Lovable is a browser-based AI app builder from a Stockholm company of the same name. It began as the open-source gpt-engineer CLI, which went viral in 2023, then relaunched as a commercial no-code platform in late 2024. You describe an app in plain language and Lovable generates, runs, and deploys a full-stack web application with nothing to install locally.
The appeal is the jump from a written idea to a working prototype that already has a frontend, a backend, authentication, and a live URL. A live preview updates as the build runs, so you watch the app take shape instead of waiting on a compile. For a non-coder this is the closest thing to describing software in a sentence and getting back a running app.
Lovable is not an IDE or a developer coding assistant like Cursor or Claude Code. It produces web applications, not native mobile apps. It also has a real ceiling past simple prototypes, where the AI starts breaking features it already built, and the credit-based billing can turn expensive once that happens. The specifics are in the limitations below.
Lovable Free gives 5 daily credits and keeps projects public. Pro is $25 per month for 100 monthly credits, private projects, and custom domains. Business is $50 per month and adds SSO and team governance. Enterprise is custom-priced for volume credits and admin controls.
Key Features
Strengths & Limitations
- Nothing in its class gets to a deployed, working app faster. Generation that would take hours of manual scaffolding by hand finishes in minutes.
- Backend provisioning beats the direct competitors. Bolt and v0 leave you wiring up auth and storage by hand, while Lovable stands up a working database and login flow on the first prompt.
- Generated code stays yours. Everything exports to GitHub as standard React and TypeScript with no proprietary format, so a developer can take a project over and finish it in a normal editor.
- Apps start breaking at around 10 or more screens with interconnected state. The AI changes one feature and quietly breaks an adjacent one, and you spend more time managing its mistakes than building. This is a context limit, not a bug a later release fixes.
- Debugging loops burn credits fast. When the AI gets stuck in a fix-break-fix cycle on a bug you reported, every attempt costs credits, and people describe single features eating 60 to 150 credits before the problem clears.
- AI-generated Supabase security is frequently wrong. Tables often ship without row-level security enabled, which leaves them readable and writable through the anon key that sits in your frontend bundle, where anyone can pull it out.
Who It’s For
Pricing Breakdown
The sticker price hides the real cost. Lovable bills on two separate layers. One is subscription credits for prompting the AI. The other is usage-based charges for Cloud hosting and the AI features inside your deployed app, and that second layer is what fills the complaint threads.
A first app usually consumes 150 to 300 credits across its build, so one moderately complex project can eat a month or two of the Pro allocation. Heavy iteration months, once you add top-ups and Cloud costs, climb to $60 to $80.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, there is a free tier, but the daily credits reset at midnight and do not roll over, and free projects are public only. Pro lifts the public-only limit and the daily cap. One thing to watch is that unused monthly credits on Pro expire after two months, so stockpiling them does not work.
Not by default. The AI often leaves new database tables without access rules switched on, so anyone can read or write them using the public API key embedded in your site. Turn on row-level security and move sensitive logic to the server before you launch anything real.
No. Lovable outputs web apps, so on a phone you get a responsive website, not an App Store or Play Store build. Teams that need a true native app usually prototype the idea in Lovable first, then rebuild it in a mobile-focused stack.
Lovable removed Figma Import in November 2025. Design now starts from a text prompt or from Visual Edits inside the builder. If your old process piped Figma frames straight into Lovable, you will need to describe those designs in prompts instead.