Lovable Free Tier Limits: What You Get and What Stops

I went through Lovable’s documentation on 2026-07-29 to find out what a free-plan project does when its credits hit zero. The answer sits in the credits docs rather than the pricing page: your published site stays live and its pages keep serving, while apps that rely on the built-in backend can pause. Three balances run out, and only one of them tells you.

The grants are small enough to hit by accident. The free plan gives 5 build credits a day, capped at 30 per calendar month, plus 20 Cloud credits and 4 AI-gateway credits a month, and none of it rolls over. There is no grace period on credits. The one 60-day grace period Lovable documents covers a deleted workspace and has nothing to do with running out.

What are the Lovable free plan limits on credits per month in 2026?

The Lovable free plan grants 5 build credits per day, capped at 30 per calendar month, plus 20 Cloud credits and 4 AI credits per month. Daily build credits reset at 00:00 UTC; the two monthly grants refresh on the 1st. Nothing unused carries forward.

All three figures verified 2026-07-29 against Lovable’s subscription-plans documentation. The monthly cap is the part that catches people: six busy days of building spends the whole 30, and the daily grant then stops arriving until the 1st, however many days are left in the month. What one credit buys varies by the mode you are in and by which of the three balances you are spending, covered in full in what a credit actually buys, per mode. And if you downgrade from a paid plan, unexpired credits granted through that subscription cannot be used while the workspace sits on Free, though top-ups you bought and any bonus credits still can, until they expire.

What happens when Lovable credits run out on the free plan?

A zero credit balance on Lovable stops the editor with a blocking dialog until credits return. Your published site stays live and keeps serving pages. AI features in the deployed app stop working, and apps that rely on the built-in backend pause shortly after. The free plan’s AI grant is 4 credits a month, so that state is easy to reach.

Those four behaviors are Lovable’s own, verified 2026-07-29 against Lovable’s credits documentation. You see the dialog, because it happens on your screen. Your users get the rest: a signup form that spins, says thanks, and saves nothing; a chat box that returns an empty answer and reads as slow instead of broken. The app keeps answering requests the whole time. Pages loading proves only that the pages load. The parts people came for are down.

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

Lovable documents no grace period on credits. At zero, building stops until the next grant refresh or an upgrade, with no buffer days and no overdraft. The only thing Lovable calls a grace period is 60 days on a deleted workspace, during which Lovable support can restore it.

Those two facts share a phrase and answer different questions, which is why searching for “lovable grace period” returns a confusing mix. The 60-day and project-deletion rows below come from Lovable’s FAQ; the credits page documents no grace period of any kind on a balance. Both checked 2026-07-29.

The third row is the one that costs people real work, worth knowing before you tidy up a workspace full of experiments. Deleting the Cloud instance behind a project works the same way: the database, storage files, function code, and secrets go together, and what moving off Lovable Cloud leaves behind covers what to capture first.

The failure your users see before you do

Cloud pauses at zero and nothing on your screen changes. The next visitor loads the page, fills in the form, submits it, and the write fails. Whether you hear about that in ten minutes or ten days comes down to whether the app records failures anywhere a human looks.

For most apps built this way, it does not. Of the 21 third-party apps AxonBuild audited, 17 recorded errors nowhere: when a user hit an error, nothing kept a record of it. That number covers apps of every quality level, the well-built ones included, which is why a credit balance running out reaches you through a customer instead of a dashboard. The mechanism is the one behind an app that fails silently and answers 200 OK, with the trigger moved from a swallowed exception to an empty wallet.

Running out of credits leaves your pages up and your backend down, so your users find the failure before your dashboard does.

A stranger can zero your four AI credits before you do

A stranger can spend your whole monthly AI budget on the Lovable free plan, because that budget is 4 credits. Fourteen of the 21 third-party apps AxonBuild audited shipped an AI feature, and 12 of those 14 had a confirmed path for an outsider or a free account to burn the owner’s AI budget, with no login required and no cap on the call.

The pattern behind that number is boring by the third repetition: the generator wires the API key server-side, correctly, then leaves metering, quotas, and authentication to somebody else. One in the set was an incident-timeline tool running three unauthenticated endpoints against a paid model, told in full in the security gaps vibe-coded apps actually ship with.

On a paid plan that gap produces a bill you argue about later. On the free plan, with a ceiling of 4 AI credits a month, it produces an outage this afternoon. One unauthenticated route plus a loop is enough, and the app spends the rest of the month serving pages with its AI feature switched off.

When is the Lovable free plan fine, and when does it break a live app?

The Lovable free plan is fine for anything with no Cloud dependency and no open AI route. It stops being fine the day a real user’s action has to reach the backend. What decides it is whether 20 Cloud credits and 4 AI credits a month sit between your users and the thing they came to do.

The bottom two rows stop being about price. Both lean on grants a deployed app spends without anyone opening the editor: the Lovable free plan Cloud credits at 20 a month, and the AI grant at 4. Whether the app behind them holds up for a stranger is a separate question from what it costs, and whether Lovable is safe to build on works through what the platform locks down and what it leaves to you. If the grants themselves are what has you looking elsewhere, the Lovable alternatives worth comparing get judged on auth, database defaults, and export rather than on price.

What to check before you rely on the Lovable free plan in production

Relying on the Lovable free plan in production comes down to five checks, all of them about what your app does at zero rather than what it does today. Start with the AI routes: 4 credits a month is the smallest ceiling in the set, and the only one a stranger can spend for you.

1. 01 List every route in your app that calls a model, and mark which ones require a signed-in user. Anything a stranger can reach spends AI credits on your behalf.
2. 02 Put a cap on each of those routes: a per-user limit, a per-IP limit, or both. At 4 credits a month, that cap is what keeps the feature answering past the first stranger who finds it.
3. 03 Break one Cloud call on purpose in a preview and watch what the UI does. An empty state where an error message belongs is what your users will see at zero.
4. 04 Add error tracking before you need it, so a paused backend produces an alert instead of a support email three days later.
5. 05 Write down the date your grants refresh (the 1st, 00:00 UTC) and check whether your monthly Cloud usage has any headroom above 20 credits before real traffic arrives.

Those five checks are the free-plan slice of a bigger question. A Beyond the Demo Audit maps every route that calls a paid model and every path that reaches Cloud, so you know what goes dark at zero before it goes dark, and what makes an AI-built app ready to launch covers the rest of what the audits check before real users show up.

One thing I still have not found a clean answer to: Lovable says backend services pause “shortly after” you run out, and that is the whole specification. Shortly is not a number, and nothing in the docs says which of database, storage, and authentication goes first.

Common questions about the Lovable free plan

Is Lovable AI free?

Partly. The free plan includes 4 AI credits a month for the model calls your deployed app makes on a visitor’s behalf, plus 5 build credits a day for working in the editor. Both are grants rather than unlimited access, and when either hits zero the corresponding feature stops until the next refresh.

Do Lovable free plan credits roll over?

No. On the free plan, daily build credits expire at day’s end and the monthly Cloud and AI grants reset on the 1st without carrying a balance forward, so an unused week is gone rather than banked. Paid plans handle rollover differently, and how Lovable credits are metered across plans covers that side.

Can you build a real app on the Lovable free plan?

You can build one. Running one for real users is the harder claim, because 20 Cloud credits and 4 AI credits a month are the ceiling on what your live app can do for visitors, and the free plan gives no grace period when either runs out. Whether the app itself clears the bar is a separate question that a passing Lovable check can and cannot answer.

What happens to my published Lovable app if I stop paying?

The published site stays live and keeps serving its pages. What stops is everything behind them: AI features in the deployed app stop working, and apps relying on Lovable Cloud can pause, so the app looks online while its writes and model calls fail.