AI Coding & Vibe Coding Published 2026-10-19

Lovable vs Bolt vs v0 (2026): Pricing, Credits, and Which AI App Builder to Pick

How we checked: plan prices, allowances, and rules come from each company's official pricing page and documentation (Lovable's pricing page and docs, Bolt's pricing page and Help Center, and v0's pricing page and docs), all checked on October 19, 2026. Sources are listed at the end. We have no affiliate relationship with any of the three. All three change plans often, so confirm on the pricing page before you buy.

The short answer

  • Pick Lovable if you're building with other people, or you're not a developer and want predictable per-prompt costs. Lovable prices by credits, not seats, so a whole team can share one $25 Pro plan, and it publishes example credit costs for typical prompts.
  • Pick Bolt if you're a solo builder who wants 10M tokens a month for $25 and built-in hosting with clearly published traffic limits. Bolt measures usage in tokens, and bigger projects burn more tokens per message.
  • Pick v0 if you'll deploy on Vercel, want to choose models by price, or if you already pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro. v0 can bill eligible OpenAI-model responses to your ChatGPT plan, though a small v0 platform fee still applies.
  • Just exploring? All three have free plans. Bolt's free tier (1M tokens a month) is the most generous for trying a real project. v0's free tier is the tightest (a one-time $5 in credits for new users and 7 messages a day).

At a glance

Lovable Bolt v0
Free plan 5 build credits a day, up to 30 a month 1M tokens a month (300K daily cap) $5 one-time credits for new users, 7 messages a day
Entry paid plan Pro: $25/mo for 100 credits ($21/mo billed annually) Pro: $25/mo for 10M tokens Plus: $30/user/mo with $30 of credits
What you're buying Credits per message (Lovable's examples range from 0.50 to 1.70 credits; Plan Mode is 1 credit) Tokens (cost depends mostly on project size) A dollar credit balance, spent per token at each model's rate
Bigger tiers Pro up to 10,000 credits ($2,250/mo) Pro tiers at $50 (26M) and $100 (55M) and up Buy extra credits any time on paid plans
Team pricing Priced by credits, unlimited members, no per-seat fee Teams: $30 per member/mo, tokens per member Plus $30/user/mo, Business $100/user/mo
Unused allowance Monthly credits expire 2 months after issue Paid tokens valid for 2 months Monthly credits roll over, expire after 65 days
Annual discount "2 months free" 10% Not listed
Hosting Lovable Cloud, small apps usually covered by a monthly grant bolt.host; Free 10 GB / 333,333 requests, Pro 30 GB / 1M requests Deploys to Vercel (Vercel plans are billed separately)
SSO Business ($50/mo and up) Enterprise Enterprise

How Lovable's pricing works

Lovable sells credits, and one balance covers building (sending messages), hosting your app on Lovable Cloud, and AI features inside the apps you publish.

  • Free: 5 build credits a day, capped at 30 a month, plus a monthly grant of 20 Cloud credits. You can publish to lovable.app domains and sync to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, but editing and downloading code are paid features.
  • Pro ($25/mo, or $250/yr): 100 monthly credits, plus the same 5 daily build credits. Lovable's docs say Pro has no monthly cap on those daily credits, though its pricing FAQ notes that some regional plans cap them at 30 a month. Pro adds custom domains, code editing and download, design systems, on-demand top-ups, and removes the Lovable badge.
  • Business ($50/mo, or $500/yr): the same 100 credits at a higher price, plus SSO, role-based access, a security center, internal (members-only) publishing, and the Lovable API. Workspace data is excluded from AI model training by default. On Free and Pro you opt out per account.
  • Bigger tiers: both Pro and Business scale from 100 to 10,000 credits a month. For example, Pro with 400 credits is $100/mo and Pro with 2,000 credits is $480/mo.

What a credit buys. Lovable publishes example costs: "Make the button gray" cost 0.50 credits, "Remove the footer" 0.90, "Add authentication with sign up and login" 1.20, and "Build me a landing page, use images" 1.70. Plan Mode costs 1 credit per message. At those rates, the free plan's 5 daily credits cover about 10 small styling edits, or two landing-page-sized prompts.

Expiry and refunds. Unused monthly credits roll over but expire two months after they're issued. On annual plans they last until one month after the annual period ends. Top-up credits last 12 months. Credits aren't refundable.

Discount: verified students and teachers get 50% off Pro (100 credits, billed monthly) for up to 12 months.

How Bolt's pricing works

Bolt (from StackBlitz) measures usage in tokens. The important detail from Bolt's own docs is that most token usage comes from syncing your project's files to the AI, so the larger your project gets, the more each message costs. A 10M-token plan goes further on a small landing page than on a big multi-page app.

  • Free: 1M tokens a month with a 300K daily cap. The daily allowance doesn't carry over. Hosting on a free bolt.host URL, a "Made in Bolt" badge, no custom domains.
  • Pro ($25/mo): 10M tokens a month with no daily cap, custom domains, no badge, AI image editing, and a choice of database provider, including Supabase.
  • Higher Pro tiers: Bolt's billing docs give 26M tokens for the $50/mo tier and 55M for the $100/mo tier, and larger tiers exist above that.
  • Teams ($30 per member/mo): everything in Pro plus centralized billing and admin controls. Tokens aren't shared. Each member gets their own allotment.
  • Annual billing saves 10%, according to Bolt's billing docs.

Rollover: with an active paid plan, each month's tokens stay valid for two months. If you cancel, you lose access to all allocated tokens, including rollover tokens, when the billing cycle ends. Extra "reload" tokens are available only on the highest monthly Pro tier or any annual Pro plan, and they never expire.

Hosting limits: the free tier allows 10 GB of bandwidth and 333,333 requests a month, shared across all your sites. If you go over, your sites go offline until the reset. Paid plans include Pro hosting with 30 GB and 1 million requests, plus optional pay-as-you-go overage up to a spending cap you set.

A token-saving detail: edits you make yourself in Code view don't use tokens, even when you've hit the free plan's daily limit. Bolt subscriptions are non-refundable.

Note: Bolt's Help Center says October 14, 2026 was the last day to sign up for its $9/month "Lite" plan, which is built around open-source models. Lite doesn't appear on the pricing page.

How v0's pricing works

v0 (by Vercel) gives you a dollar-denominated credit balance, and each message is charged by the tokens it uses at the rate of the model you pick.

  • Free: a one-time $5 in credits for new users (existing free users keep a $5 monthly allowance), a 7-message daily limit, Design Mode visual editing, GitHub sync, and deploys to Vercel.
  • Plus ($30/user/mo): access to all models, $30 of monthly credits per user, plus $2 of free daily credits each day you log in, and shared chats. The pricing page shows a struck-through "$90" next to the $30 price without explaining it.
  • Business ($100/user/mo): the same credits as Plus, with training opt-out by default.
  • Enterprise (custom): SAML SSO, role-based access control, data never used for training, and priority access.
  • Premium ($20/mo) still exists for some existing users, but it's being sunset and isn't available to new sign-ups.

Model rates (per 1M tokens):

Model Input Output
v0 Mini $0.20 $1.20
v0 Pro $2 $10
v0 Max $5 $25
v0 Max Fast $10 $50

Why short prompts can still cost a lot: v0 counts your chat history, source files, and Vercel-specific context as input tokens. As a purely illustrative example (our numbers, not v0's), one message that sends 50,000 input tokens and gets 5,000 back on v0 Pro would cost about $0.15 ($0.10 input + $0.05 output), before any cache savings. The same message on v0 Max would cost about $0.38. Your usage dashboard shows the real cost per chat.

Rollover and extras: unused monthly credits roll over and expire after 65 days. Extra credits can be bought any time on paid plans. They expire one year after purchase and need an active paid plan to use. When credits run out, generation pauses. v0 says it generally doesn't offer refunds, and its FAQ says it offers no discounts.

Two things to know: v0 is not included in Vercel's own plans, so a Vercel Pro hosting plan and a v0 plan are two separate bills. ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers can connect their ChatGPT account to cover eligible responses from supported OpenAI models. A v0 credit balance is still required, though, because each request carries a small platform fee, and image generation and some agent work still use v0 credits.

What it costs for real setups

A solo founder building an MVP:

  • Lovable Pro: $25/mo (or $21/mo annually) for 100 credits plus daily credits.
  • Bolt Pro: $25/mo for 10M tokens, which is 10× the free allowance.
  • v0 Plus: $30/mo for $30 of credits plus daily login credits. Premium at $20 isn't open to new users.

A team of three building one product together:

  • Lovable: one Pro plan from $25/mo covers the whole team. Everyone draws from the same 100-credit pool, and admins can set per-member credit limits. Business is $50/mo if you need SSO.
  • Bolt Teams: 3 × $30 = $90/mo, with tokens assigned to each member.
  • v0 Plus: 3 × $30 = $90/mo, with $30 of monthly credits per person. Business is 3 × $100 = $300/mo.

That seat-free pricing is Lovable's clearest advantage for groups such as agencies, classrooms, and co-founders. The catch is that a shared pool runs out faster. Bigger teams should budget for a higher credit tier.

A side project that needs to stay online for free:

  • Bolt Free publishes to bolt.host with a hard cap of 10 GB and 333,333 requests a month. Bolt estimates that's around 10,000 to 15,000 visits, depending on page size.
  • Lovable Free publishes to lovable.app domains and includes a monthly grant of 20 Cloud credits. Lovable's pricing FAQ says hosting for most smaller or new apps is fully covered by the included grant.
  • v0 deploys to Vercel, so hosting falls under your Vercel plan rather than v0's.

Which should you choose?

You are… Pick Why
A non-developer with an app idea Lovable Pro Example credit costs per prompt are published, and one plan covers the whole workspace
A team, class, or agency Lovable Pro or Business No per-seat pricing, and per-member credit limits
A solo builder on a $25 budget Bolt Pro 10M tokens, custom domains, and hosting with 1M requests included
A developer who deploys on Vercel v0 Plus Design Mode, GitHub sync, deploys to Vercel, and a choice of models by price
A ChatGPT Plus/Pro subscriber v0 Eligible OpenAI-model responses can bill to your ChatGPT plan
Someone who'd rather work in a real code editor None of these. See Cursor or Claude Code (part of Claude's paid plans) App builders trade control for speed

If you're weighing ChatGPT for v0's ChatGPT connection, our ChatGPT vs Claude vs Perplexity pricing comparison breaks down the Plus and Pro tiers. You'll find more coding tools in the AI Coding & Vibe Coding category.

FAQ

Which one has the best free plan? For building something real, Bolt's: 1M tokens a month (300K a day), private projects, and free hosting. Lovable's 5 daily credits work well for short sessions but stop after 30 a month. v0's new-user free plan is a one-time $5 in credits with a 7-message daily cap.

Do I own the code? Lovable and Bolt both say you own what you build. Bolt says you can use it commercially. On Lovable, code editing and downloading need a paid plan, but Git sync works on every plan. v0 syncs with GitHub on its free plan.

Can I move a project out later? Lovable offers Git sync to GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket on all plans. v0 includes GitHub sync on Free. Once your code is in a Git repository, you can keep working on it in an editor like Cursor.

Do unused credits carry over? Partly, on all three. Lovable's monthly credits expire two months after they're issued. Bolt's paid tokens are valid for two months, as long as you stay subscribed. v0's monthly credits roll over and expire after 65 days.

Sources

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