11 ms·

Lovable raises $400M Series C

167 points by thoughtpeddler 2mo ago

hudn33 2mo ago
This is crazy. Do people still use Lovable, I know they were super popular before Codex/Claude Code, but since then, I feel most people (even non-engineers from what I seen) have moved to these tools. Is Lovable still the easiest way to get an site/app going? And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
- doener 2mo ago
  Yes, I use it actually for something very unsual (I guess): Vibe coding a classic Point & Click adventure. Only in German so far and very early in development: https://schmerz-radio.com/ https://schmerz-radio.com/
  - pkaye 2mo ago
    That looks pretty good. How did you do the graphics?
    - doener 2mo ago
      Thank you! I just prompt them. :D My visual model is mostly Unavowed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/336140/Unavowed/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/336140/Unavowed/
  - doublerabbit 2mo ago
    Hmm, bug maybe? The page rotates horizontally and if I rotate the iPhone horizontally it zooms in large and the spiel button disappears. Nor can I scroll or zoom. If I enter the game and rotate my phone horizontally it kicks me back to the front page.
    - doener 2mo ago
      Thank you! I did not put much effort into mobile optimization so far. The game is clearly meant to be played on a Desktop computer.
- GenerWork 2mo ago
  I actually do know someone who's building a small community with Lovable. It's not a big community and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it, but it's all done via Lovable.
  - skeeter2020 2mo ago
    >> and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it that implies that he's probably not paying for Lovable, and thus their 13B+ valuation is built on influencers and eyeballs?
    - whoamii 2mo ago
      Welcome to the stock market.
    - GenerWork 2mo ago
      He may be? I'll be honest, I know virtually nothing about his setup other than that this is his passion project and that he's using Lovable to build it.
- igravious 2mo ago
  I have genuinely never heard of Lovable and I thought I was relatively plugged in to the tech zeitgeist :/ Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    It was one of the earliest “create a whole web app from a prompt” type of product IIRC. The space is now more than crowded
- chrisweekly 2mo ago
  I recently^1 came across an analysis of no-code tools/platforms vs AI IDEs / Harnesses, and their relative usage and trajectories, and it looked pretty dismal for nocode. 1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
  - dhdaadhd 2mo ago
    Please do!
- willnz 2mo ago
  Yes, I used Claude Code a lot, but Lovable is the fastest way to get a log-in system and database, so a great option for a true MVP.
- antonoo 2mo ago
  Yes my biased opinion is that it's the easiest way to do everything from publish, custom domain, payment, backend deployment, email, connecting to any SaaS tools, as well as git-sync. Disclaimer: I'm the founder and built the initial version for Lovable.
edoceo 2mo ago
Wonder of any of the early money got out. Very little visibility to the secondary market on these things. I remember back in dot-com days folk would take leverage on their unrealized gains. Didn't work out that well. Selling at small discount in the secondary, which was mocked, turned out to be a good play. Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
GenerWork 2mo ago
I feel like this valuation could be cut by 75% if Anthropic paid more attention to Claude Design.
- pixelready 2mo ago
  I’m curious about that too. Claude Design feels (and from the blog post) sounds like the typical IC passion project that got just polished enough for a “beta” (in the sense of gauging customer interest, not commitment to release). If someone with clout at Anthropic takes it up as a champion and pushes it into the portfolio of apps at the importance of Claude code, it could be an amazing product, eventually a threat to Adobe, Lovable, Canva market share. It needs a better direct editing layer like 2-way figma sync, so you’re not stuck only prompting for every small adjustment. It could really use smart routing of image generation requests to a nano-banana level image generation model for the images that get poured into the ui mockups (so you don’t need to round trip to external sources by hand). And of course, like all modern LLMs doing visual work, it lacks “taste” if not given extensive examples during prompting. Right now it feels like a fun proof of concept that could be killed at any time ala Google’s many “I got my PM promoted at launch and then was promptly abandoned” projects.
  - chrisweekly 2mo ago
    Yeah. IMHO Claude Design's current UX is so abysmal, it's borderline unusable. Kind of ironic, given its remit.
  - feifan 2mo ago
    many such cases in Anthropic's product portfolio
- Ancalagon 2mo ago
  you should see what happened to Airtable recently. Much more than 75%
- sarmasamosarma 2mo ago
  [dead]
orf 2mo ago
My friend built his niche news site with lovable. He used Wordpress as a headless CMS, and lovable built some absolute monstrosity with cloudflare workers - every page view incurred a call to Wordpress, no proper caching and it was slow as hell. It was just Wordpress but with 10 extra layers. 3+ second TTFB. He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it. For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site. I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.
- feifan 2mo ago
  Lovable sponsors Tanstack but Tanstack is an independent project
- jmathai 2mo ago
  I use Claude Code the way others use Lovable. I'm comfortable with the terminal and Claude Code but I think Anthropic (et al.) is closing the gap rapidly. And Claude Code + Claude Design is way more capable than what I think Lovable is. I assume Lovable had to build around constraints to reach non-technical people at the time. But the models and tooling have improved such that those constraints are melting away. I'm not sure what advantage Lovable has in the long run.
P4u1 2mo ago
This is not crazy. What's crazy is one of their favourte stories, Viver de IA [Brazil], a company that uses AI to build an AI education company.
dogmayor 2mo ago
blah blah bubble
boredumb 2mo ago
As someone who is fully bootstrapped and not looking for funding, I may be oblivious but some of the numbers I see versus the products I see i'm wondering if I should not be using my own capital and see if asking nicely can get me 200 million dollars
- devmor 2mo ago
  If it makes sense for your growth, why not? Just keep in mind that these founders are giving up control and saddling themselves with certain obligations in return.
  - edoceo 2mo ago
    Obligations that go away when you declare bankruptcy and close the business.
    - devmor 2mo ago
      That’s the implication, yeah. If growing to sell and bail out is your goal, do it. If you like running your business and want to keep what you built, don’t.
- swatcoder 2mo ago
  As a founder raising those big rounds, you'd enjoy a lot of personal luxury and develop a gtowing network of opportunity. But the odds of your business catastrophocally collapsing on itself or being aggressively gutted in an acquisition would go sky high, and all those starry eyed people you recruited to help you along the way become way more like to encounter surprise layoffs or unexpected and severe equity dilutions. A lot of it is really about where your heart is as a human. If you want to take a lucrative cut on selling an image to bigger and bigger investors and don't much care what happens to your idea or any of the "little people" along the way, then you probably should chase those funding rounds. But if you're actually passionate about your vision or have a more compassionate and paternalistic attitude towards the people you convince to work for you, you're doing the right thing with the bootstrapping. (I'm sure you know all this, though. Nobody bootstraps without thinking about this stuff, and recongizing that that they just can't stomach the tradeoffs of doing otherwise.)
sixdimensional 2mo ago
I appreciate what Lovable did as far as contributing to giving people agency over technology to build things, whether they were ideally built or not, from an engineering perspective. I can't help but feel deep down somewhere inside though - boy.. $400M is so much money - whenever I see these kind of huge raises, I kind of wonder, how likely is it to fail when you have been granted such an enormous opportunity, plus all the other money they've raised. This question isn't limited to Lovable of course.. but it's just.. wow.. it's so much runway... will they end up spending it wisely? I feel like a lot of companies end up spending this on scaling out sales, sales engineering, marketing, advertising, splinter/side efforts, tons of hiring/headcount expansion, global expansion, acquisitions... and this often makes the companies big, slow-moving behemoths, but does it really advance the core mission, technology, infra, etc.? Will be interesting to see where this takes lovable. Congratulations to their team!
- bix6 2mo ago
  Half the raise is for marketing no doubt
Taikhoom10 2mo ago
[flagged]
nylonstrung 2mo ago
I think Lovable is a very dumb product and that virtually anyone of any level of technical knowhow would be better served by using normal agents or perhaps Replit The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself
- subygan 2mo ago
  lovable is not aimed at devs though
  - pydry 2mo ago
    the apps people make with it still need to be used by someone.
- neongreen 2mo ago
  I was on the agent team at Lovable (no longer working there). I think most solo devs would be better served by using Lovable than Codex or Claude, for the kind of apps Lovable is optimized for (i.e. CRUDs with thirdparty SaaS integrations).. and if you ignore the cost, b/c Codex sub is hard to beat. Lovable is a normal, fully capable agent harness. With a Linux box. With all the usual features like MCPs, skills, subagents, browser, and whatever else. You can ask Lovable to grab Rust from nixpkgs, write a raytracer, and compile to WASM, and it will happily do it. You can ask Lovable to write an OS in assembly and run it in v86, and it will do it. (I did both.) The alternative to Lovable isn't Codex, but "Codex + Cloudflare account". I don't doubt that eventually Codex will be really good at using Workers and Durable Objects and R2 and serverless SQLite and Wrangler -- and having everything Just Work without needlessly exposing it to the user -- but idk I think it's not there yet.
  - indigodaddy 2mo ago
    Or just any agent on any VPS/VM. Or better yet exe.dev that has auth and TLS proxy/domains built-in, + Shelley Web Agent ready to go
    - 2mo ago
bluelu 2mo ago
I have recently gotten access to lightscale.ai, which is still in private beta, and I'm impressed. They have a different approach to lovable, replit, etc... They don't let the gpt models translate directly into program code, but into an intermediate language which is then compiled by a compiler. Generation speed is blazingly fast, and so far results look great. I really like that I can work on an app without having to wait between my prompts and can see the results nearly instantly. Apparently it's safer too, as code generation is deterministic. But I did not check that yet, as I only recently got access.
mrhottakes 2mo ago
Where are all the big world-changing apps that were vibe coded on this platform?
- lysace 2mo ago
  In general, people/companies attempt to hide their use of AI when building apps/services since there's an ongoing substantial effort from progressives to cancel that shit. That stated reasons vary, but the trend is very, very clear.
- swyx 2mo ago
  if you are only seeking that in order to be impressed you are not very good at the business at tech
  - agos 2mo ago
    hey it's their PR statement who insists it's not just for prototype but real apps which do real work are being used in production. "where are they?" is a fair question
k1w1 2mo ago
Lovable is dominating the generic AI application creation market, but ultimately I think the market is going to segment with products like Aha! Builder https://www.aha.io/builder/overview https://www.aha.io/builder/overview to support more business use-cases. Adoption of AI application building technologies in most enterprises is much more about governance and security than it is about any particular coding feature.
throw03172019 2mo ago
I recently replaced a Wordpress based website. I tried Claude Design, epic failure. Context windows exploding due to huge html files inlining images. I ended up dropping it for a design guide from designer and then used Cursor to build an Astro site section by section instead of the whole page. The flexibility of having code to view and edit was way better than these black box programs. Lovable funding is insane. And scary.
- esafak 2mo ago
  Did you user Cursor's Design Mode to make edits visually?
  - throw03172019 2mo ago
    No. I’ve never seen that mode. Is it new? Good?
    - esafak 2mo ago
      https://cursor.com/blog/design-mode https://cursor.com/blog/design-mode I think it's Cursor's selling point.
      - throw03172019 2mo ago
        Very cool. Thank you! I’ll give it a try.
bix6 2mo ago
I read the announcement honestly sounds like they are doing some cool things. A year ago they had 180k paying customers. If we generously put them all on biz at $50/mo that’s $9M/mo or $108M/yr. Pro gives half that. They say now they have $500M run rate. So 5x+ growth in a year? Nice.
- xenospn 2mo ago
  Churn for these no code businesses has to be off the charts. I wouldn’t count this revenue to hold once everyone had their first try.
  - eclipticplane 2mo ago
    For a lot of companies these tools exist in the world of shadow IT spend, so they can go on being paid customers with no usage, tied to various IC accounts/credit cards for a long, long time.
- minraws 2mo ago
  Just to be clear that's ARR one month signups and short terms sign ups are included in this madness.
asdev 2mo ago
This is just a bet that the models will get better and that all the half baked never seen production Lovable apps will be able to be brought life because of that. I am fading that bet personally and am bearish on non technical people building software
- echelon 2mo ago
  This is a sign that distribution matters. Doesn't matter how many Lovable clones there are. Everyone knows the name Lovable. This caters to the overwhelming majority who cannot use tools like Claude Code or that prefer an all in one solution. Open source models only help Lovable improve its own margins. They can stop paying the Anthropic or OpenAI tax and tailor the models to exactly their use case and UX.
  - ZeroCool2u 2mo ago
    I don't disagree about distribution, but absolutely no one I know outside the tech bubble knows what Lovable is or has even heard of it.
  - tikhonj 2mo ago
    It's a sign of how much distribution matters to VCs. Whether that is enough in the medium- and long-term is unclear. I'm a bit skeptical but not very confident either way... which is part of the reason I am not a VC!
    - shimman 2mo ago
      I think it's time we start questioning more of the valley's mindset when it comes to good business and software practices. From lived experience it typically results in unhealthy work environments at best and society destroying at worse. Is this really the best way to write software? I'd but my life's savings no, it's not. No way in hell.
      - conqrr 2mo ago
        Agree with this fully, I'm sure a lot of software engineers do too. Yet software is dominated by the valley. It's funny how easily money and greed manipulate the narrative while the majority suffer.
cute_boi 2mo ago
It is crazy that people still use Lovable when we have codex and claude code....
- hackernud3s 2mo ago
  I have a client that prototypes things in Lovable and hands them off to me to get them working and deployed. He would be lost in claude code.
- antonoo 2mo ago
  My biased opinion is that Lovable is easier to do everything from publish, custom domain, payment, backend deployment, email, connecting to any SaaS tools, as well as git-sync. In the browser, and powered both by GPT Sol + Fable (depending on what you ask for). Disclaimer: I'm the founder and built the initial version for Lovable.
alexashka 2mo ago
Cool. Signed up for Lovable, chose a web template, got this: "When remixing a template, I agree to take responsibility over project security, compliance, data, and operations. The templates are provided for educational purposes and do not guarantee functionality or security out of the box." With copy/paste disabled, so I had to type it out. I rest my case, your honor. --- Update: Spent 2 more minutes - I cannot believe anyone invested a penny in this. It makes those other dozen failed web site editor things look very well made and thought out. It makes Squarespace look like a good product!
- mandeepj 2mo ago
  Similar story: signed up at https://app.emergent.sh https://app.emergent.sh, funded by YC; total crap. Btw, they've raised over $100M
  - alexashka 2mo ago
    Is it just money laundering? The entire tech sector seems to amount to entrenched mega corps and finance bros who know how to fill out the forms to automatically get a fancy university graduate with a CS degree a few million and split it 3-ways, 1/3 for finance bro, 1/3 for nepo baby cs graduate and 1/3 for the losers who implement 'the idea'.
- merrvk 2mo ago
  It’s quite embarrassing how bad it is. Fair play to the founders making bank on the ai hype though
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
jbdamask 2mo ago
Enterprises need a solution like Lovable or Replit if only for the one-touch deployments. Unfortunately, neither tool is there. I don't know what's taking Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, even AWS to build deployments themselves. There are only a handful of reference architectures for vibe-coded apps.
- ajayvk 2mo ago
  There is too much friction in deploying internal tools. I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun https://github.com/openrundev/openrun to solve that. Full GitOps (create/update your app through GitOps, not just updating app source code), staged deployments, service bindings (for getting a managed database credential, instead of creating a new database per app) and OIDC/SAML with RBAC.
  - aleqs 2mo ago
    Very interesting project! I haven't fully read through yet - does it deploy to existing resources/infra, or does it handle resource/compute provisioning as well? How are you handling keys/creds? Do you have any real users yet? I'm working on a open resource/compute provisioning protocol/system (not released yet), targeting both cloud platforms as well as internal, which may go hand-in-hand with what you're building.
    - ajayvk 2mo ago
      OpenRun runs on a single machine, with either Docker or Podman. All apps runs on that one machine. Idle apps are scaled down to zero, so resource usage is low even when hundreds of apps are installed. For scaling up, OpenRun can be deployed on Kubernetes. Each app deployed through OpenRun gets created as a Kubernetes deployment, again with scaling down to zero. Same declarative config moves from singe node to Kubernetes, no changes required. I don't have any telemetry, so not sure about number of users. Based on issues filed, lots of users using the single node deployment (which is good enough for most use cases). Started with Streamlit/Gradio type apps, now users are actually using it for deploying vibe coded internal tools. See https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aclosed https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...
nadermx 2mo ago
The brand is now the moat.
cnkkd 2mo ago
$400M for a Series C is an incredible milestone. The momentum behind AI dev tools right now is insane.
epolanski 2mo ago
Two years ago they were boasting of how being small (two dozen people) and using AI was the secret enabler of their growth. No bureaucracy! Product people go brrr with little developer need. 24 months later, their headcount ballooned, they are now more than 1'000. Product keeps soft pivoting every few months and no single mediocre application built on lovable has gained any traction whatsoever, not that I've heard of it.
SlavikCA 2mo ago
any open source alternative?
ddj231 2mo ago
what’s the moat for lovable? you can already directly prompt these models to build you a full fledged app. Sure it saves you some db setup and deployment but is that enough of a product?
radial_symmetry 2mo ago
Synthetiq > Lovable if you actually want to get into production in any sort of real organization
sailfast 2mo ago
I’ve never heard of this company. Maybe that’s because I build software for a living. How many years of insane growth would it take to pay back $400M at this rate? What. Is. Happening?! $13.3B valuation? They mention Adidas, Nvidia, etc but their “favorite” use cases are toy apps inside smaller firms. The play here has to be “our model of building companies via agent workflows and websites is the best” otherwise TAM numbers are just nutty. Smoke it while you got it I guess and congrats on the raise!
- popalchemist 2mo ago
  https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-new-ai-growth-playbook-for-2026-elena-verna https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-new-ai-growth-playboo... worth the listen. They hit profitability because of their power users, who are a mixed bag of complete novices and expert SWE's, both of whom spend 10x+ the tokens of the average user. So, basically, their value prop and pricing have hit a sweet spot for a certain marketshare.
  - enos_feedler 2mo ago
    i've got old friends who have been telling me about the same app idea they've had for 10 years and are now spending 1000s on Lovable tokens. This isn't sustainable customers. It's delusional people spending money on the wrong thing. Their ideas were not good before they could "code it". Their ideas are still not good now that they can.
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      Who are you to decide? You could be absolutely right, but it's their money and if they don't hit gold, they haven't wasted your time building it.
    - pluralmonad 2mo ago
      Sign companies stay in business. Because every new startup restaurant wants its own sign. That particular restaurant being statistically doomed is actually a benefit to the sign company. I guess maybe you meant not sustainable for the half baked businesses. It seems like it could be sustainable for lovable.
redwood 2mo ago
"The last piece of software" still their tagline?
navaed01 2mo ago
There are a lot of people with domain expertise or know a workflow in their own business so well they know exactly what a solution looks like. And AI can build a solution today or will be able to in the near future - I have been blown away for example, by how lawyers are using AI to automate real work. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even if it’s not perfect and does not scale to 1bn users. I wouldn’t under estimate the potential here. I am less bullish on this idea that every peeps will have ideas for great things to build
- tripledry 2mo ago
  This is where I suspect most value with LLMs are _currently_. Of all my friends the ones actually gaining measurable value from LLMs are not product developers but rather entrepreneurs in some service business that have automated processes they previously needed to hire someone for.
maxdo 2mo ago
Why do you need if every llm vendor has their own harness , what is the moat ? Spacex even have multi model one
patwater31 2mo ago
Fwiw loveable is fun and enables playful little apps. I enjoy it
imagetic 2mo ago
who?
cm11 2mo ago
I interviewed with a startup that I thought I was a pretty good fit for. I'd had the same role at a company that did the same thing they were doing just three years ahead of them. That led to fairly nuanced interviews with each interviewer because I was familiar with their projects and more generally had a sense of what their roadmap looked like. And that put me into a final presentation interview with a bigger group that included the CEO/founders pretty quickly. Towards the end, after others had asked questions, the CEO asked how I was using AI and about the tools I was using. I mentioned using Claude Code to quickly build basic prototypes of my first few stabs to rule them in/out/iterate. I thought this was a pretty good answer in the situation—Claude Code was pretty new at the time, I really had been using it this way, and I thought it was good for a large meeting with a broad set of people where I probably can't get too detailed. I'm not sure she paid much attention, but followed up with "Do you know what Lovable is?" I hadn't. She said something along the lines of "I'm not sure exactly, but it seems to be what all the cool kids are using." Anyways, afterward I looked it up, and I was kind of bummed because I felt I was using the more advanced method (for the situation), but the CEO didn't know it, and I likely came off as behind.
- adi_kurian 2mo ago
  illegitimi non carborundum
adi2907 2mo ago
Lovable is the Wordpress of today. No developer worth his salt would have touched Wordpress to develop websites but it was a boon to non developers who could use its templates. Lovable fills the same need for non techies today I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most. That said, Replit, Lovable, Emergent are making hay till frontier labs dont release a wrapper agent app to do what they do.
- fatata123 2mo ago
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- aurareturn 2mo ago
  I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most. Most founders in these accelerators must be fairly young? Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders. IE. they might not be comfortable with the terminal, messing with SQL databases, etc. For someone like me who have developed production apps the old way, terminal-based agents with my chosen stack is my preferred way.
  - 4k0hz 2mo ago
    How is a founder meaningfully "technical" if they're not comfortable with things like using the terminal or writing SQL queries?
  - Frieren 2mo ago
    > Most founders in these accelerators must be fairly young? Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders. Why do investors put their money in companies create by people that have never developer even a real application? 50 years ago most people in the field were newbies because the field itself was totally new. So, all founders lacked experience as no-one had experience. Has not that changed? Aren't any software experts that can create new products anymore?
Frannky 2mo ago
When I don't understand why things happen, I assume the problem is my mental model. In this case, I can't build a model where pouring $400M into Lovable makes sense. Who are the users? What are the problems? And why would people pay for Lovable instead of Claude/OpenAI/Grok, etc.? Do they have something those companies don't,something that lets them get chosen vs the competition? I'm very confused. I'm not saying the valuation doesn't make sense, but I have a hard time explaining it. The best answer I can come up with is that they're betting on people building apps without knowing how to code—that this alone will be enough to leverage LLMs and turn a profit, capturing a market that's scared away from tools like Claude Code. And I assume they're not betting on the thing actually working. They're betting on people wanting to build an app and pouring money into it, hoping it'll eventually work—and on Lovable not getting eaten by CC-like tools, thanks to distribution and brand. I used it in the past and it was terrible. Claude Code from scratch, or even a template tweaked via CC, was way better. So the assumptions seem to be: - Lovable has data that delivers results people want and can't get otherwise. - Marketing, brand, and distribution are enough to keep users on Lovable, which under the hood just leverages normal LLMs guided in some smart way. - LLMs will get good enough to deliver fully working, enterprise-level products—and Lovable will be the frontend delivering that result
- keeptrying 2mo ago
  The beauty of venture capital is that VCs don't really know either but they allow themselves to be presuaded by the founders. Its a beautiful thing.
- yfontana 2mo ago
  My personal mental model is that this is the AI version of the low-code web app tools that have existed for a while (like Outsystems, Power Apps...). Those tools are a bit of a nightmare for devs to work with and they have all sorts of limitations. Yet they still carved themselves a fairly significant niche in the market, as they allow building apps fairly quickly and cheaply... as long as you stick to simple apps. I don't know if Lovable will be able to capture that market, but that's how I try to make sense of this.
- tripledry 2mo ago
vivzkestrel 2mo ago
- i have used all 3: lovable, bolt and v0 - bolt is the best product out there. paste the same prompt and see for yourself
rakel_rakel 2mo ago
In a recent interview the founder stated something like "we're enabling people to write software at a fraction of what it used to cost". I believe that to currently be true... maybe... if you're a single dev building something that Lovable can be used for. What I'm struggling to understand is that _someone_ is paying, right? $400M is probably a lot more than a fraction of what people spent on javascript CRUD apps before? It seems more like centralization than anything else to me? What am I missing?
grey-area 2mo ago
I’ve seen ads for this company, the ads were highlighting things you could build, things like: “An app to find dog friendly pubs” Most of the ideas seemed more like a Google search than an app. I have no doubt they are letting thousands of people write code faster than ever before, but what is that code worth and who would maintain it? Deploying an app is relatively expensive and time consuming vs just using the web or buying an app. Most people can’t be bothered to do that work (and rightly so) and most apps make very little money. I expect this to be one of the casualties of the AI bubble, once people realise they didn’t really want to run a business based on their dream app.
tomveber 2mo ago
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randogp 2mo ago
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jmspyderbot 2mo ago
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prolly97 2mo ago
People are throwing a lot of shade on Lovable - mostly while comparing the output of non-technical people, with the output of the HN audience. "Excel is the second best tool for everything". While, from a technical POV, we can have a trillion billion objections to making anything in Excel. But it has brought down the cost/barrier of doing numbers based knowledge work - and have enabled more and broader experimentation. Sometimes an Excel sheet should have been a "real" app. No doubt about that. When we observe someone use something, we have to assume that there's some "truth" in that demand. Lovable, and companies like it, have enabled someone to accomplish things that they couldn't before. That empowered group are now churning out half-baked stuff, that won't get used. And decent POCs that will become "real" apps. ... I challenge anyone who objects to Lovable, to give us the current status on their first web-app related project. My first 10 projects are either dead, or never got far enough to touch the internet. But some have stuck.
TrackerFF 2mo ago
Every critique I've seen of Lovable has been that while it is very easy to get started, once you cross a certain point with your app-building, it simply becomes too expensive, and complex to continue build on manually. Just like real software, ya know.
Lerc 2mo ago
"For most people, turning an idea into software once required so much capital, technical fluency, and time that many ideas never came to life. Lovable’s first chapter was about changing that. " That goes so well with "Lovable raises $400M Series C"
- sebastiennight 2mo ago
  The irony can be amusing, but one could easily argue that "turning their idea into software" did not require them to raise $400M (indeed, they did it without this raise). And it could also be argued that "serving 60 million projects" and scaling from there is a different game requiring more than a few clicks in a vibecoding platform
  - mkagenius 2mo ago
    900 million visits per month over 60 million projects is 15 visits on an average per project. How many are bot visits per project?
    - sebastiennight 2mo ago
      I didn't say "profitable viable software that turns into a unicorn"... but according to the OP article, it looks like they are realizing that until they figure out how to make these software demos successful, they'll struggle with retention.
UtahJazz777 2mo ago
I love using Lovable. It's so much better than Codex/ClaudeCode and producing a fully working application quickly. Don't need to spend hours deploying it, giving it a database, payments, analytics, etc. It just works much faster and simpler.
podviaznikov 2mo ago
I was skeptical about Lovable as software engineer until I saw it used. Last month I visited warehouse in Berlin. People who work there(with no technical background) build over 15 lovable apps for themselves -> starting from checkin system, to very sophisticated dashboards. Those were non technical people, and they did all with no engineers or IT. Those apps they were using were better than 90% of internal apps I've seen in my career.
- weird-eye-issue 2mo ago
  There's one time I meant to search somebody's email address in our internal system but I accidentally searched it in Google instead because I forgot to put in the custom search operator in the URL/search bar I actually got a Google search result back because a business's internal CMS and marketing systems had gotten indexed which had their full email list with the capabilities to delete and send newsletters. The email address I searched had subscribed to this business's newsletter which got it indexed It appeared it was built by Lovable I'm all for vibe coding too but there's a good chance when people do it they are leaking data like this
  - podviaznikov 2mo ago
    yeah, I agree with those things in the abstract. But then I remember all the absolutely horrible half finished internal software most companies have(never enough time, often afterthought, cutting corners etc) and then I saw those internal Lovable apps made by people who actually needed those. And now it's not so clear anymore! Half baked ugly app does by the engineer who doesn't need it and don't want to fix bug vs pretty Lovable app made by people who use it everyday.
    - podviaznikov 2mo ago
      Like I don't use Lovable myself because I can make my own software already, but I definitely changed my opinion after I saw it int he wild and compared to all the internal software I saw in the past 20 years.
LeonKnst 2mo ago
Has anyone looked closely at the security of all these Lovable-generated apps? There have been reports of serious security issues in apps built with Lovable, especially around backend/database configurations. Curious how Lovable plans to address this
abc123abc123 2mo ago
Read today that Lovable is basically just an Anthropic front end. Seems to me that when Anthropic is ready to eat this niche, they'll easily outcompete Lovable.
sheepscreek 2mo ago
I don’t get the appeal of Lovable. How is it different from bolt.new, or Figma’s AI feature, of GitHub Spark, or the countless others? Gaining traction or having a large marketshare cannot be the USP.
antonoo 2mo ago
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167 points by thoughtpeddler 2mo ago

This is crazy. Do people still use Lovable, I know they were super popular before Codex/Claude Code, but since then, I feel most people (even non-engineers from what I seen) have moved to these tools. Is Lovable still the easiest way to get an site/app going? And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?

doener 2mo ago
Yes, I use it actually for something very unsual (I guess): Vibe coding a classic Point & Click adventure. Only in German so far and very early in development: https://schmerz-radio.com/ https://schmerz-radio.com/
- pkaye 2mo ago
  That looks pretty good. How did you do the graphics?
  - doener 2mo ago
    Thank you! I just prompt them. :D My visual model is mostly Unavowed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/336140/Unavowed/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/336140/Unavowed/
- doublerabbit 2mo ago
  Hmm, bug maybe? The page rotates horizontally and if I rotate the iPhone horizontally it zooms in large and the spiel button disappears. Nor can I scroll or zoom. If I enter the game and rotate my phone horizontally it kicks me back to the front page.
  - doener 2mo ago
    Thank you! I did not put much effort into mobile optimization so far. The game is clearly meant to be played on a Desktop computer.
GenerWork 2mo ago
I actually do know someone who's building a small community with Lovable. It's not a big community and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it, but it's all done via Lovable.
- skeeter2020 2mo ago
  >> and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it that implies that he's probably not paying for Lovable, and thus their 13B+ valuation is built on influencers and eyeballs?
  - whoamii 2mo ago
    Welcome to the stock market.
  - GenerWork 2mo ago
    He may be? I'll be honest, I know virtually nothing about his setup other than that this is his passion project and that he's using Lovable to build it.
igravious 2mo ago
I have genuinely never heard of Lovable and I thought I was relatively plugged in to the tech zeitgeist :/ Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
- dgellow 2mo ago
  It was one of the earliest “create a whole web app from a prompt” type of product IIRC. The space is now more than crowded
chrisweekly 2mo ago
I recently^1 came across an analysis of no-code tools/platforms vs AI IDEs / Harnesses, and their relative usage and trajectories, and it looked pretty dismal for nocode. 1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
- dhdaadhd 2mo ago
  Please do!
willnz 2mo ago
Yes, I used Claude Code a lot, but Lovable is the fastest way to get a log-in system and database, so a great option for a true MVP.
antonoo 2mo ago
Yes my biased opinion is that it's the easiest way to do everything from publish, custom domain, payment, backend deployment, email, connecting to any SaaS tools, as well as git-sync. Disclaimer: I'm the founder and built the initial version for Lovable.

edoceo 2mo ago

Wonder of any of the early money got out. Very little visibility to the secondary market on these things. I remember back in dot-com days folk would take leverage on their unrealized gains. Didn't work out that well. Selling at small discount in the secondary, which was mocked, turned out to be a good play. Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.

GenerWork 2mo ago

I feel like this valuation could be cut by 75% if Anthropic paid more attention to Claude Design.

pixelready 2mo ago
I’m curious about that too. Claude Design feels (and from the blog post) sounds like the typical IC passion project that got just polished enough for a “beta” (in the sense of gauging customer interest, not commitment to release). If someone with clout at Anthropic takes it up as a champion and pushes it into the portfolio of apps at the importance of Claude code, it could be an amazing product, eventually a threat to Adobe, Lovable, Canva market share. It needs a better direct editing layer like 2-way figma sync, so you’re not stuck only prompting for every small adjustment. It could really use smart routing of image generation requests to a nano-banana level image generation model for the images that get poured into the ui mockups (so you don’t need to round trip to external sources by hand). And of course, like all modern LLMs doing visual work, it lacks “taste” if not given extensive examples during prompting. Right now it feels like a fun proof of concept that could be killed at any time ala Google’s many “I got my PM promoted at launch and then was promptly abandoned” projects.
- chrisweekly 2mo ago
  Yeah. IMHO Claude Design's current UX is so abysmal, it's borderline unusable. Kind of ironic, given its remit.
- feifan 2mo ago
  many such cases in Anthropic's product portfolio
Ancalagon 2mo ago
you should see what happened to Airtable recently. Much more than 75%
sarmasamosarma 2mo ago
[dead]

orf 2mo ago

My friend built his niche news site with lovable. He used Wordpress as a headless CMS, and lovable built some absolute monstrosity with cloudflare workers - every page view incurred a call to Wordpress, no proper caching and it was slow as hell. It was just Wordpress but with 10 extra layers. 3+ second TTFB. He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it. For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site. I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.

feifan 2mo ago
Lovable sponsors Tanstack but Tanstack is an independent project
jmathai 2mo ago
I use Claude Code the way others use Lovable. I'm comfortable with the terminal and Claude Code but I think Anthropic (et al.) is closing the gap rapidly. And Claude Code + Claude Design is way more capable than what I think Lovable is. I assume Lovable had to build around constraints to reach non-technical people at the time. But the models and tooling have improved such that those constraints are melting away. I'm not sure what advantage Lovable has in the long run.

P4u1 2mo ago

This is not crazy. What's crazy is one of their favourte stories, Viver de IA [Brazil], a company that uses AI to build an AI education company.

dogmayor 2mo ago

blah blah bubble

boredumb 2mo ago

As someone who is fully bootstrapped and not looking for funding, I may be oblivious but some of the numbers I see versus the products I see i'm wondering if I should not be using my own capital and see if asking nicely can get me 200 million dollars

devmor 2mo ago
If it makes sense for your growth, why not? Just keep in mind that these founders are giving up control and saddling themselves with certain obligations in return.
- edoceo 2mo ago
  Obligations that go away when you declare bankruptcy and close the business.
  - devmor 2mo ago
    That’s the implication, yeah. If growing to sell and bail out is your goal, do it. If you like running your business and want to keep what you built, don’t.
swatcoder 2mo ago
As a founder raising those big rounds, you'd enjoy a lot of personal luxury and develop a gtowing network of opportunity. But the odds of your business catastrophocally collapsing on itself or being aggressively gutted in an acquisition would go sky high, and all those starry eyed people you recruited to help you along the way become way more like to encounter surprise layoffs or unexpected and severe equity dilutions. A lot of it is really about where your heart is as a human. If you want to take a lucrative cut on selling an image to bigger and bigger investors and don't much care what happens to your idea or any of the "little people" along the way, then you probably should chase those funding rounds. But if you're actually passionate about your vision or have a more compassionate and paternalistic attitude towards the people you convince to work for you, you're doing the right thing with the bootstrapping. (I'm sure you know all this, though. Nobody bootstraps without thinking about this stuff, and recongizing that that they just can't stomach the tradeoffs of doing otherwise.)

sixdimensional 2mo ago

I appreciate what Lovable did as far as contributing to giving people agency over technology to build things, whether they were ideally built or not, from an engineering perspective. I can't help but feel deep down somewhere inside though - boy.. $400M is so much money - whenever I see these kind of huge raises, I kind of wonder, how likely is it to fail when you have been granted such an enormous opportunity, plus all the other money they've raised. This question isn't limited to Lovable of course.. but it's just.. wow.. it's so much runway... will they end up spending it wisely? I feel like a lot of companies end up spending this on scaling out sales, sales engineering, marketing, advertising, splinter/side efforts, tons of hiring/headcount expansion, global expansion, acquisitions... and this often makes the companies big, slow-moving behemoths, but does it really advance the core mission, technology, infra, etc.? Will be interesting to see where this takes lovable. Congratulations to their team!

bix6 2mo ago
Half the raise is for marketing no doubt

Taikhoom10 2mo ago

[flagged]

nylonstrung 2mo ago

I think Lovable is a very dumb product and that virtually anyone of any level of technical knowhow would be better served by using normal agents or perhaps Replit The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself

subygan 2mo ago
lovable is not aimed at devs though
- pydry 2mo ago
  the apps people make with it still need to be used by someone.
neongreen 2mo ago
I was on the agent team at Lovable (no longer working there). I think most solo devs would be better served by using Lovable than Codex or Claude, for the kind of apps Lovable is optimized for (i.e. CRUDs with thirdparty SaaS integrations).. and if you ignore the cost, b/c Codex sub is hard to beat. Lovable is a normal, fully capable agent harness. With a Linux box. With all the usual features like MCPs, skills, subagents, browser, and whatever else. You can ask Lovable to grab Rust from nixpkgs, write a raytracer, and compile to WASM, and it will happily do it. You can ask Lovable to write an OS in assembly and run it in v86, and it will do it. (I did both.) The alternative to Lovable isn't Codex, but "Codex + Cloudflare account". I don't doubt that eventually Codex will be really good at using Workers and Durable Objects and R2 and serverless SQLite and Wrangler -- and having everything Just Work without needlessly exposing it to the user -- but idk I think it's not there yet.
- indigodaddy 2mo ago
  Or just any agent on any VPS/VM. Or better yet exe.dev that has auth and TLS proxy/domains built-in, + Shelley Web Agent ready to go
  - 2mo ago

bluelu 2mo ago

I have recently gotten access to lightscale.ai, which is still in private beta, and I'm impressed. They have a different approach to lovable, replit, etc... They don't let the gpt models translate directly into program code, but into an intermediate language which is then compiled by a compiler. Generation speed is blazingly fast, and so far results look great. I really like that I can work on an app without having to wait between my prompts and can see the results nearly instantly. Apparently it's safer too, as code generation is deterministic. But I did not check that yet, as I only recently got access.

mrhottakes 2mo ago

Where are all the big world-changing apps that were vibe coded on this platform?

lysace 2mo ago
In general, people/companies attempt to hide their use of AI when building apps/services since there's an ongoing substantial effort from progressives to cancel that shit. That stated reasons vary, but the trend is very, very clear.
swyx 2mo ago
if you are only seeking that in order to be impressed you are not very good at the business at tech
- agos 2mo ago
  hey it's their PR statement who insists it's not just for prototype but real apps which do real work are being used in production. "where are they?" is a fair question

k1w1 2mo ago

Lovable is dominating the generic AI application creation market, but ultimately I think the market is going to segment with products like Aha! Builder https://www.aha.io/builder/overview https://www.aha.io/builder/overview to support more business use-cases. Adoption of AI application building technologies in most enterprises is much more about governance and security than it is about any particular coding feature.

throw03172019 2mo ago

I recently replaced a Wordpress based website. I tried Claude Design, epic failure. Context windows exploding due to huge html files inlining images. I ended up dropping it for a design guide from designer and then used Cursor to build an Astro site section by section instead of the whole page. The flexibility of having code to view and edit was way better than these black box programs. Lovable funding is insane. And scary.

esafak 2mo ago
Did you user Cursor's Design Mode to make edits visually?
- throw03172019 2mo ago
  No. I’ve never seen that mode. Is it new? Good?
  - esafak 2mo ago
    https://cursor.com/blog/design-mode https://cursor.com/blog/design-mode I think it's Cursor's selling point.
    - throw03172019 2mo ago
      Very cool. Thank you! I’ll give it a try.

bix6 2mo ago

I read the announcement honestly sounds like they are doing some cool things. A year ago they had 180k paying customers. If we generously put them all on biz at $50/mo that’s $9M/mo or $108M/yr. Pro gives half that. They say now they have $500M run rate. So 5x+ growth in a year? Nice.

xenospn 2mo ago
Churn for these no code businesses has to be off the charts. I wouldn’t count this revenue to hold once everyone had their first try.
- eclipticplane 2mo ago
  For a lot of companies these tools exist in the world of shadow IT spend, so they can go on being paid customers with no usage, tied to various IC accounts/credit cards for a long, long time.
minraws 2mo ago
Just to be clear that's ARR one month signups and short terms sign ups are included in this madness.

asdev 2mo ago

This is just a bet that the models will get better and that all the half baked never seen production Lovable apps will be able to be brought life because of that. I am fading that bet personally and am bearish on non technical people building software

echelon 2mo ago
This is a sign that distribution matters. Doesn't matter how many Lovable clones there are. Everyone knows the name Lovable. This caters to the overwhelming majority who cannot use tools like Claude Code or that prefer an all in one solution. Open source models only help Lovable improve its own margins. They can stop paying the Anthropic or OpenAI tax and tailor the models to exactly their use case and UX.
- ZeroCool2u 2mo ago
  I don't disagree about distribution, but absolutely no one I know outside the tech bubble knows what Lovable is or has even heard of it.
- tikhonj 2mo ago
  It's a sign of how much distribution matters to VCs. Whether that is enough in the medium- and long-term is unclear. I'm a bit skeptical but not very confident either way... which is part of the reason I am not a VC!
  - shimman 2mo ago
    I think it's time we start questioning more of the valley's mindset when it comes to good business and software practices. From lived experience it typically results in unhealthy work environments at best and society destroying at worse. Is this really the best way to write software? I'd but my life's savings no, it's not. No way in hell.
    - conqrr 2mo ago
      Agree with this fully, I'm sure a lot of software engineers do too. Yet software is dominated by the valley. It's funny how easily money and greed manipulate the narrative while the majority suffer.

cute_boi 2mo ago

It is crazy that people still use Lovable when we have codex and claude code....

hackernud3s 2mo ago
I have a client that prototypes things in Lovable and hands them off to me to get them working and deployed. He would be lost in claude code.
antonoo 2mo ago
My biased opinion is that Lovable is easier to do everything from publish, custom domain, payment, backend deployment, email, connecting to any SaaS tools, as well as git-sync. In the browser, and powered both by GPT Sol + Fable (depending on what you ask for). Disclaimer: I'm the founder and built the initial version for Lovable.

alexashka 2mo ago

Cool. Signed up for Lovable, chose a web template, got this: "When remixing a template, I agree to take responsibility over project security, compliance, data, and operations. The templates are provided for educational purposes and do not guarantee functionality or security out of the box." With copy/paste disabled, so I had to type it out. I rest my case, your honor. --- Update: Spent 2 more minutes - I cannot believe anyone invested a penny in this. It makes those other dozen failed web site editor things look very well made and thought out. It makes Squarespace look like a good product!

mandeepj 2mo ago
Similar story: signed up at https://app.emergent.sh https://app.emergent.sh, funded by YC; total crap. Btw, they've raised over $100M
- alexashka 2mo ago
  Is it just money laundering? The entire tech sector seems to amount to entrenched mega corps and finance bros who know how to fill out the forms to automatically get a fancy university graduate with a CS degree a few million and split it 3-ways, 1/3 for finance bro, 1/3 for nepo baby cs graduate and 1/3 for the losers who implement 'the idea'.
merrvk 2mo ago
It’s quite embarrassing how bad it is. Fair play to the founders making bank on the ai hype though

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

jbdamask 2mo ago

Enterprises need a solution like Lovable or Replit if only for the one-touch deployments. Unfortunately, neither tool is there. I don't know what's taking Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, even AWS to build deployments themselves. There are only a handful of reference architectures for vibe-coded apps.

ajayvk 2mo ago
There is too much friction in deploying internal tools. I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun https://github.com/openrundev/openrun to solve that. Full GitOps (create/update your app through GitOps, not just updating app source code), staged deployments, service bindings (for getting a managed database credential, instead of creating a new database per app) and OIDC/SAML with RBAC.
- aleqs 2mo ago
  Very interesting project! I haven't fully read through yet - does it deploy to existing resources/infra, or does it handle resource/compute provisioning as well? How are you handling keys/creds? Do you have any real users yet? I'm working on a open resource/compute provisioning protocol/system (not released yet), targeting both cloud platforms as well as internal, which may go hand-in-hand with what you're building.
  - ajayvk 2mo ago
    OpenRun runs on a single machine, with either Docker or Podman. All apps runs on that one machine. Idle apps are scaled down to zero, so resource usage is low even when hundreds of apps are installed. For scaling up, OpenRun can be deployed on Kubernetes. Each app deployed through OpenRun gets created as a Kubernetes deployment, again with scaling down to zero. Same declarative config moves from singe node to Kubernetes, no changes required. I don't have any telemetry, so not sure about number of users. Based on issues filed, lots of users using the single node deployment (which is good enough for most use cases). Started with Streamlit/Gradio type apps, now users are actually using it for deploying vibe coded internal tools. See https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aclosed https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...

nadermx 2mo ago

The brand is now the moat.

cnkkd 2mo ago

$400M for a Series C is an incredible milestone. The momentum behind AI dev tools right now is insane.

epolanski 2mo ago

Two years ago they were boasting of how being small (two dozen people) and using AI was the secret enabler of their growth. No bureaucracy! Product people go brrr with little developer need. 24 months later, their headcount ballooned, they are now more than 1'000. Product keeps soft pivoting every few months and no single mediocre application built on lovable has gained any traction whatsoever, not that I've heard of it.

SlavikCA 2mo ago

any open source alternative?

ddj231 2mo ago

what’s the moat for lovable? you can already directly prompt these models to build you a full fledged app. Sure it saves you some db setup and deployment but is that enough of a product?

radial_symmetry 2mo ago

Synthetiq > Lovable if you actually want to get into production in any sort of real organization

sailfast 2mo ago

I’ve never heard of this company. Maybe that’s because I build software for a living. How many years of insane growth would it take to pay back $400M at this rate? What. Is. Happening?! $13.3B valuation? They mention Adidas, Nvidia, etc but their “favorite” use cases are toy apps inside smaller firms. The play here has to be “our model of building companies via agent workflows and websites is the best” otherwise TAM numbers are just nutty. Smoke it while you got it I guess and congrats on the raise!

popalchemist 2mo ago
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-new-ai-growth-playbook-for-2026-elena-verna https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-new-ai-growth-playboo... worth the listen. They hit profitability because of their power users, who are a mixed bag of complete novices and expert SWE's, both of whom spend 10x+ the tokens of the average user. So, basically, their value prop and pricing have hit a sweet spot for a certain marketshare.
- enos_feedler 2mo ago
  i've got old friends who have been telling me about the same app idea they've had for 10 years and are now spending 1000s on Lovable tokens. This isn't sustainable customers. It's delusional people spending money on the wrong thing. Their ideas were not good before they could "code it". Their ideas are still not good now that they can.
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    Who are you to decide? You could be absolutely right, but it's their money and if they don't hit gold, they haven't wasted your time building it.
  - pluralmonad 2mo ago
    Sign companies stay in business. Because every new startup restaurant wants its own sign. That particular restaurant being statistically doomed is actually a benefit to the sign company. I guess maybe you meant not sustainable for the half baked businesses. It seems like it could be sustainable for lovable.

redwood 2mo ago

"The last piece of software" still their tagline?

navaed01 2mo ago

There are a lot of people with domain expertise or know a workflow in their own business so well they know exactly what a solution looks like. And AI can build a solution today or will be able to in the near future - I have been blown away for example, by how lawyers are using AI to automate real work. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even if it’s not perfect and does not scale to 1bn users. I wouldn’t under estimate the potential here. I am less bullish on this idea that every peeps will have ideas for great things to build

tripledry 2mo ago
This is where I suspect most value with LLMs are _currently_. Of all my friends the ones actually gaining measurable value from LLMs are not product developers but rather entrepreneurs in some service business that have automated processes they previously needed to hire someone for.

maxdo 2mo ago

Why do you need if every llm vendor has their own harness , what is the moat ? Spacex even have multi model one

patwater31 2mo ago

Fwiw loveable is fun and enables playful little apps. I enjoy it

imagetic 2mo ago

who?

cm11 2mo ago

I interviewed with a startup that I thought I was a pretty good fit for. I'd had the same role at a company that did the same thing they were doing just three years ahead of them. That led to fairly nuanced interviews with each interviewer because I was familiar with their projects and more generally had a sense of what their roadmap looked like. And that put me into a final presentation interview with a bigger group that included the CEO/founders pretty quickly. Towards the end, after others had asked questions, the CEO asked how I was using AI and about the tools I was using. I mentioned using Claude Code to quickly build basic prototypes of my first few stabs to rule them in/out/iterate. I thought this was a pretty good answer in the situation—Claude Code was pretty new at the time, I really had been using it this way, and I thought it was good for a large meeting with a broad set of people where I probably can't get too detailed. I'm not sure she paid much attention, but followed up with "Do you know what Lovable is?" I hadn't. She said something along the lines of "I'm not sure exactly, but it seems to be what all the cool kids are using." Anyways, afterward I looked it up, and I was kind of bummed because I felt I was using the more advanced method (for the situation), but the CEO didn't know it, and I likely came off as behind.

adi_kurian 2mo ago
illegitimi non carborundum

adi2907 2mo ago

Lovable is the Wordpress of today. No developer worth his salt would have touched Wordpress to develop websites but it was a boon to non developers who could use its templates. Lovable fills the same need for non techies today I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most. That said, Replit, Lovable, Emergent are making hay till frontier labs dont release a wrapper agent app to do what they do.

fatata123 2mo ago
[dead]
aurareturn 2mo ago
I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most. Most founders in these accelerators must be fairly young? Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders. IE. they might not be comfortable with the terminal, messing with SQL databases, etc. For someone like me who have developed production apps the old way, terminal-based agents with my chosen stack is my preferred way.
- 4k0hz 2mo ago
  How is a founder meaningfully "technical" if they're not comfortable with things like using the terminal or writing SQL queries?
- Frieren 2mo ago
  > Most founders in these accelerators must be fairly young? Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders. Why do investors put their money in companies create by people that have never developer even a real application? 50 years ago most people in the field were newbies because the field itself was totally new. So, all founders lacked experience as no-one had experience. Has not that changed? Aren't any software experts that can create new products anymore?

Frannky 2mo ago

When I don't understand why things happen, I assume the problem is my mental model. In this case, I can't build a model where pouring $400M into Lovable makes sense. Who are the users? What are the problems? And why would people pay for Lovable instead of Claude/OpenAI/Grok, etc.? Do they have something those companies don't,something that lets them get chosen vs the competition? I'm very confused. I'm not saying the valuation doesn't make sense, but I have a hard time explaining it. The best answer I can come up with is that they're betting on people building apps without knowing how to code—that this alone will be enough to leverage LLMs and turn a profit, capturing a market that's scared away from tools like Claude Code. And I assume they're not betting on the thing actually working. They're betting on people wanting to build an app and pouring money into it, hoping it'll eventually work—and on Lovable not getting eaten by CC-like tools, thanks to distribution and brand. I used it in the past and it was terrible. Claude Code from scratch, or even a template tweaked via CC, was way better. So the assumptions seem to be: - Lovable has data that delivers results people want and can't get otherwise. - Marketing, brand, and distribution are enough to keep users on Lovable, which under the hood just leverages normal LLMs guided in some smart way. - LLMs will get good enough to deliver fully working, enterprise-level products—and Lovable will be the frontend delivering that result

keeptrying 2mo ago
The beauty of venture capital is that VCs don't really know either but they allow themselves to be presuaded by the founders. Its a beautiful thing.
yfontana 2mo ago
My personal mental model is that this is the AI version of the low-code web app tools that have existed for a while (like Outsystems, Power Apps...). Those tools are a bit of a nightmare for devs to work with and they have all sorts of limitations. Yet they still carved themselves a fairly significant niche in the market, as they allow building apps fairly quickly and cheaply... as long as you stick to simple apps. I don't know if Lovable will be able to capture that market, but that's how I try to make sense of this.
tripledry 2mo ago

vivzkestrel 2mo ago

- i have used all 3: lovable, bolt and v0 - bolt is the best product out there. paste the same prompt and see for yourself

rakel_rakel 2mo ago

In a recent interview the founder stated something like "we're enabling people to write software at a fraction of what it used to cost". I believe that to currently be true... maybe... if you're a single dev building something that Lovable can be used for. What I'm struggling to understand is that _someone_ is paying, right? $400M is probably a lot more than a fraction of what people spent on javascript CRUD apps before? It seems more like centralization than anything else to me? What am I missing?

grey-area 2mo ago

I’ve seen ads for this company, the ads were highlighting things you could build, things like: “An app to find dog friendly pubs” Most of the ideas seemed more like a Google search than an app. I have no doubt they are letting thousands of people write code faster than ever before, but what is that code worth and who would maintain it? Deploying an app is relatively expensive and time consuming vs just using the web or buying an app. Most people can’t be bothered to do that work (and rightly so) and most apps make very little money. I expect this to be one of the casualties of the AI bubble, once people realise they didn’t really want to run a business based on their dream app.

tomveber 2mo ago

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randogp 2mo ago

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jmspyderbot 2mo ago

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prolly97 2mo ago

People are throwing a lot of shade on Lovable - mostly while comparing the output of non-technical people, with the output of the HN audience. "Excel is the second best tool for everything". While, from a technical POV, we can have a trillion billion objections to making anything in Excel. But it has brought down the cost/barrier of doing numbers based knowledge work - and have enabled more and broader experimentation. Sometimes an Excel sheet should have been a "real" app. No doubt about that. When we observe someone use something, we have to assume that there's some "truth" in that demand. Lovable, and companies like it, have enabled someone to accomplish things that they couldn't before. That empowered group are now churning out half-baked stuff, that won't get used. And decent POCs that will become "real" apps. ... I challenge anyone who objects to Lovable, to give us the current status on their first web-app related project. My first 10 projects are either dead, or never got far enough to touch the internet. But some have stuck.

TrackerFF 2mo ago

Every critique I've seen of Lovable has been that while it is very easy to get started, once you cross a certain point with your app-building, it simply becomes too expensive, and complex to continue build on manually. Just like real software, ya know.

Lerc 2mo ago

"For most people, turning an idea into software once required so much capital, technical fluency, and time that many ideas never came to life. Lovable’s first chapter was about changing that. " That goes so well with "Lovable raises $400M Series C"

sebastiennight 2mo ago
The irony can be amusing, but one could easily argue that "turning their idea into software" did not require them to raise $400M (indeed, they did it without this raise). And it could also be argued that "serving 60 million projects" and scaling from there is a different game requiring more than a few clicks in a vibecoding platform
- mkagenius 2mo ago
  900 million visits per month over 60 million projects is 15 visits on an average per project. How many are bot visits per project?
  - sebastiennight 2mo ago
    I didn't say "profitable viable software that turns into a unicorn"... but according to the OP article, it looks like they are realizing that until they figure out how to make these software demos successful, they'll struggle with retention.

UtahJazz777 2mo ago

I love using Lovable. It's so much better than Codex/ClaudeCode and producing a fully working application quickly. Don't need to spend hours deploying it, giving it a database, payments, analytics, etc. It just works much faster and simpler.

podviaznikov 2mo ago

I was skeptical about Lovable as software engineer until I saw it used. Last month I visited warehouse in Berlin. People who work there(with no technical background) build over 15 lovable apps for themselves -> starting from checkin system, to very sophisticated dashboards. Those were non technical people, and they did all with no engineers or IT. Those apps they were using were better than 90% of internal apps I've seen in my career.

weird-eye-issue 2mo ago
There's one time I meant to search somebody's email address in our internal system but I accidentally searched it in Google instead because I forgot to put in the custom search operator in the URL/search bar I actually got a Google search result back because a business's internal CMS and marketing systems had gotten indexed which had their full email list with the capabilities to delete and send newsletters. The email address I searched had subscribed to this business's newsletter which got it indexed It appeared it was built by Lovable I'm all for vibe coding too but there's a good chance when people do it they are leaking data like this
- podviaznikov 2mo ago
  yeah, I agree with those things in the abstract. But then I remember all the absolutely horrible half finished internal software most companies have(never enough time, often afterthought, cutting corners etc) and then I saw those internal Lovable apps made by people who actually needed those. And now it's not so clear anymore! Half baked ugly app does by the engineer who doesn't need it and don't want to fix bug vs pretty Lovable app made by people who use it everyday.
  - podviaznikov 2mo ago
    Like I don't use Lovable myself because I can make my own software already, but I definitely changed my opinion after I saw it int he wild and compared to all the internal software I saw in the past 20 years.

LeonKnst 2mo ago

Has anyone looked closely at the security of all these Lovable-generated apps? There have been reports of serious security issues in apps built with Lovable, especially around backend/database configurations. Curious how Lovable plans to address this

abc123abc123 2mo ago

Read today that Lovable is basically just an Anthropic front end. Seems to me that when Anthropic is ready to eat this niche, they'll easily outcompete Lovable.

sheepscreek 2mo ago

I don’t get the appeal of Lovable. How is it different from bolt.new, or Figma’s AI feature, of GitHub Spark, or the countless others? Gaining traction or having a large marketshare cannot be the USP.

antonoo 2mo ago

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