Lovable sells AI app building at $25 a month, which sounds like every other tool you pay for. It doesn’t work like them. The monthly fee buys a starting pile of credits, and credits drain based on what you do, so two people on the same plan can have very different months.
Everything below is accurate as of this morning, September 3rd, and Lovable has changed its credit structure more than once this year. The numbers will move. The shape of the thing is what to hold onto.
What the money buys
Free is $0 and gets you 5 build credits a day, capped at 30 for the month. Enough to see whether you like it. Not enough to finish anything.
Pro starts at $25 a month for 100 credits, or about $21 if you pay annually. Credits roll over, you can buy more, and you can pick a bigger monthly allotment at roughly 25 cents a credit.
Business is $50 for the same 100 credits. Double the money, identical capacity. What the extra buys is single sign-on, roles, and access controls, which either matters enormously at your company or not at all.
What it doesn’t buy
A predictable number. One credit is not one message. A complicated request costs more than a simple one, and you don’t know which is which until it’s spent. Stopping a request partway doesn’t reliably stop the charge either, since Lovable bills for whatever the model already did before you hit cancel.
The bigger surprise is that building isn’t the only thing drawing down the balance. Hosting your published app, its database, and any AI features your users trigger all pull from the same pool. So an app nobody visits is cheap, and an app that works costs you money every month it keeps working.
The math
A basic prototype runs somewhere in the range of 15 to 25 credits, so Pro’s 100 covers a couple of small builds and the fixing afterward. Top-up credits cost about 20 percent more than the ones in your plan, which is the tell that you’ve outgrown your tier.
And cancelling forfeits whatever you haven’t spent, so the rollover is only worth something while you’re still paying.
So the question isn’t which plan fits your budget. It’s whether the thing you’re building will have users, because that’s the month the bill stops being a subscription and starts being a utility. Fine either way, and honestly the meter is a fairer way to charge than seats. Just don’t find it out in November.