Comparisons / Lovable vs Bolt.new
Lovable vs Bolt.new: what each one really costs
These two are genuine alternatives. Both build a whole working app from a description, both sell you a bundle each month that you spend down, and neither adds anything to your card once the bundle is gone — you wait for the next month or move up a tier. What differs is what the bundle is measured in, and what drains it. Lovable counts credits and charges by how much of your app one instruction touches, so the late redesign is the expensive moment. Bolt.new counts tokens and charges by how much of your project it has to read before answering, so the bug you can't shake is the expensive moment. On our numbers their ranges overlap on every build we price, which is the honest way of saying price is not the thing to choose on here.
Take a SaaS dashboard as the reference build: Lovable lands at $75–$125 in plan spend and Bolt.new at $50–$100. Those two ranges overlap, so the $25 between their midpoints sits inside our own margin of error — on this build we are not calling either one cheaper.
HOWMUCHTOVIBECODE.COM
* HEAD TO HEAD *
Lovable
billed in credits
How you pay
1× Pro 400 ($100/mo)
Bolt.new
billed in tokens
How you pay
3× Pro 10M ($25/mo)
RANGES OVERLAP — TOO CLOSE TO CALL
Plan spend = the subscription money you hand over. Usage value = what the units you burn are worth at the tool’s own rate; nobody invoices you for it. Build time is active human hours — prompting, reviewing, testing and fixing — not waiting.
Which is cheaper for what you’re building
Every row is its own estimate: that app type’s standard feature list, a normal amount of iteration, priced on both platforms. Where the two ranges overlap we say so instead of picking a winner — a $20 gap between two numbers that are each $100 wide is not a finding. Click an app type for the full receipt.
| App type | Lovable plan spend | Bolt.new plan spend | Cheaper, and by how much |
|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS dashboard | $75–$125 | $50–$100 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| Marketplace | $100–$175 | $75–$100 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| Booking system | $75–$125 | $50–$100 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| Dating app | $75–$150 | $50–$100 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| AI wrapper | $50–$100 | $50–$75 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| Internal tool | $50–$75 | $25–$50 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| Landing page + waitlist | $25–$50 | $25–$50 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| E-commerce store | $75–$125 | $50–$100 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| Community / forum | $75–$125 | $50–$100 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| CRM | $75–$125 | $50–$100 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| Mobile companion app | $50–$100 | $50–$75 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
| Directory / listings site | $50–$75 | $25–$50 | Too close to call — the ranges overlap |
How they charge
The mechanics behind the numbers above: what each one counts, what the entry plan buys, and what happens on the day you run out.
| How it charges | Lovable | Bolt.new |
|---|---|---|
| What it counts | credits — Credits are prepaid units of work: you get a bundle each month and every prompt spends a slice of it. | tokens — Tokens are the chunks of text the AI reads and writes — roughly three-quarters of a word each. You get a bundle every month. |
| Entry paid plan | Pro 100, $25/mo — 100 credits. | Pro 10M, $25/mo — 10M tokens. |
| Where it starts | Free ($0): 5 credits per day, roughly 30 per month. Unused daily credits don't roll over. | Free ($0): About 1M tokens per month. Enough to build a prototype and decide whether the tool suits you. |
| When it runs out | Capped. There is no overage: when the month's allowance is gone you wait for the next month or move up a tier. A month you only half-use still costs the full price. | Capped. There is no overage: when the month's allowance is gone you wait for the next month or move up a tier. A month you only half-use still costs the full price. |
| Top-ups | Run dry mid-build and you can buy credits on the spot: roughly $15–30 per 50 credits depending on your tier (as of Aug 2026). That's a worse rate per credit than the subscription, which is precisely the moment most people reach for it. | We don't have a verified top-up rate for Bolt as of Aug 2026, so treat the monthly token allowance as a hard budget and plan the build inside it. If you're topping up twice, you're on the wrong plan. |
| Rollover | Paid monthly credits roll over while the plan is active, then expire after two months. The free daily credits never roll over at all. | Unused tokens roll over one month only, so a month you barely touch is worth something for exactly one more month. |
The catch with each
Lovable
Paid monthly credits roll over but expire after two months, and free daily credits never roll over. Once the free hosting and AI allowances run out, your live app starts spending the same credits you were saving to build with.
How to not pay for it: Plan in chat mode first and land related changes in one instruction — describing a whole redesign once costs a fraction of five “nudge it left” rounds, and unused credits roll over on paid plans.
Bolt.new
Tokens are priced by how much work a request takes, and bug-fixing loops are the killer — people have burned 2M+ tokens in a day chasing one bug. Unused tokens roll over one month only, so they last two months at most.
How to not pay for it: Give a failing fix two attempts, then roll back to the last working checkpoint and re-describe the feature from scratch — the doom loop, not the feature, is what burns millions of tokens.
Which one is for you
Neither of these is better than the other. They suit different people, and the cheaper one is only cheaper for the build we priced.
Lovable
Pick Lovable if you have never opened a code editor and want the gentlest start available. You describe screens in plain English, something good-looking comes back, and you can go a long way without reading a line of what it wrote. You pay more per unit of work than anywhere else on this site for that, and the price of a change grows as the app does.
Bolt.new
Pick Bolt.new if you want the whole thing drafted fast — the screens and the machinery behind them — and you are willing to look at the code when it goes sideways. The first version arrives quickly and cheaply. What the rest costs is decided almost entirely by whether you stop a failing fix after two attempts or keep asking it to try again.
Lovable vs Bolt.new: FAQ
+Which is cheaper overall, Lovable or Bolt.new?
Depends what you are building, and on some of them we decline to answer. Across the 12 kinds of app we price, the two ranges overlap on all 12. An overlap means the two plan-spend ranges share dollars, so the gap between them is smaller than the uncertainty around it — we call that too close rather than picking a winner out of the midpoints. And cheapest is only one measure: if one of these fits how you work, the evenings you save are worth more than the gap.
+Which is cheaper for a SaaS dashboard, Lovable or Bolt.new?
Take a SaaS dashboard as the reference build: Lovable lands at $75–$125 in plan spend and Bolt.new at $50–$100. Those two ranges overlap, so the $25 between their midpoints sits inside our own margin of error — on this build we are not calling either one cheaper. That is 1× Pro 400 ($100/mo) on Lovable against 3× Pro 10M ($25/mo) on Bolt.new, for the same standard build with 3 common features and a normal amount of iteration — two or three rounds per feature, plus a surcharge for fixing what breaks.
+What makes Lovable and Bolt.new get expensive?
Lovable: Paid monthly credits roll over but expire after two months, and free daily credits never roll over. Once the free hosting and AI allowances run out, your live app starts spending the same credits you were saving to build with. Plan in chat mode first and land related changes in one instruction — describing a whole redesign once costs a fraction of five “nudge it left” rounds, and unused credits roll over on paid plans. Bolt.new: Tokens are priced by how much work a request takes, and bug-fixing loops are the killer — people have burned 2M+ tokens in a day chasing one bug. Unused tokens roll over one month only, so they last two months at most. Give a failing fix two attempts, then roll back to the last working checkpoint and re-describe the feature from scratch — the doom loop, not the feature, is what burns millions of tokens.
+Can I move from Lovable to Bolt.new later?
Yes, and people do — but treat it as a move rather than a transfer. The fastest route is usually to describe what you already built and let the second tool produce its own version, using the first one as the brief; trying to carry a project across wholesale tends to cost more rounds than rebuilding it did. Two practical notes. Moving costs more the bigger the app gets, so if you suspect you will switch, switch early. And on the reference build these two cost about the same, so a move made purely to save money would be paid for by the move itself.
Price your own build
The numbers on this page are one standard build. Tick your own features and pick how badly you iterate, and the receipt reprints for all six platforms.
Plain links to both platforms. Nothing on this page changes which one the arithmetic calls cheaper.
The other comparisons
Estimates are ranges, not quotes. Lovable prices verified 2026-08-10; Bolt.new prices verified 2026-08-10. Prices change — see the changelog.