Is Lovable free? The Lovable free tier limits, and what stops when the credits run out

Is Lovable free? Yes: the Free plan costs $0 and grants 5 build credits a day, up to 30 a month, plus 20 Cloud credits and 4 AI credits a month. When those and any general credits run out, building stops and AI features in the deployed app fail, while the published pages keep serving.

Is Lovable free? What the Lovable free plan gives you, and for how long

Lovable’s Free plan is a standing plan, not a trial: it costs $0, needs no credit card, has no end date in Lovable’s docs, and refreshes its grants on a schedule, build credits daily and the Cloud and AI grants monthly. Paid plans start at $25 a month on Pro, which adds monthly plan credits, rollover and top-ups.

On the lovable.dev pricing page, as rendered on October 21, 2026, the Free plan card reads “$0 / month” and “No credit card needed”, and lists “5 lovable.app domains”, “Invite-only publishing”, “Cloud” and “Community support”. So Lovable does have a free tier, and Lovable’s subscription plans documentation describes it as the plan for “Trying Lovable and building smaller projects”.

Daily build credits refresh every day at 00:00 UTC, and on Free the monthly Cloud and AI grants refresh on the 1st of each calendar month at 00:00 UTC. Free also includes a daily chat allowance for Chats and Chat mode, and Lovable labels both that allowance and the monthly grants temporary and subject to change. All of it is counted in one credit balance, the same one paid plans use; what each Lovable credit pays for, prompt by prompt, is a subject of its own.

A published app does not expire on Free either, with one exception. Lovable may unpublish an app in a Free workspace when it has had no visits and no workspace-owner login for 12 months or more and has no custom domain; Lovable emails the owners and admins and keeps the project, so it can be published again.

Every grant, cap and feature below comes from Lovable’s own plan, credit, pricing and out-of-credits pages as they read on October 21, 2026. Nothing here comes from running a workspace dry.

Lovable free tier limits: the grants and the monthly cap

The Lovable free tier limits, as of October 2026, come as usage grants: 5 build credits a day up to 30 a calendar month, plus 20 Cloud credits, 4 AI credits and 1 connector credit a month. Unused grants do not roll over, and Free has no top-ups, so a spent grant waits for its next refresh.

Each row below is taken from Lovable’s credits and usage documentation, with the refresh time Lovable gives for the Free plan.

The monthly cap is the limit to plan around, and Lovable gives the arithmetic itself: “on Free, you receive daily build credits for the first 6 days each month (6 × 5 = 30), then none until the next month starts.” Pro and Business have no such cap on the same 5 daily credits, though Lovable’s pricing page notes that some regional plans cap them at 30 a month.

Added up, the Lovable free plan credits come to at most 30 build credits, 20 Cloud credits, 4 AI credits and 1 connector credit per month, and each grant covers its own kind of usage. Lovable’s daily limit for building is the 5 build credits, and how much work 5 credits buys depends on the size of each request, which is why per-prompt figures belong with credit costs rather than here.

Once a grant is spent, its usage draws on any general credits the workspace already holds, such as referral bonus credits; without those, nothing lifts a Lovable free plan limit before its refresh except an upgrade. The lovable.dev free tier limitations go past credits too: the features Free leaves out have their own section further down.

What stops on the Lovable free plan when the credits run out

Lovable’s free plan stops three things at zero and keeps one: building stops, AI features in the deployed app fail with an error, and the built-in backend pauses once the Cloud grant and general credits are both gone, while the published pages keep serving to visitors.

The third column is our reading of who meets each failure first; the first two columns are Lovable’s. One detail matters on Free: daily build credits cannot pay for Cloud, so build credits left over do nothing to keep the backend running. Chats and Chat mode keep working while the daily chat allowance lasts, even after building has stopped.

Lovable does warn before a pause, in the product and by email as the balance falls. When Cloud or AI credits run low, workspace admins and owners see a banner on Plans & credit usage and on the project’s Cloud → Overview view, with an upgrade option on Free. Before projects pause, everyone in the workspace sees a dismissible banner on the dashboard. The full list is in Lovable’s out-of-credits documentation.

A visitor sees none of those banners. The page loads, then the next sign-in or save fails, and what they see depends on how the app handles a failed call: an error message, a spinner that never stops, or an empty list that looks like lost data. Planning a fallback when a service is unavailable is how the rest of the app stays usable while one part is down. Other builders pause in their own ways, and an app paused because the credits ran out compares what each one stops.

Getting back is not automatic for every part. On Free, the way out is an upgrade or the next grant refresh; AI features resume by themselves once credits exist, but a paused backend needs Wake up in More → Cloud → Overview.

If real users already sign in and save data on the Free plan’s Cloud grant, and nobody has watched the app with its backend paused, a free audit is where we talk through with you what those users would meet and what to change before launch. In the Production Hardening Sprint, we keep unaffected functions usable when an external service is unavailable, and verify it by disabling an integration and checking its fallback plus the customer journeys it should not touch.

Does Lovable have a grace period after free credits run out?

Lovable documents no grace period after free credits run out: building stops until a grant refreshes or the workspace upgrades. The 30-day grace period in Lovable’s docs belongs to account deletion, which can be canceled by logging back in, and a deleted project has its own 60-day restore window.

Lovable’s account deletion documentation uses the phrase itself, “a 30-day grace period”, for the time to cancel a scheduled deletion. It has nothing to do with credits. A project restore does not help a paused app either: Lovable’s project deletion page says a backend “that is paused because the workspace ran out of credits, stays paused” after the restore.

Canceling a paid plan runs on its own clock. A cancellation moves the workspace to Free at the end of the current billing period, and on Lovable’s change or cancel page, unused monthly plan credits and rollover credits are then frozen: they cannot be used on Free and are not refunded, but they come back until their original expiry if the workspace upgrades again. Top-up credits bought while subscribed and any bonus credits stay usable on Free until they expire.

Before deleting a project or its Cloud backend to start fresh, read what leaving Lovable Cloud leaves behind.

What the Lovable free plan leaves out

The Lovable free plan leaves out several features a public launch usually needs: custom domains, code download and code editing, removing the Edit with Lovable badge, credit rollover and top-ups all start on a paid plan. Publishing to a lovable.app address is included, and it is public by default.

The table follows Lovable’s subscription plans page as read on October 21, 2026.

Two rows matter most at launch. Code download is paid-only, but Lovable’s Git sync documentation lists github.com, GitLab.com and Bitbucket Cloud on all plans, so a Free workspace can still keep its source in a repository it owns. And because Free cannot set usage limits or alerts, the only warnings a Free owner gets from Lovable before a pause are its own banners and emails. A custom domain is a paid feature; what publishing and custom domains need covers the publish side.

Free, Pro and Business: what an upgrade changes

Lovable’s paid plans do not enlarge the free grants: Pro and Business get the same 5 daily build credits and the same Cloud, AI and connector grants as Free. What an upgrade buys is monthly plan credits, rollover, top-ups, usage limits and alerts, and usually the end of the 30-a-month cap on daily build credits.

An upgrade from Free takes effect when you complete it and brings the full monthly allocation of the chosen plan. Annual billing gives two months free against monthly billing, so the 100-credit Pro tier is $250 a year. Students and teachers verified while their workspace is on Free can get 50% off Pro with 100 credits a month, billed monthly, for up to 12 months, once per person.

The upshot for a live app: upgrading does not make the 4-credit AI grant or the 20-credit Cloud grant any bigger. It adds general credits that the backend and AI features draw on once those grants are gone.

An open AI route can use up the monthly AI grant

An open AI route can spend the free plan’s 4 AI credits for you: a deployed feature that any visitor can call, with no sign-in and no per-caller limit, draws on the owner’s grant. Lovable’s member credit limits do not count deployed AI usage, so the per-caller cap belongs in the app.

Of the 14 third-party AI apps we audited in June and July 2026, 12 had a confirmed denial-of-wallet path, where a stranger or a free account can burn the owner’s paid AI or compute bill without limit.

Those 14 apps were picked for review, not drawn at random, so the count describes that set and is no rate for AI-built apps in general, Lovable apps included.

Our reading of how such a path looks on Lovable: the model key sits on the server, where it belongs, but nothing checks who calls the route or how often. On Free, every call from an open route comes out of the 4-credit AI grant first and then out of any general credits; with neither left, the feature fails while the pages keep serving, as in the stops table above. Lovable lists call volume among the drivers of AI cost: more users or more frequent AI actions mean more model calls.

On Free, Lovable’s own spend controls do not reach this. Member credit limits apply to Build credits, and AI gateway usage sits under Run credits, which “does not count against a member’s monthly limit”. On paid plans, a project or workspace usage limit can block AI features at a credit threshold, but it stops every caller at once, not one stranger. The cap that stops a stranger has to live in the app’s own route, which is what a ceiling on a metered API sets up.

When the free plan is enough for a live app

The Lovable free plan fits a prototype, a demo or a site without a backend. A live app needs more care when a user’s sign-in, saved data or AI feature runs on the Cloud and AI grants, because those are the parts that stop when the credits do.

The verdicts are our own guidance, not Lovable’s. Size counts too: Free runs the database on the default instance, and moving to a larger one needs an upgrade. Whether the rest of the app is ready for real users is a wider question than the plan, covered by what a Lovable app needs before launch.

What to check before you rely on the free plan with real users

These checks cover the credit boundary only, and each one can fail.

1. 01 List every route in the app that calls a model, and mark which ones need a signed-in user.
2. 02 Put a per-user or per-IP cap on each of those routes, then confirm the server enforces it by calling the route past the cap.
3. 03 Switch off one Cloud call in a preview and watch the screen: an empty state where an error belongs is the failure a paused backend would show your users.
4. 04 Add error tracking, so a pause produces an alert for you instead of a support email from a user.
5. 05 Open Workspace settings → Plans & credit usage, hold the pointer over the info icon next to Free usage included, and note which grant is closest to zero and when it refreshes.

The wider set of the controls that keep a small app up when a dependency fails reaches well past the credit question.

Where the sprint does this

In the Production Hardening Sprint, we configure spend or usage alerts for every metered API, using provider alerts or application-side measurement, and verify each one by triggering a test threshold and confirming the alert reaches the designated owner, so a grant that is draining is seen before it is gone. Hosting, paid tools and API usage are paid through your accounts. The Lovable plan and its credits stay on your bill.

Common questions about Lovable’s free plan

How do I get free credits in Lovable?

The Free plan’s grants are the free credits: 5 build credits a day up to 30 a month, plus 20 Cloud credits, 4 AI credits and 1 connector credit each month. Lovable’s referral program adds bonus credits: someone who signs up through a workspace’s invite link gets 10, and the workspace that shared the link gets 100 when that person pays for a first Pro or Business subscription, since a signup alone earns the sharer nothing. Referral credits are general credits that expire 12 months after they are granted. Lovable’s pricing page listed no promo code or free credits code on October 21, 2026.

How to use Lovable AI for free?

Lovable AI, the builder itself, is free on the Free plan with no credit card needed, and building runs on 5 daily build credits up to 30 a month. For AI features inside the app you build, Free adds a monthly grant of 4 credits for model calls made by the deployed app, which Lovable describes as a way “to try the feature before subscribing”. Once that grant is spent, the feature keeps working only while general credits remain, then fails with an error. Keeping the feature behind sign-in stops visitors from spending the grant.

What is the cheapest Lovable plan?

The Free plan, at $0 a month, is the cheapest Lovable plan. The cheapest paid plan is Pro at $25 a month for 100 monthly credits, or $250 a year on annual billing. The student and teacher discount is on Pro, and it has to be verified while the workspace is still on Free.

When should I get help before running a live app on Lovable’s free plan?

Get help when users sign in or save data on the Cloud grant, when an AI feature is open to visitors, or when no one knows what the screens show while the backend is paused. AxonBuild goes over with you, in a free audit, which limits and fallbacks to add before users rely on the app.