Lovable vs Bolt vs v0: Pricing and Limits Compared

September 10, 2026 ai-workflowscosts

We earn commissions when you shop through the links below, at no extra cost to you. We only link products we would use ourselves.

The three hosted AI app builders all have a $25 to $30 entry plan, and that is where the similarity ends. Each one meters your work in a different unit, and the unit decides what a month of building actually costs far more than the sticker price does.

• Lovable sells credits, spent per task. A small edit is about half a credit, a landing page about two. Hosting and a built-in backend are inside the same credit balance.
• Bolt sells tokens, spent on everything the model reads and writes. The Pro plan starts at 10 million a month with no daily cap.
• v0 sells dollars. Your plan credit is a cash balance drawn down at published per-token rates that differ by model, so you can compute the price of a turn to the cent.

Short version, on published prices as of 2026-09-10:

• You want the whole app, database and hosting included, and a bill you can predict from the number of changes you make: Lovable.
• You want to pick your JavaScript framework, maybe ship a mobile app, and you would rather have a big token pool than count edits: Bolt.
• You already deploy on Vercel, you want a pull request into an existing repository, and you want to see exactly what each turn costs: v0.

We build with Claude Code every day and have written before about how Lovable and Claude Code differ. We have not run a production app on Lovable, Bolt, or v0, so every figure below is read from each vendor's own pricing page and documentation on the date above, and is cited as such rather than as field experience.

Price, side by side

Two things in that table are easy to misread.

Lovable's Pro and Business plans start at the same 100 credits, but Business is $50, double the price, and its rungs run up to $4,300 at 10,000 credits. You are paying for SSO, role-based access, internal publishing, and a security center, not for more capacity. If nobody on the team asked for single sign-on, Pro is the plan.

Bolt's Pro rungs above the entry plan are not on the pricing page. That page says Pro starts at 10M tokens a month; the $50 for 26M and $100 for 55M figures come from the worked upgrade examples in Bolt's billing help center, and it also mentions a Pro 200 rung whose price and allocation we could not find published. Expect the in-app subscription page to show more than the marketing page does.

What a month of work buys on each

This is the part the sticker price hides, and it is where the three diverge.

Lovable: count your edits. Lovable publishes example costs: "make the button gray" at 0.50 credits, "remove the footer" at 0.90, "add authentication" at 1.20, "build a landing page with images" at 2.00. Plan mode costs 1 credit a message plus any subagent research. So 100 monthly credits is on the order of a hundred edits, fewer if they are large ones.

The detail worth knowing: on paid plans the 5 daily build credits have no monthly cap. They expire at the end of each day, so they only count if you use them, but someone who builds every day gets roughly 150 build credits a month on top of the 100 in the pool. On the Free plan the same daily grant is capped at 30 a month. Every plan also gets 20 Cloud credits and 4 AI credits a month for hosting, backend, and in-app AI features; none of those grants roll over.

Top-ups are dearer than plan credits: $15 buys 50 on Pro, which is $0.30 a credit against $0.25 inside the 100-credit plan. If you top up twice in a month, the 200-credit rung at $50 was the cheaper purchase.

Bolt: count your tokens, which you cannot see in advance. Bolt's 10M monthly tokens are spent on input and output for every prompt, and Bolt does not publish a per-prompt figure. Prompts that touch big files cost more, and Bolt's own help center has a page on maximizing token efficiency for exactly that reason. We are not going to invent an edits-per-month number for it. What Bolt does give you is the absence of a daily limit on Pro, rollover of unused paid tokens for one extra month, and a clean upgrade rule: move up a rung mid-cycle and you pay only the price difference, keep your unused tokens, and receive the difference in tokens immediately.

Reloads are the catch. Buying extra tokens outside a plan change is only available on the highest individual monthly Pro rung or on any annual Pro plan, and the reload price varies by plan. Reload tokens never expire. If you are on the $25 monthly plan and run out, your path is up a rung, not a top-up.

v0: read the rate card. v0 is the only one of the three that lets you price a turn before you send it. Your $30 of Plus credit is spent at the rates of the model you pick:

So $30 buys 3M output tokens on v0 Pro or 1.2M on v0 Max, and cache reads cost a tenth of input. Plus and Business users also get $2 of free daily credit on each day they log in, which is up to about $60 a month of extra room for a daily user, double the monthly grant. When credits run out, generation pauses and you buy more. There is no counterpart to Lovable's fixed per-task cost: a long conversation with a large context on Max is expensive in a way the plan price does not signal, and a short one on Mini is nearly free.

What you are actually buying: stack and hosting

The metering decides the monthly bill. The stack decides whether you can live with the app afterwards.

Lovable hosts your app at a lovable.app subdomain with HTTPS, and paid plans add custom domains. Publishing is free and works even at a zero credit balance; running the app, hosting plus the built-in backend, draws Run credits from the same balance, with the 20-credit monthly Cloud grant covering smaller apps. That backend, Lovable Cloud, is built on Supabase's open-source foundation and bundles a database, auth, file storage, realtime, edge functions, scheduled jobs, and email, so a non-developer never has to set up Supabase separately. Each publish is a snapshot: later edits are not live until you publish again. Code is portable, with two-way GitHub sync. When we checked in August, new projects generated TanStack Start, a server-rendered React framework.

Bolt is StackBlitz's product and runs the development environment in your browser tab (in Safari, previews are hosted instead). The runtime constraint follows from that: Node.js backends only, any JavaScript frontend framework, and no PHP or Python. Put the words "mobile app" in your first prompt and Bolt scaffolds an Expo app, which none of the other two do. Data lives in Bolt Cloud's managed database by default, or in Supabase if you choose it at project setup. One operational detail: on unpublished projects, a database with low usage for six or more days may be paused; published projects are exempt. Hosting is Bolt's own or Netlify through a first-party integration, and the Free plan keeps Bolt branding and has no custom domain. GitHub sync is automatic on every change in your own projects and supports importing an existing repository.

v0 is Vercel's product and behaves like it. It generates Next.js with Tailwind and shadcn/ui, and can also work in Python and SQL for data analysis. Deploys go to Vercel: working branches get preview URLs, publishing updates production, and you get a vercel.app domain or connect your own. For a GitHub-backed project, publish opens or reuses a pull request, merges it into the chat's base branch, and waits for the production deployment, with your branch protection rules still enforced. That PR flow is the reason v0 is the comfortable choice when the app already exists. v0 connects to your own APIs and databases rather than bundling a backend. Note that the Business tier is where training opt-out is the default; on Plus, check the setting.

Free tiers: enough to decide?

All three free tiers are real, and they answer different questions.

Lovable's 5 credits a day, 30 a month, is enough to build one small app and find out whether the credit-per-edit model suits how you work. It publishes to a Lovable subdomain, so you can share the result.

Bolt's 300K tokens a day is generous for reading and small edits and runs out fast on a large scaffold. Private projects are included on Free, which is unusual, and when the daily tokens are gone you can still edit code directly in Code view at no cost.

v0's 7 messages a day and $5 of monthly credit is the tightest, and the most honest: seven prompts on the Mini model go a long way, seven on Max do not. Deploy to Vercel, Design Mode, and GitHub sync are all included on Free, so the workflow you test is the one you would pay for.

How to choose

• Non-developer building a real product with users, auth, and data: Lovable. The backend is inside the plan, the hosting is inside the plan, and the cost of a change is roughly a credit. Start on Pro at 100 credits and use the daily grant.
• Team sharing one project: Lovable Pro, on cost. Unlimited workspace members with no seat price against Bolt's $30 a member and v0's $30 a user.
• You want a mobile app from a prompt: Bolt, via Expo. Neither of the others generates one.
• You want to choose the framework: Bolt, within JavaScript. Lovable and v0 each generate one stack.
• Existing Next.js repo on Vercel: v0. The pull-request publish flow means the builder joins your process instead of replacing it.
• You need to know what a turn costs before you send it: v0, because it is the only one with a public per-token rate card.
• You expect to run out mid-month: Lovable or v0. Both sell more on any paid plan. Bolt's reloads are gated to the top monthly rung or an annual plan, so on the $25 plan your only option is to upgrade.
• Compliance review is coming: Lovable Business or v0 Business, and read the training-data terms on each. Lovable carries SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification.

When the app outgrows a chat box, all three let you take the code to GitHub and keep going in an editor or an agentic tool. That is the workflow we described in Lovable vs Claude Code: scaffold in the builder, sync out, and do the long tail of maintenance in your repository.

FAQ

Is Lovable cheaper than Bolt? The entry plans are both $25 a month, so the question is what you get. Lovable gives 100 credits plus 5 daily build credits and includes hosting and a backend; Bolt gives 10 million tokens and Bolt Cloud's database, with hosting on Bolt or Netlify. Lovable's cost per change is predictable and published. Bolt's depends on how much code each prompt touches. For a small app with frequent small edits, Lovable's 100 credits plus the daily grant is a lot of changes. For heavy work in large files, count tokens before you decide.

Is v0 free? There is a permanent Free plan with $5 of monthly credit, a 7-message daily limit, and deploy to Vercel included. Paid plans start at Plus, $30 per user a month, which includes $30 of credits plus $2 of daily credit on login. The older $20 Premium plan is being sunset and is not available to new users.

Does Bolt have a daily token limit? On the Free plan, yes: 300K tokens a day inside a 1M monthly cap. On Pro there is no daily limit; you draw from the monthly pool, and unused paid tokens roll over for one extra month.

Which one lets you use your own database? All three can. Lovable Cloud is the default on Lovable, built on Supabase. Bolt uses its own managed database by default and lets you pick Supabase at setup. v0 connects to your existing APIs and databases rather than bundling one, which is the right shape if the database already exists.

Can you export the code from Lovable, Bolt, and v0? Yes, all three sync to GitHub. Lovable offers two-way sync, Bolt syncs every change to a connected repository and can import an existing one, and v0 publishes through pull requests to a GitHub-backed project. Be careful with Bolt's disconnect: removing the GitHub connection is permanent, and reconnecting the same repository requires contacting support.

Prices, limits, and features in this article were read from docs.lovable.dev and lovable.dev, bolt.new and support.bolt.new, and v0.app on 2026-09-10. All three change plans often, and Bolt's upper Pro rungs in particular are documented in help-center examples rather than on the pricing page, so confirm on the vendor's own page before budgeting.