Base44 Pricing: Five Plans, Two Meters, and the One Your Users Spend

Base44 costs $0 to $200 a month across five plans, and that’s the half of the answer the pricing page gives you. The other half is that a published Base44 app keeps spending a second currency after you close the editor. Base44 calls it integration credits, and the people spending it are your users.

Base44’s own two pages disagree about what that second currency costs, by a factor of fifteen. Both were live on 29 July 2026 when I read them, and the gap between them is why a free plan that reads as generous can be empty by dinner.

How much does Base44 cost per month in 2026?

Base44 costs $0 on the Free plan and $20 to $200 a month on the four paid plans, or $16 to $160 a month when billed annually. Five tiers separate them, and what changes most between tiers is the size of the credit allowance rather than the feature list.

The prices and both credit columns are confirmed by two Base44 sources that agree: Base44’s pricing page, read in a browser on 29 July 2026 because it blocks plain fetches, and Base44’s own cost explainer, which states its prices were correct as of 26 July 2026. The 5-a-day ceiling on the free plan’s message credits comes from Base44’s credits documentation. Annual billing is a flat 20% off. The $25 entry price still quoted on some comparison sites is stale; Starter is $20.

Base44 plans: what does each tier actually unlock?

Builder at $50 a month is the first tier that unlocks the four things a live app usually needs: backend functions, a custom domain, GitHub integration, and your choice of AI model. Starter adds credits and unlimited apps to the free feature set and stops there.

That makes the buying decision two steps rather than five. Free and Starter suit apps that live at a base44.app address. Builder is where the app becomes something you can point a domain at, sync to a repository, and extend with your own code. Pro and Elite sell the Builder product with more credits attached, plus premium support at the top.

So if something you need is missing at Starter, Builder is where it appears. Above Builder you are buying credits and support, while the capabilities stay the same.

What are Base44 integration credits, and what spends them at runtime?

Integration credits are the meter on your app’s live operations, charged whenever it calls one of Base44’s built-in services. Message credits are the separate meter on your editing, spent when you prompt the editor. A single LLM call costs roughly 3 to 15 integration credits, which is why the runtime meter is the one that moves without you.

The table covers the actions most apps hit; Base44 also prices text-to-speech at 1 credit per 50 characters and a generated social content plan at 10.

Those rates come from Base44’s credits documentation, checked 29 July 2026, where Base44 also notes the figures are estimates, calculated after an action runs and never quoted before it. Ordinary database reads and writes cost nothing, which narrows the whole question down to a short list of expensive verbs: send, generate, call a model.

It also means the cost explainer is off by more than a rounding error. That page says an integration action “spends one credit” and lists making an LLM request among its examples. The documentation prices that same request at up to 15. Both numbers are Base44’s.

The other detail worth pinning down early: nothing carries over. Unused credits expire at the end of your cycle on every plan, and there’s no way to preview what an integration action will cost before you run it. Base44’s own advice is to run the action once and read the execution logs afterward. These rates also only hold while you stay on Base44’s built-in services, and what the same features cost once you are paying a model provider directly is a different calculation.

Is Base44 completely free, and does the free plan survive real users?

The Base44 free plan is a real free tier rather than a trial, and it is small. 100 integration credits a month works out to between 6 and 33 LLM calls in total, across every user of every app you’ve published, and none of it rolls over. That’s the whole monthly runtime budget, not a per-user allowance.

Run the same arithmetic across the other verbs and nothing improves. 100 credits is 100 emails, or 20 seconds of generated video, or 100 image generations, for the month, shared by everyone who visits. The build side is tighter than it first looks too: 25 message credits a month, capped at 5 a day, so a productive Saturday spends a fifth of the month.

One free-plan detail is easy to miss. Base44’s automatic error fixes consume message credits on Free, and those same automatic fixes are free on every paid plan. The plan with 25 monthly credits is the one that charges you when the AI corrects its own mistake.

What happens when Base44 integration credits run out for end users?

Base44 emails the owner when the month’s integration credits hit zero, all 100 of them on a free plan, and any action the owner takes then fails with an explicit credit error. Someone using your app gets a different answer: Base44’s documentation says they “receive a generic error message without any reference to integration credits.”

One of those two people is told what happened, and it isn’t the one who was trying to do something. Base44’s own worked example is a visitor subscribing to your app and triggering a confirmation email. The subscription fails. The visitor sees the generic error, tries once more, and leaves. Nothing they saw pointed at an empty balance, so nothing they do next points you at one either.

Whether it reaches you at all depends on something Base44 doesn’t supply: somewhere the failure gets written down. Of the 21 third-party apps in the AxonBuild audit corpus, 17 recorded errors nowhere at all. So you get an email about credits, your user gets a shrug, and the gap between the two is however long it takes someone to write in and complain.

The bill your users can run up for you

A metered action that anyone can trigger is a budget anyone can spend. Of the 14 AI-featured apps in the AxonBuild corpus, 12 carried a confirmed route for someone other than the owner to fire the metered call, with every finding verified against the code rather than pattern-matched. On most platforms that shows up as a number on next month’s invoice. On Base44 it ends at zero integration credits and an app that’s stopped answering.

One audit outside Base44 shows how cheaply it happens, and the detail that stayed with me was the asymmetry. An AI content-management app I audited capped how often its analytics route could be called, and put no cap at all on the login route that emails a sign-in code to any address typed into it. Somebody had thought about the problem once, in one place. Price that login route at Base44’s 1 credit per email and a free plan’s entire monthly runtime budget is 100 requests, a slow afternoon for a script. Missing limits on the expensive route are the ordinary case, not the exception: 13 of the 21 apps in the corpus had no rate limit on their single most expensive endpoint. The longer version of that story is in what to do when your app goes viral.

Your plan does cap the damage, which is the one genuinely useful thing a hard credit ceiling does. The failure arrives as an outage for everyone else instead of an unbounded bill, and an outage is both cheaper and easier to notice. Preventing it is still your job. It starts with a list of every route in your app that can trigger a paid action, and it ends with someone having checked whether anything gates them before a stranger runs that check for you.

What no Base44 plan buys you

Metering is not authorization. Every tier from Free to Elite decides how many paid actions your app may perform, and none of them decides who’s allowed to perform one. Those are two different questions, and only one of them appears on the pricing page.

Integration credits are the meter your users spend. On the free plan that is 100 credits a month, shared by everyone who ever opens your app.

Base44 is ordinary in this respect, and none of this is a knock on the platform. Its certifications are real, which whether Base44 is safe to build on works through, and what Base44’s SOC 2 and GDPR posture actually covers draws the same boundary from the compliance side. The split holds everywhere because it’s structural: a platform can meter its own services down to the credit and still have no opinion about who your users are. That second half is yours, and a readiness audit of the app rather than the platform is how it stops being an assumption.

Is Base44 worth it, and which plan does your app actually need?

Base44 is worth paying for at the tier where your app stops fitting the one below it. What sets that line is what your app does for strangers. An internal tool with no AI surface runs on the $0 Free plan forever, because database reads and writes aren’t metered.

A public app with an open AI feature is where tier and security stop being separable.

Price is not what decides the last two rows. What decides them is that a stranger is doing the spending and the editor is closed the whole time. The Lovable free tier limits run into the same wall on a smaller monthly grant, and what a Lovable credit actually buys runs that cross-tool comparison. Strip the platform out and the same question is waiting underneath, which is where whether your app is ready to launch picks it up.

One thing I couldn’t settle: the pricing page FAQ says that if you run out of credits before the cycle resets, “you can top up at any time,” and neither that page nor the credits documentation says what a top-up costs. If integration credits are the meter your users spend, the price of refilling them mid-month is the number you’d most want in hand before launch day.

Common questions about Base44 pricing

How much does Base44 cost per month in 2026 on the Builder plan?

Builder costs $50 a month billed monthly, or $40 a month billed annually. It includes 250 message credits and 10,000 integration credits per month, and it’s the first tier that unlocks backend functions, a custom domain, GitHub integration, and AI model selection. Verified against Base44’s pricing page on 29 July 2026.

Is Base44 completely free?

The Free plan costs nothing and includes Base44’s core features, up to 5 apps, 25 message credits a month capped at 5 per day, and 100 integration credits a month. It’s a real free tier rather than a time-limited trial, though 100 integration credits is roughly 6 to 33 LLM calls per month in total across all of your published apps.

What happens when Base44 integration credits run out?

Base44 emails you, and any action you take that needs integration credits fails with an explicit credit error. Anyone using your published app sees only a generic error message with no mention of credits, so the feature reads as broken instead of out of budget until the next monthly reset or an upgrade.

Did Base44 pricing change after Wix acquired the company in 2025?

Wix acquired Base44 in June 2025, and no dated primary source shows a price change attributable to that acquisition. The five tiers listed on Base44’s pricing page on 29 July 2026 match the prices in Base44’s own explainer dated 26 July 2026, so the current structure is what both vendor sources describe today.

Is Base44 legit?

Yes. Base44 is a Wix subsidiary that holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification and publishes a public trust center. That covers the platform rather than the app you build on it, and whether Base44 is safe for your app specifically is the separate question worth reading before you launch.