Is Lovable getting monetization wrong?

I'm a non-tech worker in a non-tech industry, let me state two things:

- Software today is written to cover as many use cases with as many features to target as many users a possible.

- End users very often only use a tiny slice of the program's capabilities, but still pay for the entire program.

This creates a situation where the people writing software see it as a monumental undertaking to get good functional programs (it is), and end users see programs as having annoying learning curves with lots of bloat and "unnecessary" features.

LLMs do an excellent job of fixing this for end users because it allows them to easily create a program that does the handful of tasks that they normally need to use MegaSoftware for. And it's tailor made exactly for the use case. And the LLM can tell you exactly how to use it.

I can give a brief example where I used gemini to create a CAD file transposition tool that utilized a simple GUI tailor made for the files my company works with. This allowed us to forgo a (very) expensive CAD software package to work through converting our archive of files. A probably 2M LOC program could be skipped because we only needed 3k LOC functionality.

I really cannot stress enough how often this is the case, and why SWEs see LLMs as weak tools while end users see them as gods.

There will still be a need for huge software packages in the future, but I know I never again have to pay for a huge class of "here is a large solution space that covers your small scope problem" software.

To bring it home, loveable understands this, an sees that the futures has lots of non-tech people "writing" software. Standard IDEs are not the tools your mom will use to make a "Friends and family birthday reminder" app.

This analysis is very much on point. I'm building a product in this space (https://getmocha.com), and can share a few more insider insights:

- The churn from companies like lovable is indeed very high, and user frustration is high also.

- There are sub-niches available. Building internal tools is not the same as landing pages is not the same as saas. In the previous website builder market, different players (webflow, squarespace, wix) found and dominated a sub-niche

- The market is way bigger than anyone realizes. Today hundreds of millions for basically early adopters and highly tech-savvy users. This tech can and will go mainstream

- A huge issue with lovable, solved by others like mocha and replit, is the app backend. Lovable took a shortcut and partnered with supabase but that deal will not last. Supabase is losing big on their free tier (had to raise 200M to support it) and both want to capture the margin from the customer. There will be a reckoning.

What this article touches on is why I focused only on the serverless part with my project https://saasufy.com/ and why didn't implement any frontend UI for it (besides the control panel which is only concerned with backend concepts like schema definitions, auth, access control...). Now Claude is allowing generation and hosting of UI apps directly from their chat interface so it would be reinventing the wheel to build a UI.

AI companies are going to be working really hard to ensure that users do not bypass their chat interface because AI APIs don't provide much lock-in factor for them.

I’m using Lovable heavily for PM prototyping and it’s great. I think, if anything, current subscription may be too cheap! They’re probably want to get a huge mass of users now, eg they recently had a free usage weekend.

The comments on the Add Ons are spot on, I think:

“Lovable is creating lots of new software founders who will eventually spend lots of money on vendors. That money will flow, but Lovable currently captures zero of it.”

Having a Lovable App Store sounds like an excellent tool.

I don't get how this company makes money. Everyone who uses these tools is just building prototypes. They get to 60-70% functionality, but when it comes to actually productionize and launch, 99% of these projects will get abandoned. The churn has to be absurdly high, maybe people are just forgetting to cancel their subscriptions. Or they're just marketing very hard and getting new sign ups/subscriptions, but will crash and burn soon enough.

i see one crazy real leverage: every prototype built here is a frozen snapshot of someone's product thinking in motion. like u can literally watch how ppl prioritize flows, kill features mid-wireframe, choose friction over flexibility. it’s raw cognitive output

if lovable ever starts versioning those moves, storing reasoning behind edits, even lightly, u got a time-series of product intuition across thousands of users. that’s applied decision memory.

there's a window here to become the place where product sense gets archived and replayed.

just have a question, for a young company like this, isn't mrr better than arr? or do they have that many yearly subscription? cuz u always subscribe and cancel different providers

The kind of things I see mostly produced by these tools are landing pages, example dashboards and simple utilities like calculators and other simple stuff. There is certainly a space for these but nothing ground breaking that was not possible before with other beginner-friendly tools. The only difference is now that there is more freedom because LLMs can do more with less constraints.

I wonder what will happen after the honeymoon is over - after people realise that software development is not about writing new exciting code but maintaining things that should have been replaced years ago that are now too important because other people depend on it.

> I remember we were building a micro-app like that and it took at least a month, now it takes 3 minutes.

...please, statements like this have the power to invalidate the rest of the commentary. in 3 minutes you can complete a few prompts not nearly enough to write a piece of software the allegedly takes 3 months to do.

> building the software that can build all other software

All other software?

I'm afraid I stopped believing the author at that point...

I don't think the idea sticks with me. The final products of these services are never reliable.

Right now, except for some hyperscalers, any similar service has integrated their deployments to some hyperscaler which means any day 2 operations will happen in someone else's computer (supabase, azure/aws, etc). On top of that, you have third party services that you need to integrate and manage their pricing plus auth. That alone is another challenge. Let's not even start with stateful data and migrations which is almost non existent.

The main problem is these tools don't tackle day 2 operations so it will be handled to some developer to make it happen which means exporting your code to some VCS service which I think it's only github. Right there, it's a threat for lovable and others. On top of that, there's not a real feedback loop between manual integration (external dev making it prod ready) and keeping the MVP workflow. Also, there's no real way these services can say "you are free to touch these components without breaking incompatibility with our system, anything else here be dragons".

In other words, You need to own the ecosystem to make more money. Funnel the capabilities to your own ecosystem.

I recently used lovable to create the scaffolding for an app. It did a great job, far better than I expected.

However, it also squishes everything into one JS file, making it unwieldy for anything moderately complex. After I fell off the happy path (integrating onnx was basically impossible), I had to spend a fair amount of time reworking it.

I’m probably not the target audience though. And I got the end result faster than I would’ve, and it’s better looking.

The marketing is good. Especially on LinkedIn, for non technical people. But I am not convinced. Lovable is a nice Website or App builder. Nothing for professionals, unless they want to build an prototype. Even building MVPs is nearly impossible. It's like v0 from Vercel or anything you can do with other Agents like Claude or Co-Pilot. Lovable is promising a bit to much for my taste.

Is there really a reason why should I pay for vibe coding apps like this when I can vibe code for free and unlimited with Google's Gemini?

Perhaps me just stupid and do prompts bad, but I can't make Lovable come up with anything really differentiated as a design. I'm curious if folks have tips on how to use it well as I really love the idea behind it.

Cybersecurity will be booming in 2026, trust me bro :)

I fully support vibe-coding in corporate env., plese bring more :D

Good product placement of Lago :)

Lovable should allow max flexibility to its users, allow them to monetize

Lovable should be in the money flow, allow their users to monetize

I work for a very small startup. Our CTO heavily uses lovable for our internal tools. Think dashboards, user management ... A somewhat standard UI over CRUD operations.

In previous roles, we either used some SaaS platform and would end up designing features based on the limitations of the tools, or we'd spin up a team to roll our own tailored solution. (or, God forbid, use Oracle and pay consultants a small fortune to do it for us).

With lovable, our CTO can validate assumptions and iterate on their own. Even if the code was absolutely garbage and we deleted all of it, this alone saves us a ton of man hours per feature. There's an entire lossy communication loop that's been removed.

Now, the code is only ok. We generate API clients from openapi definitions but it will struggle to properly orchestrate them. It will absolutely not have sane defaults anywhere, and will abuse the "any" type.

You still need a human in the loop, but my back of the napkin calculation is we'd have to hire two full time developers to do the work it's been doing for us.

I'm pretty sure the person who wrote this has never run pricing research for a brand. Short answer, they can ignore Gabor-Granger because their cost base is so low compared to their revenue, so they'd be looking at Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter to set a benchmark for where the pricing probably lands, and a conjoint study to understand the value of different elements for segmenting different versions of the product at different price levels.

Obviously positioning, who they're positioning against, how they communicate that, the level to which they're known amongst the market etc all feed in to this, but that'd be a decent starter for ten.

This is an overly simplistic version of where to go with pricing for a brand like this, but that's where I'd begin with creating pricing for them.

These apps will look dated in a few years, don’t waste your time. You’re just having fun playing around making old shit that could have made you a lot of money 10 years ago but is now just a weekend project. That’s the way things go in tech. Starry-eyed dreamers will let their imagination run wild, but they’re the laggards, the industry is already thinking ahead.

The next generation of apps isn’t going to look like the previous gen. No beautiful UIs and fancy CSS. No UI at all.

Instead, everyone will have some kind of platform like Cursor, but instead of just coding, it’s for everything.

Subscribing to new services for your AI to use will be the equivalent of downloading apps from an AppStore to your phone.

Then you can just say things like “fuck this person! AI, give me an OSINT profile of this Redditor!” and since your AI has the osint app it compiles the info instantly and says “here, damn”. No need to open an app, just straight info into your brain as quickly as possible.

AI has clearly made us tired of googling endlessly for info on random websites, so why are we still opening up apps to do various tasks? Because we want to see pretty interfaces? Get real. It’s time for the UNIX philosophy to go mainstream. Start thinking of how your product can minimize time to satisfaction, graphical interfaces get in the way of satisfaction.

The only problem is we currently don’t have a single unifying platform like an iPhone or something to consolidate a user base, but it will come. Start planning for that day so you can launch new services on day 1. It will be a gold rush.

And in the end, a lot of people will find they will struggle with coming up with good AI app ideas, because 80% of their idea was just putting a pretty interface in front of something complex. That’s how you know it was mostly a bad idea.