Most AI app builders now cost between $20 and $30 a month for the first paid plan. That makes them look interchangeable. They are not, because each one measures usage in a different unit, and the unit decides how far your money goes.
Below are the current prices, the free tier limits, and the catches that show up after you sign up. All figures come from each tool's own pricing page or docs, checked on November 3, 2026.
The price table
| Tool | Free plan | First paid plan | Billed yearly | What it meters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lovable | 5 credits a day, max 30 a month | Pro $25/mo, 100 credits | $21/mo | Credits |
| Bolt | 1M tokens a month, 300K a day | Pro $25/mo, from 10M tokens | not listed on the pricing page | Tokens |
| Replit | Daily Agent allowance, 1 published app | Core $20/mo, $20 of credit | $18/mo | Dollar credits |
| v0 (Vercel) | 7 messages a day | Plus $30/mo per user, $30 of credit | not listed | Dollar credits |
| Base44 | 25 message credits a month | Starter $20/mo, 100 message credits | $16/mo | Message + integration credits |
| Cursor | Limited agent and chat requests | Plus $8/mo | $80/yr | Weekly usage pool |
On sticker price alone, Cursor Plus at $8 is the cheapest entry, and Base44 Starter at $16 a month on a yearly plan is the cheapest of the app builders. But price per month only tells you half the story.
Free tiers: which one lets you build the most
Bolt has the most generous free plan for heavy iteration: 1M tokens a month. The catch is a 300K daily cap, and daily tokens do not roll over. If you build in one long weekend session, you hit the daily wall fast.
Lovable gives 5 build credits a day, capped at 30 a month on Free. A small style tweak costs about half a credit and adding auth about 1.2 credits, per Lovable's own docs, so 5 credits is a few real changes a day.
Base44 gives 25 message credits and 100 integration credits a month, and up to 5 apps. That is enough to try it, not to finish something.
v0 limits Free to 7 messages a day. Replit gives a daily Agent allowance plus limited cloud credits, but it does not publish the exact daily number.
Cursor Free is limited agent and chat requests. It is a code editor, not an app builder, so it fits a different person: someone who already writes code.
The catches that cost you money later
Credits that expire
- Replit Core ($20): the $20 of monthly credit does not roll over. Use it or lose it. Replit Pro ($100) lets unused credit roll over for two months.
- Bolt Pro ($25): unused tokens roll over for about one extra month, so they are valid up to two months.
- Lovable: daily build credits do not carry over from one day to the next.
Top-ups are where the bill grows
When you run out mid-project, you pay for more. Lovable Pro top-ups are $15 per 50 credits, which works out to $0.30 a credit. On Business it is $30 per 50, or $0.60 a credit. If you regularly top up twice a month on Pro, the next credit tier is usually cheaper than the top-ups.
We wrote up what to do when you run out of Lovable credits or Bolt tokens, including reset times and which tools stop working at zero.
Per user vs per workspace
v0 Plus is $30 per user. Lovable Pro is $25 for the workspace. For a team of three, that gap gets large: three v0 Plus seats cost $90 a month.
Cursor's model split
Cursor's new tiers are Plus at $8, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200. Premium gets 4 times the Plus weekly pool, Super 15 times, Ultra 50 times. The part people miss: Plus only covers Cursor and Grok models. Third-party models like Claude and GPT start at Premium, and they are billed at API list price on top. A long agent run on a frontier model can use up a prepaid balance quickly.
Intro prices that renew higher
This one is not in the table above, but it is worth knowing. Hostinger AI Builder Premium is $1.99 a month on a 48-month promo, paid up front as $95.52. After that term it renews at $10.99 a month. Always check the renewal price, not only the first one.
So which one is cheapest?
It depends on how you work:
- You write code and want AI help: Cursor Plus at $8 is the lowest entry price of anything here, if you are fine with Cursor and Grok models only.
- You want a full app from prompts, on a tight budget: Base44 Starter at $16 a month billed yearly, or Bolt Free if your sessions are short and spread across days.
- You iterate a lot and hate waste: Bolt Pro, because tokens roll over and there is no daily cap on paid plans.
- You want predictable credit math: Lovable Pro at $25, with published per-task examples in its docs.
- You need a real backend and a team later: Replit Core at $20, with the rollover on Pro if usage gets bursty.
The full ranking, with every plan and what it includes, is on the cheapest AI app builder page.
One honest warning about comparing these
You cannot convert a Lovable credit into Bolt tokens or Replit dollars. They measure different things, and the same prompt costs different amounts on each tool depending on the model and the task. The fair comparison is "how much does my typical week cost," and the only way to know that is to try the free tier for a few days and watch the meter.
Prices in this space change often. Hostinger changed its promo pricing on the same day we checked these numbers. If you want to see what changed and when, there is a running price change log.
What are you paying for your AI builder right now, and did the free tier hold up for you? Curious what limit people hit first.
