Lovable is good. The bill is not. The free plan gives you 5 credits per day, capped at 30 per month; Pro is $25/month for 100 monthly credits (plus the same 5 daily). Since July 2025, credits are complexity-weighted: a feature change touching auth runs about 1.2 credits, a styling tweak about 0.5. In practice, a serious session on the free plan is over after two or three prompts.
There are three ways to spend less, and they cost you different things. Open-source local tools are genuinely free but leave deployment and upkeep to you. Some hosted platforms have free tiers you can do real work on, until you hit the ceiling. And a few paid plans meter usage more honestly than Lovable's credits do. All pricing below is a July 2026 snapshot; check the official sites before deciding.
Tier 1: Actually free — open source and local, at the cost of doing it yourself
Dyad runs entirely on your own Windows or Mac machine. The software is open source and model-agnostic: bring your own API key (Gemini has a free tier, OpenRouter has free models, or run fully local via Ollama). The output is a real codebase on your disk, typically paired with Supabase for database and auth. In exchange, deployment, hosting, and maintenance are all on you. If you don't want to manage keys, Dyad Pro is $20/month for 200 credits.
open-lovable is an MIT-licensed project from the Firecrawl team (26k+ GitHub stars), and it's narrower than the name suggests: it clones existing websites into modern React apps, not a general-purpose app builder. Self-hosting needs three keys — E2B for sandboxed execution, Firecrawl for scraping, plus at least one LLM provider. Good for engineers who want a starting codebase; wrong tool for no-code users.
"Free" in this tier means the software is free. You still pay for LLM tokens, just directly to the model provider, without a platform credit markup. In the end you're buying money with time.
Tier 2: Hosted platforms whose free tiers do real work
Bolt's free tier gives 300K tokens per day and 1M per month, no credit card. Enough for small prototypes; token metering is transparent, but larger projects resend context on every change, so the burn accelerates.
Replit's free Starter plan grants daily Agent credits (with a monthly cap), restricts you to Lite build, and gates external connectors (Google, Stripe, etc.) behind Core ($25/month, or $20/month billed annually). You can publish one app. It's a trial tier; sustained use hits the wall fast.
Yuan is ours, so read this part with that in mind — the shortcomings are listed right after. You describe the app in a sentence and the AI generates a complete web app: data tables, UI, an AI agent built into every app, multiple sessions. On the free side, sign-up gives you credits with no card required, and the Free plan carries a daily token quota that resets every day, so there's no "burned through the month by day 10" failure mode. The part we think matters most: visitors can use your published app without registering. Send someone a link and they're using the real thing. The gallery lets anyone browse other people's apps and Remix them. Multilingual apps, scheduled tasks, AI image generation, and MCP connections are all reachable on the free plan, within quota.
Yuan's honest limitations: no source-code export, not open source, web apps only (no native iOS/Android). If you're an engineer who wants to take over the codebase, pick Dyad or open-lovable instead.
Tier 3: Cheaper paid plans, or at least more honestly metered ones
If the free tiers aren't enough and $25 for 100 Lovable credits feels thin, the lowest sticker price here is Dyad Pro: $20/month for 200 credits, no key management. Bolt Pro starts at $25/month for 10M tokens, and unused tokens roll over; same $25, but a token is a much easier unit to reason about than a complexity-weighted credit. Yuan Pro/Max start from a daily token quota, with overage billed as metered credits — the quota refreshes daily, so you only pay extra on heavy days. Details on the pricing page.
Pricing snapshot (July 2026 — verify on official sites)
| Product | Free tier | Cheapest paid |
|---|---|---|
| Lovable | 5 credits/day, 30/month cap | Pro $25/mo, 100 credits/mo |
| Dyad | Full app, runs locally, BYO API key | Pro $20/mo, 200 credits |
| open-lovable | Open source, self-host, BYO 3 keys | None (pure OSS) |
| Bolt | 300K tokens/day, 1M/month | Pro $25/mo, from 10M tokens |
| Replit | Daily Agent credits (monthly cap), Lite build only | Core $25/mo ($20/mo annual) |
| Yuan | Sign-up credits + daily token quota | See /pricing |
How to pick
Engineers who want to own the code should go straight to Dyad. If all you need is a React starting point cloned from an existing site, open-lovable does exactly that. Bolt's free tier is the fastest route to a hosted prototype. And if the goal is shipping a complete app — data tables, agent and all — that other people can use without signing up, that's what Yuan is built for. For a head-to-head feature comparison with Lovable and v0, we wrote a separate piece: Yuan vs Lovable vs v0.