Key findings
- The four meter differently. Lovable draws building, hosting, and AI features from one workspace credit balance, and v0 charges each user's tokens by model. Replit bills paid Agent work by effort per checkpoint and hosting by compute. Bolt gives each paid seat its own monthly token allotment, which larger projects use faster.
- The included usage differs. Lovable Pro includes 100 credits, Replit Pro and v0 Plus include usage credits equal to their price, and Bolt Teams gives each member a token allotment.
- Running the app is billed inside Lovable's credits, on Replit's deployment compute, on a separate Vercel plan for v0, and against Bolt's included hosting allowance with pay-as-you-go above it.
For a team of 10 occasional builders, Lovable Pro is the cheapest entry plan at US$25 a month, against US$100 on Replit Pro and US$300 on v0 Plus or Bolt Teams. Rework sets the real bill on all four, because each one meters every fix attempt. Pilot one internal tool and record build, fix, and running charges separately before you choose.
Four pricing models
Lovable prices a workspace with unlimited members. Pro costs US$25 a month for 100 credits and Business US$50, with tiers up to 10,000 credits. Plan mode costs 1 credit per message plus any research it runs. Build mode charges by complexity. Documented examples range from 0.50 credits for a style change to 2.00 for a landing page.
v0 charges each user US$30 a month for Plus or US$100 for Business. Both include US$30 in credits. Per million tokens, Mini costs US$0.20 input and US$1.20 output, while Max Fast costs US$10 and US$50. Replit charges per workspace. Core costs US$20 a month with US$20 in credits for up to 5 builders. Pro costs US$100 with US$100 in credits for up to 15. Free Mode covers everyday work within an allowance. Power and Max charge effort per checkpoint.
Bolt charges per person. Its Pro plan is US$25 a month for 10M tokens, with higher tiers such as US$50 for 26M. Teams costs US$30 per member a month. Members keep separate balances. Monthly tokens expire after two months and require an active plan.
What drives consumption
On Lovable, request size and rework drive spend. Practitioners describe fixes that break other parts of the app, and each attempt draws credits from the balance that also pays for hosting. On v0, context drives spend, because chat history and source files count as input tokens on every request. On Replit, effort per checkpoint drives spend, and App Testing in Power and Max modes is billed by the effort it takes. On Bolt, project size drives spend. Most tokens go to reading and syncing the project's files, so the docs recommend clearing context and splitting large files, and publishing or restoring from version history by button costs nothing.
Planning before building pays off on all four. Lovable's Plan mode costs 1 credit a message plus research, Replit charges for Plan Mode work, and Bolt's Plan mode uses fewer tokens because it changes no code. A clear plan cuts the fix attempts that cost the most.
Running the app
Lovable bills hosting, the built-in backend, and AI features in the same credits as building, with 20 Cloud and 4 AI credits a month included on Free, Pro, and Business. A published site consumes no credits on its own, but when credits run out, AI features stop and Cloud apps can pause. Since August 1, 2026, Replit Autoscale costs US$0.60 per million compute units and US$0.40 per million requests. Reserved VMs start at US$15 a month. v0 uses Vercel, whose Hobby plan permits personal, non-commercial use and whose Pro plan costs US$20 a month. Bolt paid plans include 30 GB of bandwidth and 1M requests a month across an account's sites. Usage above that costs pay-as-you-go up to a spending limit. Free sites go offline at the monthly limit.
The time side
Reported build times are short. A small business turned its paper records, spreadsheets, and invoices into a job-management app in a couple of hours for about US$8 of usage. In Lovable's own customer stories, which are vendor material, a Delivery Hero lead reports getting sign-off in one week, down from about three. Kedde built a logistics platform in three weeks at about US$500 of Lovable cost. A Bolt consultant built a client's Zillow tool with Stripe and about 1,100 lines of server functions in about three days.
Rework is the variable. The same accounts that report speed describe loops where fixes break other features, and the time an engineer spends reviewing access rules and taking over the code belongs in the cost.
A cost model for your pilot
Build one internal tool on the candidate platform. Record build charges and fix charges separately. Add monthly running costs and engineering hours for review and handoff. Compare the total with engineering's estimate for the same tool.
- Record credits, tokens, or effort charges from first prompt to release.
- Measure the share of requests spent fixing earlier output.
- Record Cloud or deployment charges per month once the app is live.
- Record engineering hours spent reviewing access rules and taking over code.
Methodology
GILD calculated costs from Lovable, v0, Vercel, Replit, and Bolt list prices in US dollars, checked on October 12, 2026. The 10-builder plan totals are GILD's arithmetic on those prices, and the 10-builder team is GILD's stated assumption. Reported build times and spend come from the linked builder accounts and Lovable's own customer stories.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 21
- Public source
- 3
- Lovable docs: Subscription plans
- Lovable docs: Credits and usage
- Lovable docs: Lovable Cloud
- Lovable docs: How Lovable hosts your app
- v0 pricing
- v0 docs: Pricing
- Vercel pricing
- Replit pricing
- Replit docs: Replit Core
- Replit docs: Replit Pro
- Replit docs: Replit AI billing
- Replit docs: Free Agent Mode
- Replit docs: Cloud August 2026 pricing updates
- Bolt pricing
- Bolt Help Center: Billing
- Bolt Help Center: Tokens
- Bolt Help Center: Maximize token efficiency
- Bolt Help Center: Teams plans, billing, tokens, and invoices
- Bolt Help Center: Bolt Cloud hosting plans
- Ok_Sprinkles_6449 in r/lovable: a small business's operations app (Sep 1, 2026)
- Biron Clark: Can a Marketer Vibe-Code a Working App? (May 26, 2026)
- AffectionateShine404 in r/boltnewbuilders: a client's Zillow data tool built with Bolt (Jan 28, 2026)
- Lovable blog: How Delivery Hero green-lights features 66% faster (Nov 18, 2025)
- Lovable blog: How Kedde used Lovable to challenge Stockholm's zone-based logistics (Sep 10, 2026)