Lovable Pricing 2026: Credits, Plans and What $25 Gets You
· 5 min read · Tools
Lovable Pro costs $25 a month for 100 credits. The free tier gives you 5 daily credits, which is enough to poke around but not enough to ship. For a small app, $25 can cover a first version and a few rounds of edits. Whether it lasts the month depends on how often the AI has to fix its own mistakes.
One caveat before the details. Guides disagree on small things, like how long unused credits last and whether daily credits cap out. I've flagged those spots below. Check lovable.dev/pricing before you pay.
Lovable plans at a glance
| Plan | Price (monthly billing) | Credits | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 5 daily credits, max 30 per month | Good for testing the builder |
| Pro | $25 | 100 monthly + 5 daily | Private projects, custom domains, code access |
| Business | $50 | 100 monthly + 5 daily | SSO and a data opt-out option |
| Enterprise | Custom | Volume-based | Dedicated support, custom setup |
Higher tiers exist. One guide lists 200 credits for $50, scaling up to 10,000 credits for $2,250 a month. Annual billing is cheaper: Pro is $21 a month billed annually at $250 a year.
How Lovable credits work
Lovable charges per message, not per seat or per hour. Every message that builds or edits your app costs credits, and the cost depends on the task. One guide puts it at 0.5 credits for a minor style change, up to 2 credits for building a full landing page. Treat those as ballpark figures. Lovable decides the cost per message, and bigger or messier requests cost more.
Daily credits vs monthly credits
- Daily credits: They reset at midnight UTC and don't roll over. Use them or lose them.
- Monthly credits: These are the 100 you pay for. Per Lovable's pricing page, as one guide reads it, unused monthly credits expire two months after they are issued. Other guides say one extra month on monthly plans. Either way, they don't last forever.
- Cloud credits: Every plan includes 20 Cloud credits a month to host your app's backend. Once real users arrive, hosting can eat into your balance.
Pro's daily credits are the murky part. One guide says Pro gets 5 daily credits, up to 150 total per month. Another says there is no monthly cap on daily credits for paid plans. Don't plan around a 250-credit month. Plan around 100, and treat the daily credits as a bonus.
How far $25 a month actually goes
The simple math: $25 for 100 credits is about $0.25 a credit. Using the cost range above, 100 credits is roughly 200 tiny tweaks at 0.5 each, or about 50 big builds at 2 each. Real use lands somewhere in between, and it lands lower if the AI loops on a bug. One guide notes your real bill depends on how complex your builds are and how often the AI breaks things while trying to fix them.
A rough picture of how a month might go. This is my arithmetic, not a measured result:
- First build: a landing page plus a simple signed-in dashboard takes a handful of big prompts. That's your biggest single spend.
- Polish: copy edits, spacing, colors. These are cheap, so batch them.
- Bug fixing: this is the budget killer. Three rounds of "still broken" can cost more than the original feature.
For one active project, $25 is a workable starting point. For two or three projects, or an app you keep reworking, you'll probably run short.
What happens when you run out
You can buy top-ups. Pro users can buy top-ups starting at $15 for 50 credits. That works out to $0.30 a credit, which is more than the plan rate. The same guide lists Business top-ups at $30 per 50 credits. If you top up every month, moving to the next credit tier is probably cheaper. Compare the numbers on the pricing page before you decide.
Seven ways to make credits last
- Plan before you prompt. Write the spec in a doc first: pages, data, who signs in. Vague prompts lead to rebuilds, and rebuilds cost credits. Our guide to prompts for AI coding covers this.
- Batch small edits. One message with five copy changes is cheaper than five messages.
- Don't retry blindly. If a fix fails twice, stop and ask for a diagnosis first (prompt below).
- Use the daily credits. On the free plan, they're the only thing you get.
- Connect Git early. Lovable offers GitHub sync on every plan, the free one included. That gives you a restore point when an edit breaks things. See Git for beginners.
- Move heavy edits out. Once the app works, you can pull the code into another editor for fiddly work. Compare costs in our Cursor pricing breakdown and Claude Code pricing guide.
- Test before you ask for fixes. A quick manual run-through finds problems in one pass. Try this simple testing routine.
A prompt to paste before you burn credits on a bug
Before changing any code, diagnose this bug.
Symptom: [what I see]
Expected: [what should happen]
Steps to reproduce: [1, 2, 3]
List the 3 most likely causes, which file or component
each would live in, and how I can confirm each one.
Then make the smallest change that fixes the most likely cause.
Do not touch unrelated files.This forces one focused fix instead of a pile of speculative edits. If you want more like it, we have 12 debugging prompts.
Is Pro worth it for you?
Pay for Pro if you have one project you're serious about and you need a custom domain, private projects or no Lovable badge. One guide recommends the 100-credit tier for one active project with custom domains and badge removal.
Stay on Free if you're still validating the idea. Spend your 30 monthly credits on a rough prototype and show it to a few people. Our 7-step validation guide will help, and daily app ideas can get you started if you're short on ideas.
Think twice if you're a developer who already pays for an editor. Lovable's strength is a complete app, with backend and hosting, from a chat. If that isn't what you need, a coding agent may be better value. See Lovable vs Bolt vs v0 for a head-to-head. On price, one comparison finds Lovable cheaper for teams, since Pro covers unlimited users, while v0 Plus is $30 per user per month. For a single user, the entry plans are close.
Costs outside the Lovable bill
- Hosting traffic: as noted above, Cloud usage can draw down your credits as users arrive.
- Domain: Pro lets you connect a custom domain, but you still buy the domain yourself.
- Payments and auth: Stripe takes its own cut, and some auth providers charge at scale. See our Stripe setup guide.
- Your own backend: if you bring your own Supabase, some Lovable Cloud conveniences are lost. Read Supabase for vibe coding first.
If you ship something with Lovable, share what you built.
FAQ
Is Lovable free?
Yes, with limits. The free plan gives you 5 build credits a day, capped at 30 a month. That's enough for a prototype or a few experiments, not for steady building. Custom domains and badge removal need a paid plan.
Do Lovable credits roll over?
Monthly credits on a paid plan do, for a limited time. Guides disagree on whether that's one extra month or two, so check the pricing page. Daily credits never roll over. They expire at midnight UTC.
How many credits does one prompt cost?
It varies. One guide's range is 0.5 credits for a small style tweak up to 2 for a full landing page. Complex features and bug-fix loops cost more. Watch your balance after your first few prompts to get a feel for your own average.
