5 ms·

Is Lovable getting monetization wrong?

140 points by FinnLobsien 1y ago

pwatsonwailes 1y ago
I'm pretty sure the person who wrote this has never run pricing research for a brand. Short answer, they can ignore Gabor-Granger because their cost base is so low compared to their revenue, so they'd be looking at Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter to set a benchmark for where the pricing probably lands, and a conjoint study to understand the value of different elements for segmenting different versions of the product at different price levels. Obviously positioning, who they're positioning against, how they communicate that, the level to which they're known amongst the market etc all feed in to this, but that'd be a decent starter for ten. This is an overly simplistic version of where to go with pricing for a brand like this, but that's where I'd begin with creating pricing for them.
- echelon 1y ago
  I'm an engineer. Where do I begin learning these things without taking an MBA?
  - Jun8 1y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iuRbDBAqyFY&t=9s&pp=2AEJkAIB https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iuRbDBAqyFY&t=9s&pp=2AEJkAIB https://www.qualtrics.com/marketplace/vanwesterndorp-pricing-sensitivity-study/ https://www.qualtrics.com/marketplace/vanwesterndorp-pricing... https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Pricing-Man-Affects-Everything/dp/3319203991 https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Pricing-Man-Affects-Every... https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing-Profitably/dp/0131856774/ref=mp_s_a_1_2 https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing-Prof...
    - echelon 1y ago
      Thank you so much!
- neolefty 1y ago
  Yup. Like comparing pricing of cars to pricing of horses. Lovable is competing with future platforms, not present ones.
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    This is interesting to pull apart if anyone wants to add more id love to hear. Right now Lovable has competition in the vibe coding arena. Like Replit for example. I found Replit to be better in my testing. I think there is an interesting curve where software is generally worthless (see Github!) but software plus marketing/sales etc. is valuable. But if you have any kind of scale that software needs to be robust and AI can't do that yet. So there is a weird evolving Venn diagram where the final app industry fits in. If one player can take it yeah they'll be the next Google but that's a big IF and a big WHO.
- pluto_modadic 1y ago
  what's funny is they're a bill metering company.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  How do you know what their cost base is? I don't quite understand how you'd be evaluating that. Their cost base is largely driven by the LLM and cloud companies. The $25/month pricing feels chosen to be similar to other unrelated SaaS businesses more than something based on a serious pricing analysis. And the article confirms that, saying they made up a starting price and then immediately lost money due to (doh) selling a product where your costs scale by usage for an unlimited flat rate, which is surely one of the most basic pricing issues out there. And not just for LLMs: they host the apps too, putting them on the hook for hosting costs. They're using a ton of very expensive PaaS services like Supabase to do that too. Then they have the free tier. Such services often have massive free tier costs; if their userbase is made up of a lot of people just trying stuff out quickly before exporting it to GitHub to continue, that problem will be worse. According to their blog, they have 30,000+ paying customers but there are 25,000 new apps created per day with 1.2M apps overall. So, clearly, almost all apps are being created by free users. Don't get me wrong, maybe they're printing money like there's no tomorrow, or maybe they will soon. But it feels like the sort of business that's probably burning VC money to buy market share. If their cost base is good then they feel very vulnerable to an OpenAI or AWS releasing something tomorrow that takes away a big chunk of the business, seeing as that's where the bulk of the value lies. Oracle already has something quite similar launched in APEX.
  - nichochar 1y ago
    I promise you they're negative on unit economics. In addition to what you're saying: - hosting costs - live sandboxes costs They're betting on LLM costs going way down and VC funded until then
logifail 1y ago
> building the software that can build all other software All other software? I'm afraid I stopped believing the author at that point...
- ricardobeat 1y ago
  It’s a marketing piece written by copywriters. Probably with AI suggesting the main arguments.
Jun8 1y ago
I’m using Lovable heavily for PM prototyping and it’s great. I think, if anything, current subscription may be too cheap! They’re probably want to get a huge mass of users now, eg they recently had a free usage weekend. The comments on the Add Ons are spot on, I think: “Lovable is creating lots of new software founders who will eventually spend lots of money on vendors. That money will flow, but Lovable currently captures zero of it.” Having a Lovable App Store sounds like an excellent tool.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  I think you must be the killer use case. As a programmer this is not good enough yet to warrant my time using it for production code (nor are its competitors) However if I need to prototype for throwaway it would be ok. These things right now compete with Figma and wire frames. Hopefully they lead ultimately to better UX in software.
  - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
    > These things right now compete with Figma and wire frames I think that is exactly correct. And beyond Figma or wireframes, they can actually be launched to see if they get traction and have product market fit. Of course, I've seen tons of "throwaway" code that somehow never gets thrown away, and then, somewhat paradoxically, iteration velocity craters as the dev team tries to get a "prototype" to handle real load. So what I'm saying is that I think things like Lovable are fantastic tools, but I'm quite confident they will be horribly misused and some poor sap will have the job of getting this stuff actually working with edge cases, security issues, scale, etc. My prediction: this will look basically exactly like Visual Basic in the late 90s. VB was also heralded as "non-expert programmers can make apps just by drag and drop!" I actually think VB was a great product, the problem was most VB programmers were not, so VB apps took on a very negative connotation: like you could tell it was coded by a "VB coder", so you expected it to suck.
- GenerWork 1y ago
  As a product designer, I'm seriously looking at using Lovable for quick ideation and prototyping. Showing users a series of Figma screens can be nice, but virtually everybody responds better to an interactive prototype.
clvx 1y ago
I don't think the idea sticks with me. The final products of these services are never reliable. Right now, except for some hyperscalers, any similar service has integrated their deployments to some hyperscaler which means any day 2 operations will happen in someone else's computer (supabase, azure/aws, etc). On top of that, you have third party services that you need to integrate and manage their pricing plus auth. That alone is another challenge. Let's not even start with stateful data and migrations which is almost non existent. The main problem is these tools don't tackle day 2 operations so it will be handled to some developer to make it happen which means exporting your code to some VCS service which I think it's only github. Right there, it's a threat for lovable and others. On top of that, there's not a real feedback loop between manual integration (external dev making it prod ready) and keeping the MVP workflow. Also, there's no real way these services can say "you are free to touch these components without breaking incompatibility with our system, anything else here be dragons". In other words, You need to own the ecosystem to make more money. Funnel the capabilities to your own ecosystem.
- mkagenius 1y ago
  > manual integration (external dev making it prod ready) and keeping the MVP workflow. Right, the codebase generated by these can get huge, but maintenance can also be aided by AI tools like GitIngest[1], GitPodcast[1] etc. all helping you understand any new codebase easily or someone can query their doubts. So, I wouldn't strike these kinds of tools yet. AFAIK, v0 already lets you connect github. 1. https://gitingest.com https://gitingest.com 2. https://gitpodcast.com https://gitpodcast.com
b0a04gl 1y ago
i see one crazy real leverage: every prototype built here is a frozen snapshot of someone's product thinking in motion. like u can literally watch how ppl prioritize flows, kill features mid-wireframe, choose friction over flexibility. it’s raw cognitive output if lovable ever starts versioning those moves, storing reasoning behind edits, even lightly, u got a time-series of product intuition across thousands of users. that’s applied decision memory. there's a window here to become the place where product sense gets archived and replayed.
- njovin 1y ago
  ...and then PM's can have the same wonderful experiences as engineers: finding the exact commit where a major change was made 6+ months ago by a former employee, with a comment like 'updated behavior' that gives zero insight into what led to the change or why it was made.
  - ralferoo 1y ago
    Since working a one company that required it, ever since I've adopted the policy of including a link to the bug / feature ticket for every commit. Even for my personal projects, if I'm fixing something, I'll manage them with JIRA and will create a 1 line bug ticket just before committing so that I have an ID to reference. I also have a long-lasting tickets for general refactoring / code cleanup without a bug fix.
- orbifold 1y ago
  I think what current agent's are missing is taste or the ability to tune taste. So capturing taste across many users might be really valuable.
hackitup7 1y ago
Perhaps me just stupid and do prompts bad, but I can't make Lovable come up with anything really differentiated as a design. I'm curious if folks have tips on how to use it well as I really love the idea behind it.
asdev 1y ago
I don't get how this company makes money. Everyone who uses these tools is just building prototypes. They get to 60-70% functionality, but when it comes to actually productionize and launch, 99% of these projects will get abandoned. The churn has to be absurdly high, maybe people are just forgetting to cancel their subscriptions. Or they're just marketing very hard and getting new sign ups/subscriptions, but will crash and burn soon enough.
- _fat_santa 1y ago
  > Everyone who uses these tools is just building prototypes. But also I think that's kinda the point. Like for example we have to do a UI redesign of an app my company is building and our "wireframes" are just v0 projects my PO created in one afternoon. I think wireframing is where these tools really shine. It's gives you roughly the same ideas as building a wireframe in Figma but it's way less work and you end up with higher fidelity wireframes.Like sure if I were to peek at the code under the hood I'm certain it's close to dogshit but the code doesn't really matter at that stage.
  - asdev 1y ago
    Any serious company has a brand/design system which Lovable can't leverage well, thus needs designers to use in Figma. Either way, my point is the customer LTV will be super low for use cases like this.
    - lbreakjai 1y ago
      I haven't tried with lovable, but gemini studio is fully capable of following a styleguide based on a screenshot, which is probably the crudest and least refined protocol I could think of. I'm sure there's already integrations somewhere that could allow a designer to specify a bunch of brand colours, to generate a styleguide out of it in plain english, and get a working prototype out of it.
      - marcosdumay 1y ago
        A design system is not "following a styleguide based on a screenshot". A design system is an ontology of UI elements that your software has to adhere to, with several rules about how those elements are or aren't allowed to interact. Following a styleguide will make your software break as soon as the design system gets updated.
Fokamul 1y ago
Cybersecurity will be booming in 2026, trust me bro :) I fully support vibe-coding in corporate env., plese bring more :D
- mrkramer 1y ago
  Bug bounty programs will blossom like hell!!
  - _pdp_ 1y ago
    We have AI tools working on those as well. ;)
elitegolfhub 1y ago
[dead]
deadbabe 1y ago
These apps will look dated in a few years, don’t waste your time. You’re just having fun playing around making old shit that could have made you a lot of money 10 years ago but is now just a weekend project. That’s the way things go in tech. Starry-eyed dreamers will let their imagination run wild, but they’re the laggards, the industry is already thinking ahead. The next generation of apps isn’t going to look like the previous gen. No beautiful UIs and fancy CSS. No UI at all. Instead, everyone will have some kind of platform like Cursor, but instead of just coding, it’s for everything. Subscribing to new services for your AI to use will be the equivalent of downloading apps from an AppStore to your phone. Then you can just say things like “fuck this person! AI, give me an OSINT profile of this Redditor!” and since your AI has the osint app it compiles the info instantly and says “here, damn”. No need to open an app, just straight info into your brain as quickly as possible. AI has clearly made us tired of googling endlessly for info on random websites, so why are we still opening up apps to do various tasks? Because we want to see pretty interfaces? Get real. It’s time for the UNIX philosophy to go mainstream. Start thinking of how your product can minimize time to satisfaction, graphical interfaces get in the way of satisfaction. The only problem is we currently don’t have a single unifying platform like an iPhone or something to consolidate a user base, but it will come. Start planning for that day so you can launch new services on day 1. It will be a gold rush. And in the end, a lot of people will find they will struggle with coming up with good AI app ideas, because 80% of their idea was just putting a pretty interface in front of something complex. That’s how you know it was mostly a bad idea.
- lbreakjai 1y ago
  Would you need a new platform, or just a screen and a microphone?
- lubujackson 1y ago
  Love this concept - LLMs as the new "API layer" to everything. Don't design a frontend because the user can generate one on the fly or use their own styling or pick a common "theme".
  - deadbabe 1y ago
exiguus 1y ago
The marketing is good. Especially on LinkedIn, for non technical people. But I am not convinced. Lovable is a nice Website or App builder. Nothing for professionals, unless they want to build an prototype. Even building MVPs is nearly impossible. It's like v0 from Vercel or anything you can do with other Agents like Claude or Co-Pilot. Lovable is promising a bit to much for my taste.
Workaccount2 1y ago
I'm a non-tech worker in a non-tech industry, let me state two things: - Software today is written to cover as many use cases with as many features to target as many users a possible. - End users very often only use a tiny slice of the program's capabilities, but still pay for the entire program. This creates a situation where the people writing software see it as a monumental undertaking to get good functional programs (it is), and end users see programs as having annoying learning curves with lots of bloat and "unnecessary" features. LLMs do an excellent job of fixing this for end users because it allows them to easily create a program that does the handful of tasks that they normally need to use MegaSoftware for. And it's tailor made exactly for the use case. And the LLM can tell you exactly how to use it. I can give a brief example where I used gemini to create a CAD file transposition tool that utilized a simple GUI tailor made for the files my company works with. This allowed us to forgo a (very) expensive CAD software package to work through converting our archive of files. A probably 2M LOC program could be skipped because we only needed 3k LOC functionality. I really cannot stress enough how often this is the case, and why SWEs see LLMs as weak tools while end users see them as gods. There will still be a need for huge software packages in the future, but I know I never again have to pay for a huge class of "here is a large solution space that covers your small scope problem" software. To bring it home, loveable understands this, an sees that the futures has lots of non-tech people "writing" software. Standard IDEs are not the tools your mom will use to make a "Friends and family birthday reminder" app.
- 98codes 1y ago
  End users rarely pay for the program. Someone in their management chain OKs the purchase, or there's a larger purchase with a cross-charge to the department for the license cost. the problem comes when software needs to meet every whim of the decision maker, when really the users only will ever use 20% at best.
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    I think you may be assuming a certain enterprise size and accompanying workflow, probably would need stats to actually know how much of software is bought in this way however, and if the other way described would open up possible purchases by smaller companies, as was claimed.
lbreakjai 1y ago
I work for a very small startup. Our CTO heavily uses lovable for our internal tools. Think dashboards, user management ... A somewhat standard UI over CRUD operations. In previous roles, we either used some SaaS platform and would end up designing features based on the limitations of the tools, or we'd spin up a team to roll our own tailored solution. (or, God forbid, use Oracle and pay consultants a small fortune to do it for us). With lovable, our CTO can validate assumptions and iterate on their own. Even if the code was absolutely garbage and we deleted all of it, this alone saves us a ton of man hours per feature. There's an entire lossy communication loop that's been removed. Now, the code is only ok. We generate API clients from openapi definitions but it will struggle to properly orchestrate them. It will absolutely not have sane defaults anywhere, and will abuse the "any" type. You still need a human in the loop, but my back of the napkin calculation is we'd have to hire two full time developers to do the work it's been doing for us.
- htrp 1y ago
  Why does your CTO not use cursor or whatever other code IDE tools to build on your own standard internal stack? At least that would allow them to handoff to other members of the team.
  - lbreakjai 1y ago
    Lovable operates at a higher abstraction level. You describe what you want, the UI magically updates, you never have to see the code. Changes made by lovable aren't anything special. They live in their own branch, and get periodically merged to master, so you can carry on working on it as if it was any other project.
  - einsteinx2 1y ago
    I assume it’s because they don’t actually know how to code at all or how to use developer tools for that matter.
donnaoana 1y ago
Lovable should be in the money flow, allow their users to monetize
donnaoana 1y ago
Lovable should allow max flexibility to its users, allow them to monetize
janalsncm 1y ago
I recently used lovable to create the scaffolding for an app. It did a great job, far better than I expected. However, it also squishes everything into one JS file, making it unwieldy for anything moderately complex. After I fell off the happy path (integrating onnx was basically impossible), I had to spend a fair amount of time reworking it. I’m probably not the target audience though. And I got the end result faster than I would’ve, and it’s better looking.
mrkramer 1y ago
Is there really a reason why should I pay for vibe coding apps like this when I can vibe code for free and unlimited with Google's Gemini?
esher 1y ago
Good product placement of Lago :)
chaosprint 1y ago
just have a question, for a young company like this, isn't mrr better than arr? or do they have that many yearly subscription? cuz u always subscribe and cancel different providers
_pdp_ 1y ago
The kind of things I see mostly produced by these tools are landing pages, example dashboards and simple utilities like calculators and other simple stuff. There is certainly a space for these but nothing ground breaking that was not possible before with other beginner-friendly tools. The only difference is now that there is more freedom because LLMs can do more with less constraints. I wonder what will happen after the honeymoon is over - after people realise that software development is not about writing new exciting code but maintaining things that should have been replaced years ago that are now too important because other people depend on it. > I remember we were building a micro-app like that and it took at least a month, now it takes 3 minutes. ...please, statements like this have the power to invalidate the rest of the commentary. in 3 minutes you can complete a few prompts not nearly enough to write a piece of software the allegedly takes 3 months to do.
socketcluster 1y ago
What this article touches on is why I focused only on the serverless part with my project https://saasufy.com/ https://saasufy.com/ and why didn't implement any frontend UI for it (besides the control panel which is only concerned with backend concepts like schema definitions, auth, access control...). Now Claude is allowing generation and hosting of UI apps directly from their chat interface so it would be reinventing the wheel to build a UI. AI companies are going to be working really hard to ensure that users do not bypass their chat interface because AI APIs don't provide much lock-in factor for them.
nichochar 1y ago
This analysis is very much on point. I'm building a product in this space (https://getmocha.com https://getmocha.com), and can share a few more insider insights: - The churn from companies like lovable is indeed very high, and user frustration is high also. - There are sub-niches available. Building internal tools is not the same as landing pages is not the same as saas. In the previous website builder market, different players (webflow, squarespace, wix) found and dominated a sub-niche - The market is way bigger than anyone realizes. Today hundreds of millions for basically early adopters and highly tech-savvy users. This tech can and will go mainstream - A huge issue with lovable, solved by others like mocha and replit, is the app backend. Lovable took a shortcut and partnered with supabase but that deal will not last. Supabase is losing big on their free tier (had to raise 200M to support it) and both want to capture the margin from the customer. There will be a reckoning.
maest 1y ago
Oh great, another article on this company. I swear I keep being bombarded left and right with content desperately telling me hyperbolic things like "Lovable is the last piece of software humanity will ever build".
dzonga 1y ago
what most people assume: myth (a) - software engineers mostly work on software for consumers reality (a) - software engineers mostly work on software for enterprises myth (a) - it's just crud reality (a) - it's crud but with a bunch of business rules behind it that ai can't grasp every other shiny 'saas' that's not the reality of the majority of software out there.
r0fl 1y ago
What are the most popular use cases for these vibe coding products? What are people trying to build where they are getting stuck at 75-90%?

140 points by FinnLobsien 1y ago

I'm pretty sure the person who wrote this has never run pricing research for a brand. Short answer, they can ignore Gabor-Granger because their cost base is so low compared to their revenue, so they'd be looking at Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter to set a benchmark for where the pricing probably lands, and a conjoint study to understand the value of different elements for segmenting different versions of the product at different price levels. Obviously positioning, who they're positioning against, how they communicate that, the level to which they're known amongst the market etc all feed in to this, but that'd be a decent starter for ten. This is an overly simplistic version of where to go with pricing for a brand like this, but that's where I'd begin with creating pricing for them.

echelon 1y ago
I'm an engineer. Where do I begin learning these things without taking an MBA?
- Jun8 1y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iuRbDBAqyFY&t=9s&pp=2AEJkAIB https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iuRbDBAqyFY&t=9s&pp=2AEJkAIB https://www.qualtrics.com/marketplace/vanwesterndorp-pricing-sensitivity-study/ https://www.qualtrics.com/marketplace/vanwesterndorp-pricing... https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Pricing-Man-Affects-Everything/dp/3319203991 https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Pricing-Man-Affects-Every... https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing-Profitably/dp/0131856774/ref=mp_s_a_1_2 https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing-Prof...
  - echelon 1y ago
    Thank you so much!
neolefty 1y ago
Yup. Like comparing pricing of cars to pricing of horses. Lovable is competing with future platforms, not present ones.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  This is interesting to pull apart if anyone wants to add more id love to hear. Right now Lovable has competition in the vibe coding arena. Like Replit for example. I found Replit to be better in my testing. I think there is an interesting curve where software is generally worthless (see Github!) but software plus marketing/sales etc. is valuable. But if you have any kind of scale that software needs to be robust and AI can't do that yet. So there is a weird evolving Venn diagram where the final app industry fits in. If one player can take it yeah they'll be the next Google but that's a big IF and a big WHO.
pluto_modadic 1y ago
what's funny is they're a bill metering company.
mike_hearn 1y ago
How do you know what their cost base is? I don't quite understand how you'd be evaluating that. Their cost base is largely driven by the LLM and cloud companies. The $25/month pricing feels chosen to be similar to other unrelated SaaS businesses more than something based on a serious pricing analysis. And the article confirms that, saying they made up a starting price and then immediately lost money due to (doh) selling a product where your costs scale by usage for an unlimited flat rate, which is surely one of the most basic pricing issues out there. And not just for LLMs: they host the apps too, putting them on the hook for hosting costs. They're using a ton of very expensive PaaS services like Supabase to do that too. Then they have the free tier. Such services often have massive free tier costs; if their userbase is made up of a lot of people just trying stuff out quickly before exporting it to GitHub to continue, that problem will be worse. According to their blog, they have 30,000+ paying customers but there are 25,000 new apps created per day with 1.2M apps overall. So, clearly, almost all apps are being created by free users. Don't get me wrong, maybe they're printing money like there's no tomorrow, or maybe they will soon. But it feels like the sort of business that's probably burning VC money to buy market share. If their cost base is good then they feel very vulnerable to an OpenAI or AWS releasing something tomorrow that takes away a big chunk of the business, seeing as that's where the bulk of the value lies. Oracle already has something quite similar launched in APEX.
- nichochar 1y ago
  I promise you they're negative on unit economics. In addition to what you're saying: - hosting costs - live sandboxes costs They're betting on LLM costs going way down and VC funded until then

logifail 1y ago

> building the software that can build all other software All other software? I'm afraid I stopped believing the author at that point...

ricardobeat 1y ago
It’s a marketing piece written by copywriters. Probably with AI suggesting the main arguments.

Jun8 1y ago

I’m using Lovable heavily for PM prototyping and it’s great. I think, if anything, current subscription may be too cheap! They’re probably want to get a huge mass of users now, eg they recently had a free usage weekend. The comments on the Add Ons are spot on, I think: “Lovable is creating lots of new software founders who will eventually spend lots of money on vendors. That money will flow, but Lovable currently captures zero of it.” Having a Lovable App Store sounds like an excellent tool.

bravesoul2 1y ago
I think you must be the killer use case. As a programmer this is not good enough yet to warrant my time using it for production code (nor are its competitors) However if I need to prototype for throwaway it would be ok. These things right now compete with Figma and wire frames. Hopefully they lead ultimately to better UX in software.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  > These things right now compete with Figma and wire frames I think that is exactly correct. And beyond Figma or wireframes, they can actually be launched to see if they get traction and have product market fit. Of course, I've seen tons of "throwaway" code that somehow never gets thrown away, and then, somewhat paradoxically, iteration velocity craters as the dev team tries to get a "prototype" to handle real load. So what I'm saying is that I think things like Lovable are fantastic tools, but I'm quite confident they will be horribly misused and some poor sap will have the job of getting this stuff actually working with edge cases, security issues, scale, etc. My prediction: this will look basically exactly like Visual Basic in the late 90s. VB was also heralded as "non-expert programmers can make apps just by drag and drop!" I actually think VB was a great product, the problem was most VB programmers were not, so VB apps took on a very negative connotation: like you could tell it was coded by a "VB coder", so you expected it to suck.
GenerWork 1y ago
As a product designer, I'm seriously looking at using Lovable for quick ideation and prototyping. Showing users a series of Figma screens can be nice, but virtually everybody responds better to an interactive prototype.

clvx 1y ago

I don't think the idea sticks with me. The final products of these services are never reliable. Right now, except for some hyperscalers, any similar service has integrated their deployments to some hyperscaler which means any day 2 operations will happen in someone else's computer (supabase, azure/aws, etc). On top of that, you have third party services that you need to integrate and manage their pricing plus auth. That alone is another challenge. Let's not even start with stateful data and migrations which is almost non existent. The main problem is these tools don't tackle day 2 operations so it will be handled to some developer to make it happen which means exporting your code to some VCS service which I think it's only github. Right there, it's a threat for lovable and others. On top of that, there's not a real feedback loop between manual integration (external dev making it prod ready) and keeping the MVP workflow. Also, there's no real way these services can say "you are free to touch these components without breaking incompatibility with our system, anything else here be dragons". In other words, You need to own the ecosystem to make more money. Funnel the capabilities to your own ecosystem.

mkagenius 1y ago
> manual integration (external dev making it prod ready) and keeping the MVP workflow. Right, the codebase generated by these can get huge, but maintenance can also be aided by AI tools like GitIngest[1], GitPodcast[1] etc. all helping you understand any new codebase easily or someone can query their doubts. So, I wouldn't strike these kinds of tools yet. AFAIK, v0 already lets you connect github. 1. https://gitingest.com https://gitingest.com 2. https://gitpodcast.com https://gitpodcast.com

b0a04gl 1y ago

i see one crazy real leverage: every prototype built here is a frozen snapshot of someone's product thinking in motion. like u can literally watch how ppl prioritize flows, kill features mid-wireframe, choose friction over flexibility. it’s raw cognitive output if lovable ever starts versioning those moves, storing reasoning behind edits, even lightly, u got a time-series of product intuition across thousands of users. that’s applied decision memory. there's a window here to become the place where product sense gets archived and replayed.

njovin 1y ago
...and then PM's can have the same wonderful experiences as engineers: finding the exact commit where a major change was made 6+ months ago by a former employee, with a comment like 'updated behavior' that gives zero insight into what led to the change or why it was made.
- ralferoo 1y ago
  Since working a one company that required it, ever since I've adopted the policy of including a link to the bug / feature ticket for every commit. Even for my personal projects, if I'm fixing something, I'll manage them with JIRA and will create a 1 line bug ticket just before committing so that I have an ID to reference. I also have a long-lasting tickets for general refactoring / code cleanup without a bug fix.
orbifold 1y ago
I think what current agent's are missing is taste or the ability to tune taste. So capturing taste across many users might be really valuable.

hackitup7 1y ago

Perhaps me just stupid and do prompts bad, but I can't make Lovable come up with anything really differentiated as a design. I'm curious if folks have tips on how to use it well as I really love the idea behind it.

asdev 1y ago

I don't get how this company makes money. Everyone who uses these tools is just building prototypes. They get to 60-70% functionality, but when it comes to actually productionize and launch, 99% of these projects will get abandoned. The churn has to be absurdly high, maybe people are just forgetting to cancel their subscriptions. Or they're just marketing very hard and getting new sign ups/subscriptions, but will crash and burn soon enough.

_fat_santa 1y ago
> Everyone who uses these tools is just building prototypes. But also I think that's kinda the point. Like for example we have to do a UI redesign of an app my company is building and our "wireframes" are just v0 projects my PO created in one afternoon. I think wireframing is where these tools really shine. It's gives you roughly the same ideas as building a wireframe in Figma but it's way less work and you end up with higher fidelity wireframes.Like sure if I were to peek at the code under the hood I'm certain it's close to dogshit but the code doesn't really matter at that stage.
- asdev 1y ago
  Any serious company has a brand/design system which Lovable can't leverage well, thus needs designers to use in Figma. Either way, my point is the customer LTV will be super low for use cases like this.
  - lbreakjai 1y ago
    I haven't tried with lovable, but gemini studio is fully capable of following a styleguide based on a screenshot, which is probably the crudest and least refined protocol I could think of. I'm sure there's already integrations somewhere that could allow a designer to specify a bunch of brand colours, to generate a styleguide out of it in plain english, and get a working prototype out of it.
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      A design system is not "following a styleguide based on a screenshot". A design system is an ontology of UI elements that your software has to adhere to, with several rules about how those elements are or aren't allowed to interact. Following a styleguide will make your software break as soon as the design system gets updated.

Fokamul 1y ago

Cybersecurity will be booming in 2026, trust me bro :) I fully support vibe-coding in corporate env., plese bring more :D

mrkramer 1y ago
Bug bounty programs will blossom like hell!!
- _pdp_ 1y ago
  We have AI tools working on those as well. ;)

elitegolfhub 1y ago

[dead]

deadbabe 1y ago

These apps will look dated in a few years, don’t waste your time. You’re just having fun playing around making old shit that could have made you a lot of money 10 years ago but is now just a weekend project. That’s the way things go in tech. Starry-eyed dreamers will let their imagination run wild, but they’re the laggards, the industry is already thinking ahead. The next generation of apps isn’t going to look like the previous gen. No beautiful UIs and fancy CSS. No UI at all. Instead, everyone will have some kind of platform like Cursor, but instead of just coding, it’s for everything. Subscribing to new services for your AI to use will be the equivalent of downloading apps from an AppStore to your phone. Then you can just say things like “fuck this person! AI, give me an OSINT profile of this Redditor!” and since your AI has the osint app it compiles the info instantly and says “here, damn”. No need to open an app, just straight info into your brain as quickly as possible. AI has clearly made us tired of googling endlessly for info on random websites, so why are we still opening up apps to do various tasks? Because we want to see pretty interfaces? Get real. It’s time for the UNIX philosophy to go mainstream. Start thinking of how your product can minimize time to satisfaction, graphical interfaces get in the way of satisfaction. The only problem is we currently don’t have a single unifying platform like an iPhone or something to consolidate a user base, but it will come. Start planning for that day so you can launch new services on day 1. It will be a gold rush. And in the end, a lot of people will find they will struggle with coming up with good AI app ideas, because 80% of their idea was just putting a pretty interface in front of something complex. That’s how you know it was mostly a bad idea.

lbreakjai 1y ago
Would you need a new platform, or just a screen and a microphone?
lubujackson 1y ago
Love this concept - LLMs as the new "API layer" to everything. Don't design a frontend because the user can generate one on the fly or use their own styling or pick a common "theme".
- deadbabe 1y ago

exiguus 1y ago

The marketing is good. Especially on LinkedIn, for non technical people. But I am not convinced. Lovable is a nice Website or App builder. Nothing for professionals, unless they want to build an prototype. Even building MVPs is nearly impossible. It's like v0 from Vercel or anything you can do with other Agents like Claude or Co-Pilot. Lovable is promising a bit to much for my taste.

Workaccount2 1y ago

I'm a non-tech worker in a non-tech industry, let me state two things: - Software today is written to cover as many use cases with as many features to target as many users a possible. - End users very often only use a tiny slice of the program's capabilities, but still pay for the entire program. This creates a situation where the people writing software see it as a monumental undertaking to get good functional programs (it is), and end users see programs as having annoying learning curves with lots of bloat and "unnecessary" features. LLMs do an excellent job of fixing this for end users because it allows them to easily create a program that does the handful of tasks that they normally need to use MegaSoftware for. And it's tailor made exactly for the use case. And the LLM can tell you exactly how to use it. I can give a brief example where I used gemini to create a CAD file transposition tool that utilized a simple GUI tailor made for the files my company works with. This allowed us to forgo a (very) expensive CAD software package to work through converting our archive of files. A probably 2M LOC program could be skipped because we only needed 3k LOC functionality. I really cannot stress enough how often this is the case, and why SWEs see LLMs as weak tools while end users see them as gods. There will still be a need for huge software packages in the future, but I know I never again have to pay for a huge class of "here is a large solution space that covers your small scope problem" software. To bring it home, loveable understands this, an sees that the futures has lots of non-tech people "writing" software. Standard IDEs are not the tools your mom will use to make a "Friends and family birthday reminder" app.

98codes 1y ago
End users rarely pay for the program. Someone in their management chain OKs the purchase, or there's a larger purchase with a cross-charge to the department for the license cost. the problem comes when software needs to meet every whim of the decision maker, when really the users only will ever use 20% at best.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  I think you may be assuming a certain enterprise size and accompanying workflow, probably would need stats to actually know how much of software is bought in this way however, and if the other way described would open up possible purchases by smaller companies, as was claimed.

lbreakjai 1y ago

I work for a very small startup. Our CTO heavily uses lovable for our internal tools. Think dashboards, user management ... A somewhat standard UI over CRUD operations. In previous roles, we either used some SaaS platform and would end up designing features based on the limitations of the tools, or we'd spin up a team to roll our own tailored solution. (or, God forbid, use Oracle and pay consultants a small fortune to do it for us). With lovable, our CTO can validate assumptions and iterate on their own. Even if the code was absolutely garbage and we deleted all of it, this alone saves us a ton of man hours per feature. There's an entire lossy communication loop that's been removed. Now, the code is only ok. We generate API clients from openapi definitions but it will struggle to properly orchestrate them. It will absolutely not have sane defaults anywhere, and will abuse the "any" type. You still need a human in the loop, but my back of the napkin calculation is we'd have to hire two full time developers to do the work it's been doing for us.

htrp 1y ago
Why does your CTO not use cursor or whatever other code IDE tools to build on your own standard internal stack? At least that would allow them to handoff to other members of the team.
- lbreakjai 1y ago
  Lovable operates at a higher abstraction level. You describe what you want, the UI magically updates, you never have to see the code. Changes made by lovable aren't anything special. They live in their own branch, and get periodically merged to master, so you can carry on working on it as if it was any other project.
- einsteinx2 1y ago
  I assume it’s because they don’t actually know how to code at all or how to use developer tools for that matter.

donnaoana 1y ago

Lovable should be in the money flow, allow their users to monetize

donnaoana 1y ago

Lovable should allow max flexibility to its users, allow them to monetize

janalsncm 1y ago

I recently used lovable to create the scaffolding for an app. It did a great job, far better than I expected. However, it also squishes everything into one JS file, making it unwieldy for anything moderately complex. After I fell off the happy path (integrating onnx was basically impossible), I had to spend a fair amount of time reworking it. I’m probably not the target audience though. And I got the end result faster than I would’ve, and it’s better looking.

mrkramer 1y ago

Is there really a reason why should I pay for vibe coding apps like this when I can vibe code for free and unlimited with Google's Gemini?

esher 1y ago

Good product placement of Lago :)

chaosprint 1y ago

just have a question, for a young company like this, isn't mrr better than arr? or do they have that many yearly subscription? cuz u always subscribe and cancel different providers

_pdp_ 1y ago

The kind of things I see mostly produced by these tools are landing pages, example dashboards and simple utilities like calculators and other simple stuff. There is certainly a space for these but nothing ground breaking that was not possible before with other beginner-friendly tools. The only difference is now that there is more freedom because LLMs can do more with less constraints. I wonder what will happen after the honeymoon is over - after people realise that software development is not about writing new exciting code but maintaining things that should have been replaced years ago that are now too important because other people depend on it. > I remember we were building a micro-app like that and it took at least a month, now it takes 3 minutes. ...please, statements like this have the power to invalidate the rest of the commentary. in 3 minutes you can complete a few prompts not nearly enough to write a piece of software the allegedly takes 3 months to do.

socketcluster 1y ago

What this article touches on is why I focused only on the serverless part with my project https://saasufy.com/ https://saasufy.com/ and why didn't implement any frontend UI for it (besides the control panel which is only concerned with backend concepts like schema definitions, auth, access control...). Now Claude is allowing generation and hosting of UI apps directly from their chat interface so it would be reinventing the wheel to build a UI. AI companies are going to be working really hard to ensure that users do not bypass their chat interface because AI APIs don't provide much lock-in factor for them.

nichochar 1y ago

This analysis is very much on point. I'm building a product in this space (https://getmocha.com https://getmocha.com), and can share a few more insider insights: - The churn from companies like lovable is indeed very high, and user frustration is high also. - There are sub-niches available. Building internal tools is not the same as landing pages is not the same as saas. In the previous website builder market, different players (webflow, squarespace, wix) found and dominated a sub-niche - The market is way bigger than anyone realizes. Today hundreds of millions for basically early adopters and highly tech-savvy users. This tech can and will go mainstream - A huge issue with lovable, solved by others like mocha and replit, is the app backend. Lovable took a shortcut and partnered with supabase but that deal will not last. Supabase is losing big on their free tier (had to raise 200M to support it) and both want to capture the margin from the customer. There will be a reckoning.

maest 1y ago

Oh great, another article on this company. I swear I keep being bombarded left and right with content desperately telling me hyperbolic things like "Lovable is the last piece of software humanity will ever build".

dzonga 1y ago

what most people assume: myth (a) - software engineers mostly work on software for consumers reality (a) - software engineers mostly work on software for enterprises myth (a) - it's just crud reality (a) - it's crud but with a bunch of business rules behind it that ai can't grasp every other shiny 'saas' that's not the reality of the majority of software out there.

r0fl 1y ago

What are the most popular use cases for these vibe coding products? What are people trying to build where they are getting stuck at 75-90%?