Vercel’s v0 Agent Grows Beyond Coding for Developers
From devs to dreamers: Vercel’s AI builder now lets anyone spin up apps—and opens the door to a bigger market
Vercel, the cloud infrastructure platform, is releasing an update turning its v0 agent into an AI builder for everyone. It’s no longer a vibe coding tool exclusively for software developers. Instead, it’s a tool that designers, marketers, sales, finance professionals, or anyone with an idea can use to rapidly create software without needing “a single commit.” Consequently, the company is also migrating the AI agent away from v0.dev to v0.app.
Launched in 2023 as one of the first AI coding agents, v0 aimed to help developers build the first iteration of their product. Zeb Hermann, Vercel’s v0 general manager, tells me that at the time, at least 100,000 people signedx up for the waitlist in the first three weeks. “v0 has had many iterations since, but we’ve always stayed true to Vercel’s founding insight: that developers should focus on the creative and innovative parts of building products, not repetitive tasks,” he states. “That’s why we built our platform in the first place: to eliminate deployment friction. v0 is the natural evolution of that philosophy, applied to the front-end development process.”
The company shares that over 3.5 million developers, designers, product managers, and others have used the v0.dev agent to date.
The New v0 Agent
Vercel’s overhauled agent promises an entirely new user experience, moving away from a “prompt and fix” approach to one that is all about “describe and deliver.” That means, once a natural language prompt is provided, the bot autonomously identifies the next steps, reviews your build history, and manages everything involved, including all the front-end, back-end, copywriting, and application logic.
“We learned from other agentic projects like Codex and [Anthropic’s] Claude Code,” Hermann explains. “In particular, we realized the importance of Tool Calling (the ability of AI models to interact with external tools, APIs, or systems). The agent needs to be highly capable—to do things like visit websites itself, do its own testing, etc. But it also needs to be interpretable and steerable.”
He goes on to say, “A lot of the complexity is getting the interaction with the user right—letting them see what the agent is doing when, letting them adjust and course correct, making the agent really good at executing on small tweaks to existing applications. This results in a tool that anyone can use to build cool apps.”
With the original v0, developers first described the interface they wanted to build. The bot would then produce the code needed. It’s a process that wasn’t too dissimilar to other vibe coding platforms like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Augment Code, Warp, and Google. However, this next-generation agent has expanded capabilities, making it able to conduct web searches, read files, inspect sites, generate image concepts, handle task management, review work for errors, and support third-party integrations.
“v0 is built on the same infrastructure, security, and support that Vercel is known for, and it’s already being used by some of the most demanding teams in the world,” Hermann proclaims. “It integrates cleanly with existing design systems and development workflows, and it’s designed to meet the security and compliance standards enterprise teams expect. The goal is to help teams adopt AI in a way that actually fits how they build software today.”
In true “eat your own dog food” fashion, he reveals Vercel leveraged v0 to build its revamped agent, proof of v0’s capabilities. “That kind of daily use meant we ran into the same friction our users felt. When something didn’t work or felt slow, we fixed it. And when it felt good, we made it even faster. That loop of building the product with the product helped us tune every part of the experience.”
So how does Vercel think non-technical professionals will use the new agent? Already, it’s seeing v0 being used to generate entire startup MVPs (Minimal Viable Products) for founders and product managers, e-commerce storefronts for designers, versatile data dashboards complete with real data, API hooks, and fine-tuned copy for marketers, survey apps connected to real databases, and custom slide decks with editable layouts and live content.
Pricing will remain unchanged—the new v0 uses the same credit- and token-based rates as its predecessor, with four tiers: a free plan, a $20 per month premium option, a $30-per-user-per-month team plan, and an enterprise offering. However, Vercel is offering a free trial during the first week of the new v0 launch.
And if you’re curious about the AI models powering the v0 agent, Vercel lists its composite model family—v0-1.5-sm, v0-1.5-md, and v0-1.5-lg. And just in time for the launch, it also includes OpenAI’s GPT-5.
Capitalizing on the AI No-Code Wave
When it comes to vibe coding, Vercel knows it’s not in a league of its own. And it’s a space that has seen a flurry of activity as of late. But how is the company approaching this AI-fueled practice? “First and foremost, vibe coding should be secure,” Hermann declares. “When anyone can now build an app that goes viral, it’s more important than ever for those apps to be secure from the very first prototype. Leaked secrets, unsafe defaults, and misconfigured access are no longer rare mistakes. They are the default without intervention. We believe security is the defining issue in the world of vibe coding and AI-generated code. v0 is the only platform built and proven to solve this problem.”
Elaborating further, he says Vercel believes “vibe coding is about building what you imagine without getting bogged down in syntax. The best products will be the ones that help people create in a way that feels more like designing, composing, or storytelling.” v0 achieves this because it “gives people superpowers whether or not they write code.”
When asked what lessons Vercel has learned over the years about vibe coding that helped it build this new v0 agent, Hermann highlights a few points:
People want to build a variety of things from presentations and dashboards to data visualizations, prototypes, and more
Not everyone is well-versed in development
Users want a tool that “just works, that is secure, that is easy to get up and running to share with people”
Users prefer technology like Next.js and Vercel’s security to be behind the scenes, not in the foreground
People expect to make adjustments to their projects and will not be perfect on the first try
“When they work well, these tools change people’s lives.”
By further democratizing its vibe coding agent, Vercel isn’t just aiming to outpace competitors—it’s also opening the door to a much broader audience: entrepreneurs, designers, marketers, educators, small-business owners, creators, and enterprise teams. For companies exploring vibe coding to augment their developers, v0 could be especially appealing thanks to its security features and its ability to let non-technical staff generate solutions on the fly, bypassing layers of administrative red tape.
“Vibe coding is less about writing faster and more about thinking differently. It’s about collapsing the gap between idea and execution, and making it possible for more people to participate in building. It’s not just for engineers anymore,” Hermann proclaims.
The v0 upgrade comes as reports suggest AI coding startups like Vercel face high operating costs and thin margins. The new agent could be seen as a bid to grow the user base and revenue. Hermann disputes this, contending his company doesn’t see itself “in a similar situation to the one described in that story.” He asserts, “We were among the first vibe coding products to implement token-based pricing back in May, and the market has since moved to this model. In AI, it has become common for new entrants to sometimes try to underprice, many of them selling at negative gross margin, to gain market share. This creates a race to the bottom and encourages what we call ‘AI optimizer’ behavior, where power users hop between the cheapest providers. That’s not a long-term strategy for building an enduring business.”
Hermann attests that what makes v0 stand out is its “product-market fit with business users…These people use v0 to create prototypes, to build landing pages, to create working versions of their product, and more. This is a markedly different population than who Cursor, Windsurf, and Claude Code target—they are AI assistants for developers. v0 is for everyone else.”