Lovable Pricing: Where the Credits Go

Lovable pricing looks simple on the pricing page. Pro is $25 a month for 100 credits, Business is $50 for the same 100 credits plus SSO and the team controls, and you can buy bigger tiers on either plan, all the way up to 10,000 credits. The part people miss is what those credits now pay for. Since the switch to one credit balance (it rolled out from June 1, 2026), your credits don’t just pay for prompts. They pay for your live app too.

That changes the math more than the price does, so most of this post is about that.

What a credit actually buys

Build mode is billed by the work done, not per message. Lovable’s own examples: making a button gray costs 0.50 credits, removing a footer 0.90, adding authentication 1.20, a landing page with generated images 2.00. Plan mode is a flat 1 credit per message, plus whatever its research subagents cost. Chat mode has its own small per-message price and a daily allowance that’s free until it runs out (that offer is marked temporary and runs through October 31, 2026).

On top of the monthly credits you get 5 daily build credits on every plan. On Free they stop after 30 in a calendar month, so a free account gets six days of building and then nothing until the 1st. On Pro and Business there’s no cap, which is worth about 150 extra credits a month if you build every day. They expire at midnight UTC, so they only help if you use them that day.

You can see the exact cost of any reply under More options, Credits used. Open it. Most people never do, and it’s the fastest way to learn which of your habits are expensive.

Where the credits really go

Not on the big features. On the bug loop.

A founder sent us their usage export last month. 412 credits in four weeks on a Pro 400 tier. We went through it by day. The first week was the app itself: the dashboard, Stripe checkout, an onboarding flow. Maybe 90 credits. Then they hit a bug where the profiles row wasn’t being created for users who signed up with Google, so the app crashed right after login. They spent the next 11 days and roughly 260 credits on it. Lovable fixed the symptom four separate times (a null check here, a retry there, a loading state) and never touched the actual cause, which was a trigger on auth.users that only fired for email signups. A developer reading the SQL would have found it in about 20 minutes.

That’s the pattern we see over and over. Credits don’t get burned by ambition. They get burned by a bug the model can’t see, and by prompts like “it’s still broken, fix it” that send it off to rewrite the same three files again. If one bug has eaten more than 20 or 30 credits, stop prompting. Switch to Plan mode, ask it to explain the cause before it changes anything, or get someone to read the code. Lovable even checks in by default when a single message passes 20 credits. Don’t just click Continue.

/goal runs are the other trap. They keep working until the goal is met, and Lovable’s docs say plainly that the same work costs noticeably more that way.

Lovable Cloud pricing is now the same credit pool

This is the change that matters for anyone with real users.

Hosting and the built-in backend (database, storage, auth, edge functions, realtime) are billed as “run credits” out of the same balance you build with. Every plan gets a 20 credit monthly Cloud grant and a 4 credit monthly AI grant, labelled temporary, and they don’t roll over. After that, your app’s traffic is eating the credits you were going to build with. You can see it under More, Cloud, Usage, broken down into database server, database storage, network, storage, compute and realtime.

The database runs on an instance size you pick: Tiny, Mini, Small, Medium, Large, X-Large. Bigger costs more credits per hour. Lovable will happily offer to resize you when the database is under pressure, and sometimes that’s right, but often the real fix is a missing index. And stored files keep costing credits even while the project is paused, which surprises people.

Now the bit that should worry you. When the balance hits zero, building stops, which is fine. But AI features in your deployed app stop too, and the backend services “pause shortly after you run out of credits.” Your users can’t log in. And Lovable’s docs say you can’t access or export your data while it’s paused. Adding credits doesn’t always restart it either; sometimes you have to open Cloud, Overview and click Wake up.

So one heavy week of prompting on a bug can take your production app down. Your marketing site stays live, everything behind the login doesn’t. Set a usage alert and a hard limit per project under Usage limits & alerts, and turn on auto top-up with a threshold well above zero if anyone is paying you for this app. Pro top-ups are $15 per 50 credits ($0.30 each), Business top-ups are $30 per 50. They last 12 months.

Rollover, downgrades and cancelling

Unused monthly credits roll over while you stay subscribed, but they still expire two months after they were issued on monthly billing. Annual billing gives you two months free, and the credits last until a month after the year ends.

Downgrading a tier keeps what you have. Downgrading to Free is different: your unexpired subscription credits freeze and can’t be used on Free. Top-ups and bonus credits still work. If you cancel to save money, spend the credits first.

When to stop paying for credits

If the app is still an idea, Lovable is cheap. $25 or $50 a month to get a working prototype in front of people is a great deal and I’d tell anyone to do it.

It gets worse once three things are true at the same time: you have real users, your monthly usage keeps climbing, and most of the credits go to fixing rather than building. At that point you’re paying Lovable rates for your database, and prompting your way around bugs at $0.30 a go. A Supabase project you own costs $25 a month on Pro, with $10 of compute credit that covers a Micro instance, it doesn’t pause because your build budget ran out, and a developer can work on it directly. That’s the move our Lovable Cloud to Supabase migration handles, data, users and files included. You can keep building in Lovable afterwards.

If you’re not sure which side of that line you’re on, send us your usage breakdown and we’ll tell you. Contact us, or see what a handover costs.