Every prompt-to-app builder has a plan around $25 a month. Lovable, bolt.new, v0, Base44 and Replit Agent all sell one, and the five plans buy five different things. Lovable counts credits, Bolt counts tokens, v0 counts dollars, Base44 counts message credits that expire, and Replit prices each task by effort.
I have not built an app with any of these five, so this is a post about AI app builder pricing, not about which one writes better code. I read every price on the vendors' own pricing pages and docs on 14 November 2026, in US dollars before tax.
Five tools, five ways to count your work
The plan price tells you what you pay. The unit tells you how fast you burn through it, and that part is harder to compare.
- Lovable: credits. A Plan mode message costs 1 credit, and a Build mode message costs whatever the work took. The same balance also pays for hosting your app.
- bolt.new: tokens. Bolt reads your project files on every message, so the same prompt costs more as your project grows.
- v0: dollars of credit, spent at per-model token rates.
- Base44: message credits for building, plus a separate pool of integration credits for what your app does once it runs (emails, LLM calls, images).
- Replit Agent: dollars of credit, spent per checkpoint. Replit prices each finished request by how much effort it took.
Two "$25 plans" from two of these tools will get you different amounts of app, and you only find out how much after you have used them.
The entry plans side by side
| Tool | Free plan | Entry paid plan, monthly | Same plan, billed yearly | Unused allowance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lovable | 5 credits a day, up to 30 a month | Pro $25, 100 credits | $21 a month | Rolls over, expires 2 months after issue |
| bolt.new | 1M tokens a month, 300K a day | Pro $25, from 10M tokens | $18 a month ($216 a year) | Rolls over for 2 months |
| v0 | $5 one-time credit, 7 messages a day | Plus $30 a user, $30 of credit | Not offered on the page | Rolls over, expires after 65 days |
| Base44 | 25 message credits a month, 5 a day | Starter $20, 100 message credits | $16 a month | Expires at each monthly reset |
| Replit Agent | Starter: daily Agent credits, Lite build only | Core $20, $20 of credit | $18 a month | Core: not stated. Pro credits roll over for 2 months |
All prices read 14 November 2026. The table is the cheapest paid door into each tool, not the plan you will end up on.
Lovable: one balance pays for building and hosting
Lovable Pro is $25 a month, or $21 billed yearly, with 100 monthly credits. Every plan, Free included, also gets 5 daily build credits and a daily chat allowance. The jump from Pro to Business ($50) buys SSO, a team workspace and role-based access, not more credits: both start at 100.
The detail I would watch is in Lovable's credits docs. The same credit balance pays for building, chatting, hosting your app on Lovable Cloud and the AI features inside your deployed app. Paid plans get a small monthly grant for Cloud (20 credits) and AI (4 credits), and Lovable calls those grants temporary. Past that, a busy app spends credits you meant to build with.
Two smaller ones: a Build mode message run with the /goal command costs more than the same work done step by step, and Lovable pauses a long run at 20 credits by default to ask whether you want to keep going. I like that check-in, because a vague prompt can run for a long time.
bolt.new: tokens, and your project size sets the price
Bolt Pro is $25 a month or $18 billed yearly ($216 a year), starting at 10M tokens a month. Teams is $30 a member, or $27 yearly. The free plan is generous for trying it: 1M tokens a month, capped at 300K a day.
Tokens are the most honest unit of the five and the hardest to budget. Bolt's own help center says most of your usage comes from Bolt reading and syncing your project files, so a message on a big project costs more than the same message on a small one. Expect the first week to look cheap and month three on the same app to cost more. When you hit the free daily cap, you can still edit code by hand in Code view, which uses no tokens.
v0: dollars of credit at model token rates
v0 Plus is $30 per user a month and includes $30 of credit, plus $2 of free credit each day you log in. Business is $100 per user with the same $30 of credit. The extra $70 buys training opt-out by default, not more usage. Free gets a one-time $5 credit and 7 messages a day.
v0 is the only one of the five that publishes per-token rates for its own models. Its own models run from v0 Mini at $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, up to v0 Max Fast at $10 and $50. Model choice decides how far $30 goes. Pick Max for everything and you will run out first.
The page shows $90 struck through next to the $30 Plus price, with no end date and no explanation. I could not find one in the docs either, so I would not count on $30 staying put. Daily login credits expire the same day. Monthly credits roll over and expire after 65 days.
Base44: the cheapest credit, if you use it this month
Base44 has the longest ladder: Free, Starter $20, Builder $50, Pro $100 and Elite $200 a month, with 20% off yearly ($16, $40, $80, $160). The pricing page loads on yearly billing, so the big numbers you see first are the discounted ones.
Per credit, Base44 is the cheapest on paper. Starter works out to $0.20 a message credit, against $0.25 for Lovable Pro. Base44's docs put a simple text change at about 0.5 credits and a small feature at about 1. The catch is in the same docs: unused credits expire at every monthly reset. If you skip a month, you lose that month's credits. Lovable and Bolt both roll yours over.
The second pool, integration credits, pays for what your app does once it runs, such as sending emails or calling an LLM. Base44's docs say you cannot preview that cost before an action runs. Starter's 2,000 a month is the one to watch if your app sends anything.
Replit Agent: free mode first, paid work priced by effort
Replit Core is $20 a month ($18 yearly) and includes $20 of credit. Pro is $100 ($90 yearly) with $100 of credit, and its credit tiers go up to $2,000 a month on yearly billing. Paid plans also get Free Mode, which covers everyday Agent work at no cost up to an allowance: Core lists up to 30 hours of chat.
Beyond Free Mode, Replit uses effort-based pricing. Each request ends in one checkpoint, and a bug fix costs less than a whole feature. Replit asks you to confirm before a paid action starts, which I like. Plan Mode can bill for reasoning even when it changes no code, and the same credits pay for hosting, databases and storage.
The free Starter plan is thinner than the others. It only gets Lite build, and the one app you can publish goes down after 30 days. If you want to test whether Replit can build your idea end to end, budget for Core.
The traps I would check before paying
- Base44 credits expire monthly. Size the plan to a normal month, not your busiest one.
- Lovable and Replit bill hosting from your build balance. A live app with real users eats the credits you planned to build with.
- Bolt costs more per message as your project grows. Watch your token use in month two, not week one.
- v0's $30 Plus price sits next to a struck-through $90 with no date. Check the page before you plan a year on it.
- Yearly billing saves 10% to 28% (Replit 10%, Lovable two months free, Base44 20%, Bolt up to 28%). With units this hard to predict, I would pay monthly until I know my real usage.
Which one I would start with
On price alone, and without having built anything in them:
- You want to try one for free for a few weeks: bolt.new or Lovable. Both refill a free allowance every day, and Bolt lets you keep editing code by hand after you hit the cap.
- You build in bursts, a week on and two off: Lovable or Bolt, because unused credits roll over.
- You want the cheapest credit and build every week: Base44 Starter at $20.
- You know which model you want and want to see its price: v0, the only one with published per-model rates.
- You want a full dev environment behind the agent: Replit Core, and use Free Mode for the small stuff.
For side-by-side listings, start with Lovable vs v0, bolt.new vs Lovable, Base44 vs Lovable and bolt.new vs v0. If your next step after the prototype is a real codebase, Does ChatGPT Have a CLI Like Claude Code? covers the terminal agents.
FAQ
How much does v0 AI cost?
v0 is free with a one-time $5 credit and 7 messages a day. Plus costs $30 per user a month with $30 of credit and $2 of daily login credit. Business is $100 per user a month. Credits are spent at per-model token rates, from v0 Mini at $0.20 per million input tokens to v0 Max Fast at $10. Prices read 14 November 2026.
Is Replit Ghostwriter the same as Replit Agent?
Ghostwriter was the old name for Replit's AI features, and Replit retired it. Today the app-building agent is Replit Agent, priced through the Core ($20) and Pro ($100) plans.
Which AI app builder has the cheapest paid plan?
Billed monthly, Base44 Starter and Replit Core tie at $20. Billed yearly, Base44 Starter is the cheapest at $16 a month, then bolt.new Pro and Replit Core at $18. The units differ, so the cheapest plan is not always the one that builds the most.
