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Is Lovable Free? What You Get for $0

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Is Lovable free? Yes. You can sign up, build an app and publish it to a lovable.app address without a card. What people miss is how small the free allowance is once you’re past the first weekend, and which features are simply locked until you pay.

Everything below comes from Lovable’s subscription plans and credits and usage docs, checked on October 15, 2026. Lovable changes this stuff often, so if you’re reading this in 2027, check the dates.

What the Lovable free plan gives you

  • 5 build credits a day, capped at 30 a month. This is the number that matters.
  • A daily chat allowance for Chat mode and the separate Chats, which doesn’t touch your build credits.
  • 20 Cloud credits and 4 AI credits a month to run what you built: the database, auth, storage, and any AI features your users click.
  • Publishing to your-app.lovable.app, public or invite only.
  • GitHub sync (GitLab and Bitbucket too), private projects and unlimited workspace members.

That’s genuinely generous for trying the tool. Plenty of builders pay for nothing until they have something worth paying for.

The 30-credit wall

The cap works like this: you get 5 credits at 00:00 UTC each day, and once you’ve collected 30 in a calendar month, the daily drip stops until the 1st. Lovable’s own example says it plainly: on Free you get build credits for the first 6 days of the month, then none.

A month calendar for the Lovable free plan: 5 build credits arrive on each of days 1 to 6, and days 7 to 31 get nothing until the 1st of next month

Credits don’t roll over either. If you skip Tuesday, Tuesday’s 5 are gone, and you still hit the cap on day 6 if you log in every day before that.

How far 30 credits go depends on what you ask for. Lovable’s docs give illustrative prices: “make the button gray” costs about 0.5 credits, adding authentication about 1.2, a landing page with generated images about 2. Plan mode is 1 credit a message. So a careful builder can get a decent landing page and a small form out of a month. A first version of a SaaS with logins, a dashboard and a payment page usually burns through the 30 in one evening, mostly on fixing the bugs the earlier prompts made.

I watched a founder do exactly that in September. He’d planned to “build it on the free plan over the month”, spent all 30 credits on a Saturday chasing a broken Supabase policy, and spent the next three weeks reading his own code in GitHub because he couldn’t edit it in Lovable. Which brings us to the locks.

What Free doesn’t do at all

Credits aside, these are switched off on the Free plan:

  • Edit code. You can’t open the code editor. You can still push changes through GitHub sync, which is the loophole most technical people use.
  • Download code from inside Lovable (again, GitHub sync gets you the code anyway).
  • Custom domains. Your app lives on lovable.app until you pay.
  • Removing the “Edit with Lovable” badge.
  • Bigger database instances. Free projects stay on the default Cloud instance.
  • Credit top-ups. When you’re out, you’re out until the next month or until you upgrade.
  • Email support. Free gets the community.

One more that matters for anything you leave running: Lovable can unpublish a Free workspace’s site after 12 months with no visits and no owner logins. Fine for a demo. Not fine for a link you put on a printed flyer.

When the free plan stops being free in practice

The build credits get the attention, but the run side is what surprises people later. The 20 Cloud credits a month cover a quiet app. If your app gets real users and the Cloud grant runs out, Cloud usage draws from your general credits, and on Free you don’t have any. The docs are direct about what happens then: AI features fail, and the database, storage and auth “pause shortly after you run out of credits”. Your data is kept, but your users see a dead app, and you may have to press Wake up in the Cloud tab after adding credits.

So the honest answer to “is Lovable free” is: free to build a small thing, free to show it to people, not free to run something people depend on.

Cheaper ways in

Pro at $25 a month gives 100 credits, keeps the 5 daily ones without the 30 cap, and switches on code editing and custom domains. Annual billing is $250 for the year.

Students and teachers get 50% off that $25 Pro tier for up to 12 months. You verify on lovable.dev/students with an academic email, and only from a Free workspace. It covers the 100-credit monthly tier only, and you can use it once.

Referral and promo credits exist too. Referral credits expire 12 months after you get them.

There’s no permanent “unlimited free” trick. People searching for “lovable 2 months free” are usually looking at annual billing, which is priced as twelve months for the cost of ten. It’s a discount, not a trial.

What I’d actually do

Build the first version on Free. Use the daily chat allowance for thinking and questions, and spend the 30 build credits on real changes. Connect GitHub on day one, so the code is yours whatever happens next. When you need a domain or you’re out of credits mid-month, go to Pro.

If the app takes off and the monthly bill starts climbing because of the database rather than your prompts, that’s a different question. Our free Lovable cost check reads your repo and shows what the same app costs on four setups, and how much Lovable costs per month walks through three example bills. If your app is past the prototype and needs to survive real users, that’s what our Lovable to production service is for.