I’ve never heard of this company. Maybe that’s because I build software for a living.
How many years of insane growth would it take to pay back $400M at this rate?
What. Is. Happening?!
$13.3B valuation? They mention Adidas, Nvidia, etc but their “favorite” use cases are toy apps inside smaller firms.
The play here has to be “our model of building companies via agent workflows and websites is the best” otherwise TAM numbers are just nutty. Smoke it while you got it I guess and congrats on the raise!
It replaced Figma for us. Product and design use it to build interactive mockups, sometimes directly with the (prospective) customers. Even a few thousands are pocket change if it means you can build the correct thing directly.
worth the listen. They hit profitability because of their power users, who are a mixed bag of complete novices and expert SWE's, both of whom spend 10x+ the tokens of the average user. So, basically, their value prop and pricing have hit a sweet spot for a certain marketshare.
i've got old friends who have been telling me about the same app idea they've had for 10 years and are now spending 1000s on Lovable tokens. This isn't sustainable customers. It's delusional people spending money on the wrong thing. Their ideas were not good before they could "code it". Their ideas are still not good now that they can.
kids who don't know how to code are making millions with AI and they usually start with loveable. Those kids are good at social media marketting and now AI removed the code barrier, they're flooding the app stores basically.
Lovable is the Wordpress of today. No developer worth his salt would have touched Wordpress to develop websites but it was a boon to non developers who could use its templates. Lovable fills the same need for non techies today
I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most.
That said, Replit, Lovable, Emergent are making hay till frontier labs dont release a wrapper agent app to do what they do.
I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most.
Most founders in these accelerators must be fairly young? Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders.
IE. they might not be comfortable with the terminal, messing with SQL databases, etc.
For someone like me who have developed production apps the old way, terminal-based agents with my chosen stack is my preferred way.
> Most founders in these accelerators must be fairly young? Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders.
Why do investors put their money in companies create by people that have never developer even a real application?
50 years ago most people in the field were newbies because the field itself was totally new. So, all founders lacked experience as no-one had experience. Has not that changed? Aren't any software experts that can create new products anymore?
This is just a bet that the models will get better and that all the half baked never seen production Lovable apps will be able to be brought life because of that. I am fading that bet personally and am bearish on non technical people building software
If the models get that good you won’t need Lovable at all. That’s the strange part - the model companies will instead eat the infra layer (at least I’d imagine that’s what happens - Claude just knows how to manage AWS for you). This seems like a very shallow moat into which to pour $400M.
They’re good enough already. You can one-shot a website with Claude Code or Codex of the same or better quality than Lovable. I have no idea what the appeal of the product is at this point.
may help thinking through what you'd have to do to go from the generated web app to get it running on a website, may be with subscribers, payments, etc. and then operating it. There are so many concepts, constructs, terminology one needs to know to do it without ongoing headaches. Lovable at least takes away some of those pains.
Im bullish on more people being able to build software than pre-AI but bearish on the general population being able to. The unfortunate truth of AI is that it requires you to think like a dev to be effective. And thats just not how a lot of people think or want to think. Thats fine. But that means AI wont be a huge unlock for the masses.
I think we might underestimate the evolution of these tools as AI gets both better and cheaper. The current form factors are like trying to setup a website in early 90s, cumbersome and not user friendly. Coding infra, AI coding UI, etc are not solved problems yet. If things progress, I think there will be a time when a whole app can be developed and deployed with a single prompt. In that kind of world, who can’t write code?
>I... am bearish on non technical people building software.
I can't bring myself to be bullish or bearish in such broad strokes.
Over the years, I have met and worked with a number of people who were "non-technical", but who nonetheless built their own internal rough software tools with a cobbled-together combination of spreadsheets and SaaS services, connected by something like Zapier. They are a particular kind of person, but I would not call all of them them "technical". They are experienced in their business domain, are detail-oriented, and are persistent in making improvements by any means they could.
I have seen those people be supercharged by AI app builders like Replit and Lovable, even if I don't personally have a need for either.
This might be a matter of definitions: Is such a person "technical" because they value systematizing human processes and put effort into it? Or is such a person "non-technical" because they are not experienced in software engineering best practices, or programming in the conventional sense?
In addition to the nature of the user, I suspect the fulcrum that success and failure rests on for these kinds of apps and tools is long-term maintenance. How frequent? How involved? How breaking are the changes? On this topic, there is a quote I think about a lot (paraphrased, and I forget who said it, or I would credit them):
>AI app builders mean that anyone can experience the joy of building software, but also that they will experience the joy of maintaining software.
I have seen and worked with a number of “non technical” people ship apps and automations over the last year that are making real money so it’s past the point where you can be bearish. Sure these people are probably just a class in themselves and not “the average person” but they never would have done this if they had to write code by hand
Doesn't matter how many Lovable clones there are. Everyone knows the name Lovable.
This caters to the overwhelming majority who cannot use tools like Claude Code or that prefer an all in one solution.
Open source models only help Lovable improve its own margins. They can stop paying the Anthropic or OpenAI tax and tailor the models to exactly their use case and UX.
It's a sign of how much distribution matters to VCs. Whether that is enough in the medium- and long-term is unclear. I'm a bit skeptical but not very confident either way... which is part of the reason I am not a VC!
I think it's time we start questioning more of the valley's mindset when it comes to good business and software practices. From lived experience it typically results in unhealthy work environments at best and society destroying at worse. Is this really the best way to write software? I'd but my life's savings no, it's not. No way in hell.
Agree with this fully, I'm sure a lot of software engineers do too. Yet software is dominated by the valley. It's funny how easily money and greed manipulate the narrative while the majority suffer.
In a recent interview the founder stated something like "we're enabling people to write software at a fraction of what it used to cost".
I believe that to currently be true... maybe... if you're a single dev building something that Lovable can be used for.
What I'm struggling to understand is that _someone_ is paying, right? $400M is probably a lot more than a fraction of what people spent on javascript CRUD apps before?
It seems more like centralization than anything else to me? What am I missing?
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.
He may be? I'll be honest, I know virtually nothing about his setup other than that this is his passion project and that he's using Lovable to build it.
When I don't understand why things happen, I assume the problem is my mental model. In this case, I can't build a model where pouring $400M into Lovable makes sense.
Who are the users? What are the problems? And why would people pay for Lovable instead of Claude/OpenAI/Grok, etc.? Do they have something those companies don't,something that lets them get chosen vs the competition?
I'm very confused. I'm not saying the valuation doesn't make sense, but I have a hard time explaining it. The best answer I can come up with is that they're betting on people building apps without knowing how to code—that this alone will be enough to leverage LLMs and turn a profit, capturing a market that's scared away from tools like Claude Code.
And I assume they're not betting on the thing actually working. They're betting on people wanting to build an app and pouring money into it, hoping it'll eventually work—and on Lovable not getting eaten by CC-like tools, thanks to distribution and brand.
I used it in the past and it was terrible. Claude Code from scratch, or even a template tweaked via CC, was way better.
So the assumptions seem to be:
- Lovable has data that delivers results people want and can't get otherwise.
- Marketing, brand, and distribution are enough to keep users on Lovable, which under the hood just leverages normal LLMs guided in some smart way.
- LLMs will get good enough to deliver fully working, enterprise-level products—and Lovable will be the frontend delivering that result
Enterprises need a solution like Lovable or Replit if only for the one-touch deployments. Unfortunately, neither tool is there.
I don't know what's taking Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, even AWS to build deployments themselves. There are only a handful of reference architectures for vibe-coded apps.
OpenAI has a feature they rolled out several weeks ago called Sites that takes care of deployment with one click (hosting, database, auth). It’s so much easier for non-technical now to vibe code and publish their app
There is too much friction in deploying internal tools. I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun to solve that. Full GitOps (create/update your app through GitOps, not just updating app source code), staged deployments, service bindings (for getting a managed database credential, instead of creating a new database per app) and OIDC/SAML with RBAC.
Very interesting project! I haven't fully read through yet - does it deploy to existing resources/infra, or does it handle resource/compute provisioning as well? How are you handling keys/creds?
Do you have any real users yet?
I'm working on a open resource/compute provisioning protocol/system (not released yet), targeting both cloud platforms as well as internal, which may go hand-in-hand with what you're building.
OpenRun runs on a single machine, with either Docker or Podman. All apps runs on that one machine. Idle apps are scaled down to zero, so resource usage is low even when hundreds of apps are installed. For scaling up, OpenRun can be deployed on Kubernetes. Each app deployed through OpenRun gets created as a Kubernetes deployment, again with scaling down to zero. Same declarative config moves from singe node to Kubernetes, no changes required.
I don't have any telemetry, so not sure about number of users. Based on issues filed, lots of users using the single node deployment (which is good enough for most use cases). Started with Streamlit/Gradio type apps, now users are actually using it for deploying vibe coded internal tools. See https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...
IMO you should evolve also as a central platform to host AND build internal tools (eg with agents). Have you considered that? EDIT oh snap I see in the console tour that there's an AI App Builder section. Ok gonna have to try this out then!
Also does your git integration support self-hosted Bitbucket (I guess at the least generic git instance not just GitHub etc) ?
Also, pretty cool that you have a FastHTML spec.. I built this (well AI mostly did) with FastHTML: https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/
The agent based app builder is pretty new, still improving it. It runs with Agent Client Protocol (ACP), with integrations for Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode and Pi.
Thanks! That's sounds excellent. I love the Shelley Web Agent ( https://GitHub.com/boldsoftware/Shelley ), but guessing it would be hard to integrate that into your platform (although would be amazing if you could).
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.
There are a lot of people with domain expertise or know a workflow in their own business so well they know exactly what a solution looks like. And AI can build a solution today or will be able to in the near future - I have been blown away for example, by how lawyers are using AI to automate real work. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even if it’s not perfect and does not scale to 1bn users.
I wouldn’t under estimate the potential here.
I am less bullish on this idea that every peeps will have ideas for great things to build
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.
For a lot of companies these tools exist in the world of shadow IT spend, so they can go on being paid customers with no usage, tied to various IC accounts/credit cards for a long, long time.
I interviewed with a startup that I thought I was a pretty good fit for. I'd had the same role at a company that did the same thing they were doing just three years ahead of them. That led to fairly nuanced interviews with each interviewer because I was familiar with their projects and more generally had a sense of what their roadmap looked like. And that put me into a final presentation interview with a bigger group that included the CEO/founders pretty quickly.
Towards the end, after others had asked questions, the CEO asked how I was using AI and about the tools I was using. I mentioned using Claude Code to quickly build basic prototypes of my first few stabs to rule them in/out/iterate. I thought this was a pretty good answer in the situation—Claude Code was pretty new at the time, I really had been using it this way, and I thought it was good for a large meeting with a broad set of people where I probably can't get too detailed. I'm not sure she paid much attention, but followed up with "Do you know what Lovable is?" I hadn't. She said something along the lines of "I'm not sure exactly, but it seems to be what all the cool kids are using."
Anyways, afterward I looked it up, and I was kind of bummed because I felt I was using the more advanced method (for the situation), but the CEO didn't know it, and I likely came off as behind.
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!
In general, people/companies attempt to hide their use of AI when building apps/services since there's an ongoing substantial effort from progressives to cancel that shit. That stated reasons vary, but the trend is very, very clear.
I’ve seen ads for this company, the ads were highlighting things you could build, things like:
“An app to find dog friendly pubs”
Most of the ideas seemed more like a Google search than an app.
I have no doubt they are letting thousands of people write code faster than ever before, but what is that code worth and who would maintain it? Deploying an app is relatively expensive and time consuming vs just using the web or buying an app. Most people can’t be bothered to do that work (and rightly so) and most apps make very little money.
I expect this to be one of the casualties of the AI bubble, once people realise they didn’t really want to run a business based on their dream app.
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 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.
what’s the moat for lovable? you can already directly prompt these models to build you a full fledged app. Sure it saves you some db setup and deployment but is that enough of a product?
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.
Cool. Signed up for Lovable, chose a web template, got this:
"When remixing a template, I agree to take responsibility over project security, compliance, data, and operations. The templates are provided for educational purposes and do not guarantee functionality or security out of the box."
With copy/paste disabled, so I had to type it out.
I rest my case, your honor.
---
Update: Spent 2 more minutes - I cannot believe anyone invested a penny in this. It makes those other dozen failed web site editor things look very well made and thought out.
The entire tech sector seems to amount to entrenched mega corps and finance bros who know how to fill out the forms to automatically get a fancy university graduate with a CS degree a few million and split it 3-ways, 1/3 for finance bro, 1/3 for nepo baby cs graduate and 1/3 for the losers who implement 'the idea'.
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.
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
I was on the agent team at Lovable (no longer working there).
I think most solo devs would be better served by using Lovable than Codex or Claude, for the kind of apps Lovable is optimized for (i.e. CRUDs with thirdparty SaaS integrations).. and if you ignore the cost, b/c Codex sub is hard to beat.
Lovable is a normal, fully capable agent harness. With a Linux box. With all the usual features like MCPs, skills, subagents, browser, and whatever else.
You can ask Lovable to grab Rust from nixpkgs, write a raytracer, and compile to WASM, and it will happily do it. You can ask Lovable to write an OS in assembly and run it in v86, and it will do it. (I did both.)
The alternative to Lovable isn't Codex, but "Codex + Cloudflare account". I don't doubt that eventually Codex will be really good at using Workers and Durable Objects and R2 and serverless SQLite and Wrangler -- and having everything Just Work without needlessly exposing it to the user -- but idk I think it's not there yet.
I’m using exe.dev, yeah, but I don’t feel like it is a quality of life improvement for CRUD apps. Deploying smth that has to be persistent like a discord bot — yeah sure.
“Any agent on any VPS/VM” is an agent with self hosted infra. Lovable is an agent with managed infra. I think having managed infra is neat.
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?
Two years ago they were boasting of how being small (two dozen people) and using AI was the secret enabler of their growth. No bureaucracy! Product people go brrr with little developer need.
24 months later, their headcount ballooned, they are now more than 1'000.
Product keeps soft pivoting every few months and no single mediocre application built on lovable has gained any traction whatsoever, not that I've heard of it.
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 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.
How many years of insane growth would it take to pay back $400M at this rate?
What. Is. Happening?!
$13.3B valuation? They mention Adidas, Nvidia, etc but their “favorite” use cases are toy apps inside smaller firms.
The play here has to be “our model of building companies via agent workflows and websites is the best” otherwise TAM numbers are just nutty. Smoke it while you got it I guess and congrats on the raise!
Lovable reported hitting $500M in annualized revenue last month and estimates $1B+ over the next year (https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/09/lovable-says-it-has-hit-50...)
So I’m going to say not too many.
The raise is not a loan. They sold equity in the company.
Their revenue is already greater than $400mm
worth the listen. They hit profitability because of their power users, who are a mixed bag of complete novices and expert SWE's, both of whom spend 10x+ the tokens of the average user. So, basically, their value prop and pricing have hit a sweet spot for a certain marketshare.
I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most.
That said, Replit, Lovable, Emergent are making hay till frontier labs dont release a wrapper agent app to do what they do.
IE. they might not be comfortable with the terminal, messing with SQL databases, etc.
For someone like me who have developed production apps the old way, terminal-based agents with my chosen stack is my preferred way.
Why do investors put their money in companies create by people that have never developer even a real application?
50 years ago most people in the field were newbies because the field itself was totally new. So, all founders lacked experience as no-one had experience. Has not that changed? Aren't any software experts that can create new products anymore?
I can't bring myself to be bullish or bearish in such broad strokes.
Over the years, I have met and worked with a number of people who were "non-technical", but who nonetheless built their own internal rough software tools with a cobbled-together combination of spreadsheets and SaaS services, connected by something like Zapier. They are a particular kind of person, but I would not call all of them them "technical". They are experienced in their business domain, are detail-oriented, and are persistent in making improvements by any means they could.
I have seen those people be supercharged by AI app builders like Replit and Lovable, even if I don't personally have a need for either.
This might be a matter of definitions: Is such a person "technical" because they value systematizing human processes and put effort into it? Or is such a person "non-technical" because they are not experienced in software engineering best practices, or programming in the conventional sense?
In addition to the nature of the user, I suspect the fulcrum that success and failure rests on for these kinds of apps and tools is long-term maintenance. How frequent? How involved? How breaking are the changes? On this topic, there is a quote I think about a lot (paraphrased, and I forget who said it, or I would credit them):
>AI app builders mean that anyone can experience the joy of building software, but also that they will experience the joy of maintaining software.
Doesn't matter how many Lovable clones there are. Everyone knows the name Lovable.
This caters to the overwhelming majority who cannot use tools like Claude Code or that prefer an all in one solution.
Open source models only help Lovable improve its own margins. They can stop paying the Anthropic or OpenAI tax and tailor the models to exactly their use case and UX.
not really. maybe last year.
What I'm struggling to understand is that _someone_ is paying, right? $400M is probably a lot more than a fraction of what people spent on javascript CRUD apps before? It seems more like centralization than anything else to me? What am I missing?
And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
https://schmerz-radio.com/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/336140/Unavowed/
If I enter the game and rotate my phone horizontally it kicks me back to the front page.
1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
that implies that he's probably not paying for Lovable, and thus their 13B+ valuation is built on influencers and eyeballs?
Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
Who are the users? What are the problems? And why would people pay for Lovable instead of Claude/OpenAI/Grok, etc.? Do they have something those companies don't,something that lets them get chosen vs the competition?
I'm very confused. I'm not saying the valuation doesn't make sense, but I have a hard time explaining it. The best answer I can come up with is that they're betting on people building apps without knowing how to code—that this alone will be enough to leverage LLMs and turn a profit, capturing a market that's scared away from tools like Claude Code.
And I assume they're not betting on the thing actually working. They're betting on people wanting to build an app and pouring money into it, hoping it'll eventually work—and on Lovable not getting eaten by CC-like tools, thanks to distribution and brand.
I used it in the past and it was terrible. Claude Code from scratch, or even a template tweaked via CC, was way better.
So the assumptions seem to be: - Lovable has data that delivers results people want and can't get otherwise. - Marketing, brand, and distribution are enough to keep users on Lovable, which under the hood just leverages normal LLMs guided in some smart way. - LLMs will get good enough to deliver fully working, enterprise-level products—and Lovable will be the frontend delivering that result
Its a beautiful thing.
I don't know what's taking Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, even AWS to build deployments themselves. There are only a handful of reference architectures for vibe-coded apps.
Do you have any real users yet?
I'm working on a open resource/compute provisioning protocol/system (not released yet), targeting both cloud platforms as well as internal, which may go hand-in-hand with what you're building.
I don't have any telemetry, so not sure about number of users. Based on issues filed, lots of users using the single node deployment (which is good enough for most use cases). Started with Streamlit/Gradio type apps, now users are actually using it for deploying vibe coded internal tools. See https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...
Also does your git integration support self-hosted Bitbucket (I guess at the least generic git instance not just GitHub etc) ?
Also, pretty cool that you have a FastHTML spec.. I built this (well AI mostly did) with FastHTML: https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/
Also any feedback on the Git question?
I have tested with GitHub and GitLab. OpenRun uses the go-git library, so BitBucket should work, not tried it yet.
FastHTML is great for internal tools use case.
Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
I am less bullish on this idea that every peeps will have ideas for great things to build
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.
Towards the end, after others had asked questions, the CEO asked how I was using AI and about the tools I was using. I mentioned using Claude Code to quickly build basic prototypes of my first few stabs to rule them in/out/iterate. I thought this was a pretty good answer in the situation—Claude Code was pretty new at the time, I really had been using it this way, and I thought it was good for a large meeting with a broad set of people where I probably can't get too detailed. I'm not sure she paid much attention, but followed up with "Do you know what Lovable is?" I hadn't. She said something along the lines of "I'm not sure exactly, but it seems to be what all the cool kids are using."
Anyways, afterward I looked it up, and I was kind of bummed because I felt I was using the more advanced method (for the situation), but the CEO didn't know it, and I likely came off as behind.
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!
“An app to find dog friendly pubs”
Most of the ideas seemed more like a Google search than an app.
I have no doubt they are letting thousands of people write code faster than ever before, but what is that code worth and who would maintain it? Deploying an app is relatively expensive and time consuming vs just using the web or buying an app. Most people can’t be bothered to do that work (and rightly so) and most apps make very little money.
I expect this to be one of the casualties of the AI bubble, once people realise they didn’t really want to run a business based on their dream app.
- bolt is the best product out there. paste the same prompt and see for yourself
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 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.
Spacex even have multi model one
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 think it's Cursor's selling point.
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 you like running your business and want to keep what you built, don’t.
"When remixing a template, I agree to take responsibility over project security, compliance, data, and operations. The templates are provided for educational purposes and do not guarantee functionality or security out of the box."
With copy/paste disabled, so I had to type it out.
I rest my case, your honor.
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Update: Spent 2 more minutes - I cannot believe anyone invested a penny in this. It makes those other dozen failed web site editor things look very well made and thought out.
It makes Squarespace look like a good product!
The entire tech sector seems to amount to entrenched mega corps and finance bros who know how to fill out the forms to automatically get a fancy university graduate with a CS degree a few million and split it 3-ways, 1/3 for finance bro, 1/3 for nepo baby cs graduate and 1/3 for the losers who implement 'the idea'.
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.
The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself
I think most solo devs would be better served by using Lovable than Codex or Claude, for the kind of apps Lovable is optimized for (i.e. CRUDs with thirdparty SaaS integrations).. and if you ignore the cost, b/c Codex sub is hard to beat.
Lovable is a normal, fully capable agent harness. With a Linux box. With all the usual features like MCPs, skills, subagents, browser, and whatever else.
You can ask Lovable to grab Rust from nixpkgs, write a raytracer, and compile to WASM, and it will happily do it. You can ask Lovable to write an OS in assembly and run it in v86, and it will do it. (I did both.)
The alternative to Lovable isn't Codex, but "Codex + Cloudflare account". I don't doubt that eventually Codex will be really good at using Workers and Durable Objects and R2 and serverless SQLite and Wrangler -- and having everything Just Work without needlessly exposing it to the user -- but idk I think it's not there yet.
“Any agent on any VPS/VM” is an agent with self hosted infra. Lovable is an agent with managed infra. I think having managed infra is neat.
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/
24 months later, their headcount ballooned, they are now more than 1'000.
Product keeps soft pivoting every few months and no single mediocre application built on lovable has gained any traction whatsoever, not that I've heard of it.
Adoption of AI application building technologies in most enterprises is much more about governance and security than it is about any particular coding feature.
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.