Lovable vs Bolt: both of them build for the web, and the split that matters is what happens after you publish.

What you pay, and what runs out first

Bolt meters tokens. Its pricing page lists a free plan at $0 with a 300,000 token daily limit and 1 million tokens a month, Bolt branding on published websites, a 10MB file upload limit, hosting with up to 333,000 web requests and unlimited databases. Bolt Pro is $25 a month billed monthly, removes the daily limit, starts at 10 million tokens a month, drops the branding, raises uploads to 100MB and web requests to 1 million, adds custom domains and a choice of database provider, and rolls unused tokens into the next month. Teams is $30 a month per member with centralized billing and admin controls. Enterprise is quoted. Bolt's own tokens page explains the thing that surprises people: most token use comes from Bolt reading and syncing your project files, so the larger the project, the more each message costs.

Lovable meters credits, and one balance covers four different things: building, chatting, hosting the deployed app with its built in backend, and AI features inside the app you ship. Lovable's subscription documentation lists Pro at $25 a month for 100 credits, $50 for 200 and $100 for 400, with annual billing at $250 a year for the 100 credit tier, which it works out as $21 a month. Business starts at $50 a month for the same 100 credits and adds governance features. The free plan gives 5 build credits a day capped at 30 in a calendar month, plus 20 Cloud credits and 4 AI credits a month. Lovable's pricing FAQ prices example prompts in credits: making a button gray costs 0.50, adding authentication with sign up and login costs 1.20. It also says monthly plan credits expire two months after they are issued, and that credits are not refundable.

You cannot convert a token into a credit, so compare the shape of the bill instead. Bolt's meter responds to the size of your codebase, which means a long lived project costs more per message than a new one. Lovable's meter responds to the complexity of each request, and it keeps running after launch, because hosting and any AI features in your deployed app draw on the same balance. One structural difference is worth more than either number: Lovable's pricing FAQ says it does not charge per seat, that workspaces support unlimited members on all plans, and that owners can set per member credit limits. Bolt Teams charges per member. If the credit model is what puts you off, the field is wider than two names and we lined it up in lovable alternatives.

Neither vendor publishes anything we could use to compare output quality, so we are not going to score them. No user counts, no star ratings, no benchmark table. Both free tiers are large enough to build the same small app twice, which is a better test than anyone's review.

Bolt, pricing page, plan limits and token FAQs

The native app question, answered by each vendor

Lovable is explicit. Publishing deploys a snapshot to a web address ending in lovable.app, or to a custom domain on a paid plan, and its FAQ states there is no built in flow that packages and submits your project to a store. It names the two workarounds, a progressive web app or a Capacitor shell built outside Lovable, and says plainly that it does not generate React Native projects. It also clears up a thing people misread: the Lovable app in the App Store and on Google Play is for building projects from your phone, not for turning your project into an app your users install.

Bolt's path is real and it is longer than the marketing suggests. Inside the browser you get a Device Preview icon and a QR code for Expo Go, so you can hold the app in your hand while you build. To ship it, Bolt's doc has you download the code, install Node and Git on your own computer, install the EAS command line tool, log in to an Expo account, run expo-doctor and eas build:configure, then build each platform. For iOS it documents a build with auto submit to TestFlight, then App Store Connect for the public release. For Android it documents a build and the internal testing track in Play Console. The prerequisites it lists include a paid Apple Developer account and a Google Play Developer account. What that process involves end to end, including the store paperwork, is taking either one to mobile.

So the honest version of this comparison: if installable is a hard requirement, Bolt is the only one of the two with a documented route, and you should expect to open a terminal. If installable is a nice to have, Lovable's progressive web app route costs nothing extra and keeps one codebase, and a Capacitor wrapper stays available later. If your app needs the camera, push notifications or biometrics, Lovable's own FAQ points you at the native wrapper, which is a fair signal about where its limits are.

Lovable, publishing documentation and its native app FAQ

The jobs each one is better at

Bolt is wider. Its home page offers four starting points, Website, Slides, App and Prototype, and lets you begin from Figma, from GitHub or from a team template. Bolt Slides makes presentations, the Templates marketplace holds projects its docs say you can copy for free, and the Teams plan adds design system support with per package prompts. Bolt Cloud supplies databases, user management and authentication, hosting with analytics and custom domains, and its docs also cover connecting Supabase instead. Two limits are published and worth knowing: Bolt supports JavaScript based backends only, so Python and PHP are out, and in Safari the code view is read only with hosted previews rather than in browser ones.

Lovable is deeper on the web product itself. Its docs describe a Plan mode that investigates your project and writes a structured plan you can review and edit, Chats outside a project including Lovable in Slack and Telegram, and Cloud as the built in backend covering database, storage, realtime and compute. Connectors such as Perplexity, Firecrawl and Parallel can be billed through the same credits. The detail that matters for anything marketing related is the template: Lovable's latest template is TanStack Start, which its documentation ties to pages rendering on the server for search visibility and social link previews. Some of its SEO checks only run against the live published site, including indexing and Google Search Console setup. On Business and Enterprise plans you can publish an app so that only your workspace or a named audience can open it.

Pick the shape that matches the work. A founder testing an idea this week, a marketer who needs a campaign page and a deck, an agency producing client sites: Bolt covers more of that in one subscription. A product that will be public, indexed, iterated on for months and shared with a team on one bill: Lovable's model fits better. If neither spread is right, bolt new alternatives lists what else sits in this bracket.

Code, lock in and moving a project between them

Both let you leave, which is the reason this choice is cheaper to get wrong than it looks. Lovable's pricing FAQ answers the ownership question directly: you own your code, the apps and projects you build, your customer data stored in Lovable and the AI output you generate, subject to third party rights in the underlying models. Its documentation covers two way sync with github.com, GitHub Enterprise, GitLab and Bitbucket, so the repository can be the source of truth rather than the editor. Bolt's own instructions assume you can download the project, because that is step one of its Expo build process, and it documents a GitHub integration for version control.

Moving between them is documented in one direction only. Bolt's help center has a page for importing a project from Lovable: sync the Lovable project to GitHub, connect Bolt to GitHub, import the repository. Lovable's documentation index lists no equivalent page for importing from Bolt, which does not make it impossible, since both produce JavaScript web projects in a git repository, but it does mean nobody has written the steps for you. Note that an imported project is a web project, so Bolt's warning about web projects not switching easily to mobile still applies to it.

Practical advice that applies either way: connect git on day one, before the project is big enough to be painful. It makes the pricing meters less frightening, because a project you can clone locally is a project you can keep working on when the month's tokens or credits run out.