How do I make sure my work isn't public?

Vercel’s deployment protection service is available on the Pro plans without any extra purchase, so might be suitable for your needs. The Advanced Deployment Protection is a paid service that includes extra features but we can’t offer a trial of this. You can see the difference between the offerings here: Deployment Protection on Vercel

Secondly, you can also create Vercel WAF custom rules to prevent website from accessing from specific IP, country, user agent based on your requirement: Vercel Firewall

Alternatively you’re always able to create your own password/protection service using Middleware. We have an example of how to do this here: examples/edge-middleware/basic-auth-password at main · vercel/examples · GitHub

Please let us know if you have any further questions or issues.