Portfolio, or Education — from a fixed list of categories.

The classification is generated by an AI model (Anthropic's Claude) using only the project's label and slug — the short, public descriptors you choose. No private account data is used. If the model is unavailable or returns something outside the known list, the project is simply filed under Other; classification never blocks a project from working or appearing.

6. Data freshness & caching

Different signals refresh on different cadences, chosen to balance accuracy against load:

• Your portfolio data (which projects show, and their visibility) is served with no-store caching, so a change you make is reflected on the very next load rather than after a delay.
• Screenshots are cached and re-captured when you edit a route.
• Public pages like the directory and these informational pages are cached briefly at the edge for speed, then revalidated.
• Aggregate market figures are computed on a short cache so the view stays current without recomputing on every request.