This all seems so helpful!

I've got a question about "users": For those of us that are just getting started and have a few programs that we threw up on Vercel or Render which a couple of friends are using, what's the next step to making our programs more independent? Is there a way with these services to see how often people are using our software? I'm assuming the next step is just to buy a domain and upload the code there, but the path to that just doesn't seem straight-forward to me.