[HN Gopher] Is Lovable getting monetization wrong?
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Is Lovable getting monetization wrong?
Author : FinnLobsien
Score : 93 points
Date : 2025-06-25 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (getlago.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (getlago.substack.com)
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm an engineer. Where do I begin learning these things without
| taking an MBA?
| Jun8 wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iuRbDBAqyFY&t=9s&pp=2AEJkAIB
|
| https://www.qualtrics.com/marketplace/vanwesterndorp-
| pricing...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Pricing-Man-Affects-
| Every...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing-
| Prof...
| echelon wrote:
| Thank you so much!
| neolefty wrote:
| Yup. Like comparing pricing of cars to pricing of horses.
| Lovable is competing with future platforms, not present ones.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| This is interesting to pull apart if anyone wants to add more
| id love to hear.
|
| Right now Lovable has competition in the vibe coding arena.
| Like Replit for example. I found Replit to be better in my
| testing.
|
| I think there is an interesting curve where software is
| generally worthless (see Github!) but software plus
| marketing/sales etc. is valuable. But if you have any kind of
| scale that software needs to be robust and AI can't do that
| yet.
|
| So there is a weird evolving Venn diagram where the final app
| industry fits in. If one player can take it yeah they'll be
| the next Google but that's a big IF and a big WHO.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| what's funny is they're a bill metering company.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| How do you know what their cost base is? I don't quite
| understand how you'd be evaluating that. Their cost base is
| largely driven by the LLM and cloud companies. The $25/month
| pricing feels chosen to be similar to other unrelated SaaS
| businesses more than something based on a serious pricing
| analysis.
|
| And the article confirms that, saying they made up a starting
| price and then immediately lost money due to (doh) selling a
| product where your costs scale by usage for an unlimited flat
| rate, which is surely one of the most basic pricing issues out
| there. And not just for LLMs: they host the apps too, putting
| them on the hook for hosting costs. They're using a ton of very
| expensive PaaS services like Supabase to do that too.
|
| Then they have the free tier. Such services often have massive
| free tier costs; if their userbase is made up of a lot of
| people just trying stuff out quickly before exporting it to
| GitHub to continue, that problem will be worse. According to
| their blog, they have 30,000+ paying customers but there are
| 25,000 new apps created _per day_ with 1.2M apps overall. So,
| clearly, almost all apps are being created by free users.
|
| Don't get me wrong, maybe they're printing money like there's
| no tomorrow, or maybe they will soon. But it feels like the
| sort of business that's probably burning VC money to buy market
| share. If their cost base _is_ good then they feel very
| vulnerable to an OpenAI or AWS releasing something tomorrow
| that takes away a big chunk of the business, seeing as that 's
| where the bulk of the value lies. Oracle already has something
| quite similar launched in APEX.
| logifail wrote:
| > building the software that can build all other software
|
| _All_ other software?
|
| I'm afraid I stopped believing the author at that point...
| Jun8 wrote:
| 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.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| I think you must be the killer use case. As a programmer this
| is not good enough yet to warrant my time using it for
| production code (nor are its competitors)
|
| However if I need to prototype for throwaway it would be ok.
|
| These things right now compete with Figma and wire frames.
| Hopefully they lead ultimately to better UX in software.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > These things right now compete with Figma and wire frames
|
| I think that is exactly correct. And beyond Figma or
| wireframes, they can actually be launched to see if they get
| traction and have product market fit.
|
| Of course, I've seen tons of "throwaway" code that somehow
| never gets thrown away, and then, somewhat paradoxically,
| iteration velocity craters as the dev team tries to get a
| "prototype" to handle real load.
|
| So what I'm saying is that I think things like Lovable are
| fantastic tools, but I'm quite confident they will be
| horribly misused and some poor sap will have the job of
| getting this stuff actually working with edge cases, security
| issues, scale, etc.
|
| My prediction: this will look basically exactly like Visual
| Basic in the late 90s. VB was also heralded as "non-expert
| programmers can make apps just by drag and drop!" I actually
| think VB was a great product, the problem was most VB
| programmers were not, so VB apps took on a very negative
| connotation: like you could tell it was coded by a "VB
| coder", so you expected it to suck.
| clvx wrote:
| 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.
| mkagenius wrote:
| > manual integration (external dev making it prod ready) and
| keeping the MVP workflow.
|
| Right, the codebase generated by these can get huge, but
| maintenance can also be aided by AI tools like GitIngest[1],
| GitPodcast[1] etc. all helping you understand any new codebase
| easily or someone can query their doubts.
|
| So, I wouldn't strike these kinds of tools yet. AFAIK, v0
| already lets you connect github.
|
| 1. https://gitingest.com
|
| 2. https://gitpodcast.com
| b0a04gl wrote:
| 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.
| njovin wrote:
| ...and then PM's can have the same wonderful experiences as
| engineers: finding the exact commit where a major change was
| made 6+ months ago by a former employee, with a comment like
| 'updated behavior' that gives zero insight into what led to the
| change or why it was made.
| orbifold wrote:
| I think what current agent's are missing is taste or the
| ability to tune taste. So capturing taste across many users
| might be really valuable.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| 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.
| asdev wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > Everyone who uses these tools is just building prototypes.
|
| But also I think that's kinda the point. Like for example we
| have to do a UI redesign of an app my company is building and
| our "wireframes" are just v0 projects my PO created in one
| afternoon.
|
| I think wireframing is where these tools really shine. It's
| gives you roughly the same ideas as building a wireframe in
| Figma but it's way less work and you end up with higher
| fidelity wireframes.Like sure if I were to peek at the code
| under the hood I'm certain it's close to dogshit but the code
| doesn't really matter at that stage.
| asdev wrote:
| Any serious company has a brand/design system which Lovable
| can't leverage well, thus needs designers to use in Figma.
|
| Either way, my point is the customer LTV will be super low
| for use cases like this.
| lbreakjai wrote:
| I haven't tried with lovable, but gemini studio is fully
| capable of following a styleguide based on a screenshot,
| which is probably the crudest and least refined protocol I
| could think of.
|
| I'm sure there's already integrations somewhere that could
| allow a designer to specify a bunch of brand colours, to
| generate a styleguide out of it in plain english, and get a
| working prototype out of it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| A design system is not "following a styleguide based on a
| screenshot". A design system is an ontology of UI
| elements that your software has to adhere to, with
| several rules about how those elements are or aren't
| allowed to interact.
|
| Following a styleguide will make your software break as
| soon as the design system gets updated.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I guess you could argue its just marketing, but if that's the
| case they're not building "the last software" as they claim.
| In fact they become entirely reliant on people building more
| software.
| lubujackson wrote:
| I noticed in the example product the person was bragging they
| made "$1.6k in 5 weeks" but looking at the screenshot they were
| selling "lifetime access" built on this product they pay $25 a
| month for. I think there is going to be a reckoning for all
| these fly-by-night SaaSlings and the poor people who start to
| rely on them.
| Fokamul wrote:
| Cybersecurity will be booming in 2026, trust me bro :)
|
| I fully support vibe-coding in corporate env., plese bring more
| :D
| mrkramer wrote:
| Bug bounty programs will blossom like hell!!
| _pdp_ wrote:
| We have AI tools working on those as well. ;)
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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.
| lbreakjai wrote:
| Would you need a new platform, or just a screen and a
| microphone?
| lubujackson wrote:
| Love this concept - LLMs as the new "API layer" to everything.
| Don't design a frontend because the user can generate one on
| the fly or use their own styling or pick a common "theme".
| deadbabe wrote:
| Exactly, bring your own front end. No more worrying about
| "user experience"
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| With that mindset you'd have skipped getting a PC in the 90s
| because the Internet in your pocket is gonna happen any day
| now.
|
| For example let's say the agent you describe can relieve people
| of manual data extraction from websites. Such an agent would be
| sheer utter magic for a friend of mine. Part of their role
| involves logging in to get data on employees from 4-5 different
| systems, compiling a spreadsheet of the data, turning the
| spreadsheet into a report, and sending it to internal folks.
| It'd be great to have an agentic tool that can drive the data
| extraction piece and automate their entire process with just a
| prompt - but today's tech works just fine! A Playwright script,
| some carefully stored credentials, and a workflow automation
| are enough to get the job done - even if they require constant
| tweaking and monitoring.
|
| Today's tech is never the ideal version you can imagine, but it
| can still be used to solve important problems. Better to enjoy
| what is happening now even if you know it's temporary.
| exiguus wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| 98codes wrote:
| End users rarely pay for the program. Someone in their
| management chain OKs the purchase, or there's a larger purchase
| with a cross-charge to the department for the license cost. the
| problem comes when software needs to meet every whim of the
| decision maker, when really the users only will ever use 20% at
| best.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I think you may be assuming a certain enterprise size and
| accompanying workflow, probably would need stats to actually
| know how much of software is bought in this way however, and
| if the other way described would open up possible purchases
| by smaller companies, as was claimed.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| So true. Some of my favorite enterprise software I use often
| I could never afford or would never purchase for my own use.
| I've taken jobs because of this.
| Munksgaard wrote:
| IDA?
| lbreakjai wrote:
| I agree with you, and I think the Jevons paradox will
| eventually manifest itself once again. How many smaller
| companies are stuck with outdated workflows and tools because
| they can't afford to pay ten engineers for months on end for
| something better?
|
| Now those companies may very well be able to afford one
| engineer and some AI subscription to do the equivalent work.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Good point. "Build vs buy" is a perennial controversy
|
| https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume...
| ebiester wrote:
| I think there was a consensus over the past decade, but we
| are now having to adjust our priors. The answer is changing
| month by month. It also means people are delaying their
| decision because they are afraid of the wrong solution right
| now except in the most obvious cases.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I don't disagree with the thrust, but I've recently cleaned
| some of those up.
|
| One example: LLMs aren't smart enough to do things like
| properly manage zip codes with leading zeros. It was round
| tripping strings through an integer representation and
| corrupting them. The users did notice, but did not have the
| vocabulary/concepts to explain. To them, sometimes zipcodes get
| corrupted because inscrutable reasons (tm).
|
| chatgpt also authored a bash script that would have blown away
| a chunk of my drive if any paths had a space in them. :shrug:
| lubujackson wrote:
| Fun thing I noticed is converting a CSV to XLSX in Excel also
| drops leading 0s from zip codes...
| jt2190 wrote:
| > I'm a non-tech worker in a non-tech industry...
|
| Certainly you must have enough detailed knowledge of CAD files
| to validate the output of the transposition tool you had AI
| create for you. This might not be enough for you to think of
| yourself as "technical" but I'd argue that it's _far_ above the
| level of "entry level employee using CAD".
|
| This does also seem to fit the paradigm of "AI is a
| productivity booster for people who already know how to do x"
| qsort wrote:
| I don't deny that there's utility in what you are describing:
| if you can make it work for you that's fantastic. However:
|
| - if you can ship software like that given the current state of
| the technology, you are probably not the average non-tech
| worker in a non-tech industry. There are people paying
| exorbitant consulting rates for dashboards in PowerBI. LLMs in
| mid 2025 are orders of magnitude more operationally complex
| than anything most people have seen.
|
| - "citizen developers" doing something to scratch their own
| itches sounds very much like how a professional software
| project starts. Suddenly the scope grows and you need a nerd to
| handle it. Then two. Then four. You get the idea. Maybe that
| won't be the case for your specific needs, but that's how it
| generally goes.
|
| Weak or strong is a matter of framing, but that's why I see
| them as tools and not gods.
| lbreakjai wrote:
| 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.
| htrp wrote:
| Why does your CTO not use cursor or whatever other code IDE
| tools to build on your own standard internal stack?
|
| At least that would allow them to handoff to other members of
| the team.
| lbreakjai wrote:
| Lovable operates at a higher abstraction level. You describe
| what you want, the UI magically updates, you never have to
| see the code.
|
| Changes made by lovable aren't anything special. They live in
| their own branch, and get periodically merged to master, so
| you can carry on working on it as if it was any other
| project.
| donnaoana wrote:
| Lovable should be in the money flow, allow their users to
| monetize
| donnaoana wrote:
| Lovable should allow max flexibility to its users, allow them to
| monetize
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| 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?
| esher wrote:
| Good product placement of Lago :)
| chaosprint wrote:
| 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
| _pdp_ wrote:
| 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.
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