Lovable is dominating the generic AI application creation market, but ultimately I think the market is going to segment with products like Aha! Builder https://www.aha.io/builder/overview to support more business use-cases.
Adoption of AI application building technologies in most enterprises is much more about governance and security than it is about any particular coding feature.
I recently replaced a Wordpress based website. I tried Claude Design, epic failure. Context windows exploding due to huge html files inlining images.
I ended up dropping it for a design guide from designer and then used Cursor to build an Astro site section by section instead of the whole page. The flexibility of having code to view and edit was way better than these black box programs.
I read the announcement honestly sounds like they are doing some cool things.
A year ago they had 180k paying customers. If we generously put them all on biz at $50/mo that’s $9M/mo or $108M/yr. Pro gives half that. They say now they have $500M run rate. So 5x+ growth in a year? Nice.
This is crazy. Do people still use Lovable, I know they were super popular before Codex/Claude Code, but since then, I feel most people (even non-engineers from what I seen) have moved to these tools. Is Lovable still the easiest way to get an site/app going?
And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
Yes, I use it actually for something very unsual (I guess): Vibe coding a classic Point & Click adventure. Only in German so far and very early in development:
Hmm, bug maybe? The page rotates horizontally and if I rotate the iPhone horizontally it zooms in large and the spiel button disappears. Nor can I scroll or zoom.
If I enter the game and rotate my phone horizontally it kicks me back to the front page.
I recently^1 came across an analysis of no-code tools/platforms vs AI IDEs / Harnesses, and their relative usage and trajectories, and it looked pretty dismal for nocode.
1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
I actually do know someone who's building a small community with Lovable. It's not a big community and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it, but it's all done via Lovable.
I have recently gotten access to lightscale.ai, which is still in private beta, and I'm impressed.
They have a different approach to lovable, replit, etc... They don't let the gpt models translate directly into program code, but into an intermediate language which is then compiled by a compiler. Generation speed is blazingly fast, and so far results look great.
I really like that I can work on an app without having to wait between my prompts and can see the results nearly instantly.
Apparently it's safer too, as code generation is deterministic. But I did not check that yet, as I only recently got access.
Wonder of any of the early money got out. Very little visibility to the secondary market on these things. I remember back in dot-com days folk would take leverage on their unrealized gains. Didn't work out that well. Selling at small discount in the secondary, which was mocked, turned out to be a good play.
Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
I appreciate what Lovable did as far as contributing to giving people agency over technology to build things, whether they were ideally built or not, from an engineering perspective.
I can't help but feel deep down somewhere inside though - boy.. $400M is so much money - whenever I see these kind of huge raises, I kind of wonder, how likely is it to fail when you have been granted such an enormous opportunity, plus all the other money they've raised.
This question isn't limited to Lovable of course.. but it's just.. wow.. it's so much runway... will they end up spending it wisely? I feel like a lot of companies end up spending this on scaling out sales, sales engineering, marketing, advertising, splinter/side efforts, tons of hiring/headcount expansion, global expansion, acquisitions... and this often makes the companies big, slow-moving behemoths, but does it really advance the core mission, technology, infra, etc.?
Will be interesting to see where this takes lovable. Congratulations to their team!
My friend built his niche news site with lovable. He used Wordpress as a headless CMS, and lovable built some absolute monstrosity with cloudflare workers - every page view incurred a call to Wordpress, no proper caching and it was slow as hell. It was just Wordpress but with 10 extra layers. 3+ second TTFB.
He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it.
For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site.
I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.
I use Claude Code the way others use Lovable. I'm comfortable with the terminal and Claude Code but I think Anthropic (et al.) is closing the gap rapidly. And Claude Code + Claude Design is way more capable than what I think Lovable is.
I assume Lovable had to build around constraints to reach non-technical people at the time. But the models and tooling have improved such that those constraints are melting away. I'm not sure what advantage Lovable has in the long run.
I think Lovable is a very dumb product and that virtually anyone of any level of technical knowhow would be better served by using normal agents or perhaps Replit
The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself
As someone who is fully bootstrapped and not looking for funding, I may be oblivious but some of the numbers I see versus the products I see i'm wondering if I should not be using my own capital and see if asking nicely can get me 200 million dollars
As a founder raising those big rounds, you'd enjoy a lot of personal luxury and develop a gtowing network of opportunity.
But the odds of your business catastrophocally collapsing on itself or being aggressively gutted in an acquisition would go sky high, and all those starry eyed people you recruited to help you along the way become way more like to encounter surprise layoffs or unexpected and severe equity dilutions.
A lot of it is really about where your heart is as a human. If you want to take a lucrative cut on selling an image to bigger and bigger investors and don't much care what happens to your idea or any of the "little people" along the way, then you probably should chase those funding rounds. But if you're actually passionate about your vision or have a more compassionate and paternalistic attitude towards the people you convince to work for you, you're doing the right thing with the bootstrapping.
(I'm sure you know all this, though. Nobody bootstraps without thinking about this stuff, and recongizing that that they just can't stomach the tradeoffs of doing otherwise.)
If it makes sense for your growth, why not? Just keep in mind that these founders are giving up control and saddling themselves with certain obligations in return.
This is the clearest example of how companies with little differentiation fail. Enterprise companies would prefer Lovable bundled with a product they already use, ex. Figma.
You probably need vertical integration to build real AI businesses; it feels like Silicon Valley forces new paradigms, while AI feels like something that can be bundled in with existing companies. Clouds are still the distribution, the pre AI enterpise domiance remains through bundling.
Maybe OpenAI can do something special by owning the whole stack?
I’m curious about that too. Claude Design feels (and from the blog post) sounds like the typical IC passion project that got just polished enough for a “beta” (in the sense of gauging customer interest, not commitment to release).
If someone with clout at Anthropic takes it up as a champion and pushes it into the portfolio of apps at the importance of Claude code, it could be an amazing product, eventually a threat to Adobe, Lovable, Canva market share. It needs a better direct editing layer like 2-way figma sync, so you’re not stuck only prompting for every small adjustment. It could really use smart routing of image generation requests to a nano-banana level image generation model for the images that get poured into the ui mockups (so you don’t need to round trip to external sources by hand). And of course, like all modern LLMs doing visual work, it lacks “taste” if not given extensive examples during prompting.
Right now it feels like a fun proof of concept that could be killed at any time ala Google’s many “I got my PM promoted at launch and then was promptly abandoned” projects.
Lovable is dominating the generic AI application creation market, but ultimately I think the market is going to segment with products like Aha! Builder https://www.aha.io/builder/overview to support more business use-cases.
Adoption of AI application building technologies in most enterprises is much more about governance and security than it is about any particular coding feature.
I recently replaced a Wordpress based website. I tried Claude Design, epic failure. Context windows exploding due to huge html files inlining images.
I ended up dropping it for a design guide from designer and then used Cursor to build an Astro site section by section instead of the whole page. The flexibility of having code to view and edit was way better than these black box programs.
Lovable funding is insane. And scary.
I read the announcement honestly sounds like they are doing some cool things.
A year ago they had 180k paying customers. If we generously put them all on biz at $50/mo that’s $9M/mo or $108M/yr. Pro gives half that. They say now they have $500M run rate. So 5x+ growth in a year? Nice.
This is crazy. Do people still use Lovable, I know they were super popular before Codex/Claude Code, but since then, I feel most people (even non-engineers from what I seen) have moved to these tools. Is Lovable still the easiest way to get an site/app going?
And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
Yes, I use it actually for something very unsual (I guess): Vibe coding a classic Point & Click adventure. Only in German so far and very early in development:
https://schmerz-radio.com/
That looks pretty good. How did you do the graphics?
Hmm, bug maybe? The page rotates horizontally and if I rotate the iPhone horizontally it zooms in large and the spiel button disappears. Nor can I scroll or zoom.
If I enter the game and rotate my phone horizontally it kicks me back to the front page.
I recently^1 came across an analysis of no-code tools/platforms vs AI IDEs / Harnesses, and their relative usage and trajectories, and it looked pretty dismal for nocode.
1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
I actually do know someone who's building a small community with Lovable. It's not a big community and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it, but it's all done via Lovable.
>> and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it
that implies that he's probably not paying for Lovable, and thus their 13B+ valuation is built on influencers and eyeballs?
Welcome to the stock market.
I have genuinely never heard of Lovable and I thought I was relatively plugged in to the tech zeitgeist :/
Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
It was one of the earliest “create a whole web app from a prompt” type of product IIRC. The space is now more than crowded
I have recently gotten access to lightscale.ai, which is still in private beta, and I'm impressed.
They have a different approach to lovable, replit, etc... They don't let the gpt models translate directly into program code, but into an intermediate language which is then compiled by a compiler. Generation speed is blazingly fast, and so far results look great.
I really like that I can work on an app without having to wait between my prompts and can see the results nearly instantly.
Apparently it's safer too, as code generation is deterministic. But I did not check that yet, as I only recently got access.
Wonder of any of the early money got out. Very little visibility to the secondary market on these things. I remember back in dot-com days folk would take leverage on their unrealized gains. Didn't work out that well. Selling at small discount in the secondary, which was mocked, turned out to be a good play.
Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
I appreciate what Lovable did as far as contributing to giving people agency over technology to build things, whether they were ideally built or not, from an engineering perspective.
I can't help but feel deep down somewhere inside though - boy.. $400M is so much money - whenever I see these kind of huge raises, I kind of wonder, how likely is it to fail when you have been granted such an enormous opportunity, plus all the other money they've raised.
This question isn't limited to Lovable of course.. but it's just.. wow.. it's so much runway... will they end up spending it wisely? I feel like a lot of companies end up spending this on scaling out sales, sales engineering, marketing, advertising, splinter/side efforts, tons of hiring/headcount expansion, global expansion, acquisitions... and this often makes the companies big, slow-moving behemoths, but does it really advance the core mission, technology, infra, etc.?
Will be interesting to see where this takes lovable. Congratulations to their team!
Half the raise is for marketing no doubt
Where are all the big world-changing apps that were vibe coded on this platform?
This is not crazy. What's crazy is one of their favourte stories, Viver de IA [Brazil], a company that uses AI to build an AI education company.
My friend built his niche news site with lovable. He used Wordpress as a headless CMS, and lovable built some absolute monstrosity with cloudflare workers - every page view incurred a call to Wordpress, no proper caching and it was slow as hell. It was just Wordpress but with 10 extra layers. 3+ second TTFB.
He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it.
For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site.
I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.
I use Claude Code the way others use Lovable. I'm comfortable with the terminal and Claude Code but I think Anthropic (et al.) is closing the gap rapidly. And Claude Code + Claude Design is way more capable than what I think Lovable is.
I assume Lovable had to build around constraints to reach non-technical people at the time. But the models and tooling have improved such that those constraints are melting away. I'm not sure what advantage Lovable has in the long run.
Lovable sponsors Tanstack but Tanstack is an independent project
I think Lovable is a very dumb product and that virtually anyone of any level of technical knowhow would be better served by using normal agents or perhaps Replit
The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself
lovable is not aimed at devs though
As someone who is fully bootstrapped and not looking for funding, I may be oblivious but some of the numbers I see versus the products I see i'm wondering if I should not be using my own capital and see if asking nicely can get me 200 million dollars
As a founder raising those big rounds, you'd enjoy a lot of personal luxury and develop a gtowing network of opportunity.
But the odds of your business catastrophocally collapsing on itself or being aggressively gutted in an acquisition would go sky high, and all those starry eyed people you recruited to help you along the way become way more like to encounter surprise layoffs or unexpected and severe equity dilutions.
A lot of it is really about where your heart is as a human. If you want to take a lucrative cut on selling an image to bigger and bigger investors and don't much care what happens to your idea or any of the "little people" along the way, then you probably should chase those funding rounds. But if you're actually passionate about your vision or have a more compassionate and paternalistic attitude towards the people you convince to work for you, you're doing the right thing with the bootstrapping.
(I'm sure you know all this, though. Nobody bootstraps without thinking about this stuff, and recongizing that that they just can't stomach the tradeoffs of doing otherwise.)
If it makes sense for your growth, why not? Just keep in mind that these founders are giving up control and saddling themselves with certain obligations in return.
Obligations that go away when you declare bankruptcy and close the business.
This is the clearest example of how companies with little differentiation fail. Enterprise companies would prefer Lovable bundled with a product they already use, ex. Figma.
You probably need vertical integration to build real AI businesses; it feels like Silicon Valley forces new paradigms, while AI feels like something that can be bundled in with existing companies. Clouds are still the distribution, the pre AI enterpise domiance remains through bundling.
Maybe OpenAI can do something special by owning the whole stack?
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-struggle-of-openai/
I feel like this valuation could be cut by 75% if Anthropic paid more attention to Claude Design.
I’m curious about that too. Claude Design feels (and from the blog post) sounds like the typical IC passion project that got just polished enough for a “beta” (in the sense of gauging customer interest, not commitment to release).
If someone with clout at Anthropic takes it up as a champion and pushes it into the portfolio of apps at the importance of Claude code, it could be an amazing product, eventually a threat to Adobe, Lovable, Canva market share. It needs a better direct editing layer like 2-way figma sync, so you’re not stuck only prompting for every small adjustment. It could really use smart routing of image generation requests to a nano-banana level image generation model for the images that get poured into the ui mockups (so you don’t need to round trip to external sources by hand). And of course, like all modern LLMs doing visual work, it lacks “taste” if not given extensive examples during prompting.
Right now it feels like a fun proof of concept that could be killed at any time ala Google’s many “I got my PM promoted at launch and then was promptly abandoned” projects.
Yeah. IMHO Claude Design's current UX is so abysmal, it's borderline unusable. Kind of ironic, given its remit.
many such cases in Anthropic's product portfolio
you should see what happened to Airtable recently. Much more than 75%
blah blah bubble