How much do AI app builders cost, and why do prices vary so much?

What the four tools publish

Checked against each company's own pricing page on 19 August 2026.

Lovable meters credits. Its pricing page defines credits as "units Lovable uses to measure and pay for usage across your workspace", with Plan Mode at "1 credit per message" and Default Mode varying by task complexity — its own examples run from 0.50 credits for a small styling change to 1.70 for a landing page with images.

Replit uses effort-based pricing billed at checkpoints, which it describes as reflecting "time and computation". Its published examples start around $0.06 for simple requests, with more involved ones usually above $0.25 and sometimes several dollars. Plans include Core at $20/month annually with $25 of monthly credits, and Pro at $95/month with $100.

v0 meters credits and also publishes per-token rates across four models. Its free tier includes $5 of monthly credits with a 7 message per day limit; Plus is $30 per user per month.

Base44 meters two things separately — message credits for AI messages and integration actions, and integration credits — across five plans from free to $160 per month billed annually.

sup3rapp charges per build operation and has not published prices, because it is in private beta. Stating that plainly is better than a number we would have to change.

Why the headline number tells you little

The units are not comparable. A credit that varies with task complexity, a checkpoint priced by compute time, and a per-token rate are three different things. Converting between them requires knowing your own usage pattern, which you do not know until you have used the tool.

Retries may be billed. This is the part that surprises people. If a generation goes wrong and has to be redone, someone pays for the redo. On some tools that someone is you, in the same currency you use for new features — Lovable, for instance, gives ten free automatic fixes per workspace before further fixes consume credits.

Failure is not free time either. Where pricing tracks compute, a request that takes the agent longer costs more, whether or not the extra effort was your idea.

The plan is rarely the whole bill. Databases, custom domains, higher limits and integrations are frequently separate.

A better way to compare

Ask what one delivered outcome costs. Not one message, not one thousand tokens — one change you asked for, working, in front of you.

That number is hard to get from a pricing page, which is itself informative. You can approximate it during a trial: make five realistic changes to a real project, count what they cost including anything spent recovering from failures, and divide.

Why we price per build

sup3rapp charges per build operation — one change you asked for, carried through to a verified version you can open. The unit is deliberately the outcome rather than the effort, so verbosity, retries and wrong turns are the system's problem rather than yours.

The tradeoff is honest: a unit like that is only sustainable if generation usually succeeds, which is why the repair rate is the metric the product is built around. More detail is on the pricing page, including what we will and will not publish while the beta is closed.

The costs that are not on the pricing page

The database, once it is real. Free tiers are generous until you have data, and the step up is often where the monthly cost actually lands.

A custom domain. Frequently a paid-plan feature rather than a per-domain charge.

Seats. Two tools in this comparison price per user, which changes the arithmetic the moment a second person is involved.

Your time. The largest cost and the one nobody meters. An hour spent describing a bug you cannot read to a model that cannot see it is more expensive than any credit balance, and it does not appear on any invoice.

That last one is why "cost per delivered change" is the number to estimate rather than cost per message. A cheaper tool that needs three attempts is not cheaper.