Bolt.new vs Lovable: Tokens, Credits and Plans Compared

Bolt.new (Bolt) and Lovable both turn plain-language prompts into working web apps, so the real choice comes down to how each one bills and which plan unlocks what you need. Bolt meters tokens on an individual account, and its Teams plan charges per member. Lovable meters credits per workspace, with unlimited users on its paid plans. The two units cannot be converted. Pick Bolt for native mobile apps through Expo, code editing on the free tier, or your own design system on a team plan. Pick Lovable if several people should draw on one budget, or if you need SSO below an enterprise contract. Neither is cheaper in every case.

Tokens on a person, credits on a workspace

Bolt's entry paid plan is Pro, at $25 per month billed monthly or $18 per month billed yearly ($216 a year) for 10M tokens a month ^[1]. Higher Pro levels reach 900M tokens a month, chosen in the plan selector. A Pro account belongs to one named person, and the Terms forbid sharing logins to stretch usage limits. Bolt's Teams plan costs $30 per member per month billed monthly or $27 per member per month billed yearly ($324 a year per member), with 10M tokens a month for each member.

Lovable puts a familiar plan name on a different basis. Its Pro plan with 100 credits costs $25 per month billed monthly or $21 per month billed annually, taken as one charge of $250 a year ^[2]. Lovable Business with 100 credits costs $50 per month billed monthly or $42 per month billed annually ($500 a year). Each plan covers a whole workspace with unlimited users and scales through 11 credit options, up to 10,000 credits.

The sticker prices match at the entry level, yet the meters underneath do not. One unit measures the work the agent does while reading project files, planning and writing code. The other is a single balance that pays for building, the cloud backend, AI features and connectors. For a group, the billing basis matters more than the sticker. By our arithmetic, three members on the entry Teams level pay $90 per month billed monthly ($1,080 a year) or $81 per month billed yearly ($972 a year). A workspace plan keeps one price as headcount grows, but everyone draws on the same balance.

Free tiers: a daily token cap against 30 credits a month

Bolt Free gives 1M tokens a month with a 300K daily limit, and the monthly bar resets on the 1st ^[3]. Unused Free tokens never roll over. Cost per prompt is not fixed, because Bolt reads your project files with every message, so bigger projects burn more tokens per request. Once the daily bar runs dry, edits in Code view stay free and the agent returns when the bar refreshes. Max, Bolt's deeper-reasoning agent, is reserved for paid plans.

Lovable Free hands out 5 build credits a day, up to 30 a month, plus 20 Cloud credits, 4 AI credits and 1 connector credit a month. Projects publish on lovable.app, either publicly or invite-only for up to 10 people per project. Code is read-only on that tier; editing inside Lovable and downloading a zip start on Pro. Lovable Pro and Business keep the 5 daily build credits on top of their plan credits, which softens the jump from free to paid.

Publishing is where Bolt's free tier tightens. Every Free site is public, even though Free projects can be private. Custom domains and badge removal need a paid plan, and the whole account shares 10 GB of bandwidth and 333,333 requests a month. Hit that cap and every site stops serving until it resets. One busy page can take the rest offline.

Leftover allowance, cancellations and refunds

Paid Bolt tokens stay valid for two months from the start of the cycle in which they arrived, but only while the subscription is active. The oldest tokens are spent first. Cancel, and the plan runs to the end of the period; after that every allocated token, rollover included, is gone unless you re-subscribe before it expires. Extra tokens come as reloads, sold only on the highest monthly Pro level or any annual Pro plan. Reload tokens never expire. Bolt does not publish their price.

Lovable credits on monthly billing expire two months after issue, which works out to one month of rollover. On annual billing they last until one month after the annual period ends. Lovable Pro top-ups cost $15 per 50 credits and stay valid for 12 months. That published price makes a heavy month easier to budget, whereas the size of a Bolt reload bill stays unknown until you are eligible and buy one.

Bolt subscriptions are non-refundable except where the law requires it ^[4], and Lovable's own Terms take the same line. On Bolt, an annual plan can downgrade only at the next annual renewal, possibly a year away, so yearly billing is a commitment either way. Bolt advertises savings of up to 28% on yearly billing; that holds only for Pro at 10M tokens, where it saves $84 a year by our arithmetic. Every higher Pro level saves 10%. Lovable prints no percentage and frames its annual price as two months free.

Plan gates that push each buyer up a rung

Custom domains and badge removal start on Pro with both tools, so a solo builder publishing a branded site meets the same first gate. Private published sites need Bolt Pro, while Lovable Free can already publish invite-only for up to 10 people per project. Past that point the ladders split, and the split decides which plan a team actually needs:

• Your own design system: Bolt requires a paid Teams plan; everyone can build with the pre-loaded Chakra, Material UI and Shadcn systems. Lovable allows design systems from Pro, with npm-package design systems on Enterprise.
• Single sign-on: Bolt keeps SSO and audit logs on Enterprise. Lovable puts SSO on Business, with SCIM and audit logs on Enterprise.
• Your own Supabase: Bolt needs Pro or Teams to start on, connect or claim a Supabase project; Bolt Database itself runs on every plan.
• Outside access: Lovable has a public API on Business, an MCP server on every plan and two-factor sign-in on all plans. Bolt publishes no public API or SDK to control Bolt from outside the product, only an invite-only CLI beta, and does not describe two-factor sign-in.

If a shared component library is the reason you are shopping, Bolt's cheapest route is a Teams seat for every builder, while Lovable's is one Pro workspace. A company that needs SSO without negotiating an enterprise deal has only one of the two options. Map the feature first, then the plan, and only then compare prices on the same billing term.

Backend, code and mobile: where the builds diverge

Both backends rest on the same foundation. Bolt Database is built on PostgreSQL and runs on Supabase infrastructure managed by Bolt, with auth, storage, server functions and secrets on every plan. Lovable Cloud is a managed PostgreSQL backend with auth, storage and edge functions, also built on Supabase and billed in credits. The exit differs. A Bolt Pro or Teams user can claim a Bolt database into their own Supabase account, though one Bolt account links to a single Supabase organization for good. Leaving Lovable Cloud for your own Supabase is manual work.

Code access tilts toward Bolt at the low end. In Code view anyone, Free included, can edit files and run terminal commands without spending tokens, and two-way GitHub sync works on every plan. Bolt also opens an existing public repository when you put bolt.new in front of its URL. Lovable syncs with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket from Free but cannot import an existing repo. StackBlitz's Terms assign AI output to you as far as the law allows. On Bolt, restoring an earlier version rolls back code but never the database.

Mobile is the sharpest split. Bolt builds native iOS and Android apps through Expo, previewed on a phone with Expo Go. Store publishing happens outside Bolt, through the EAS CLI and your own Expo, Apple and Google developer accounts, as our mobile apps guide walks through. Lovable builds web apps, not native ones, and its route to a phone is a PWA or a Capacitor wrapper set up outside Lovable.

Training defaults, support and what reviewers flag

Unless they opt out, individual Bolt accounts outside the EEA, UK and Switzerland may have content created from October 2026 used for AI training. Teams and Enterprise workspaces are excluded, and the opt-out is free on any plan. Lovable has a similar default: since September 2026, data on its Free and Pro plans may train its models unless the user opts out, with Business and Enterprise excluded by default. Privacy-minded teams get exclusion without a toggle on Bolt Teams or Lovable Business.

Support follows the plan on both sides. Bolt Free users get the community Discord; paid users get email on weekdays during business hours, with no response-time commitment, and Enterprise adds 24/7 priority support. Lovable runs community help on Free, email on Pro, priority support on Business and a dedicated team on Enterprise. Only Lovable names a priority lane below its enterprise tier, which matters for a small team working to a deadline.

Bolt's Trustpilot reviewers most often complain about support, account access and price, a map of where things go wrong rather than a trend. Bolt's own comparison page claims both tools write comparable code on the first pass and diverge during iteration, because Bolt runs every change in WebContainers. Those are a vendor's claims about a rival. For Lovable's side in full, see our Lovable review; for every Bolt token level, see our Bolt pricing guide.

The bottom line

Choose Bolt when the app must reach the App Store or Google Play through Expo, when free users need to edit code, or when a team wants its own design system and can pay per member for it. Choose Lovable when a group should share one credit balance without per-head pricing, or when SSO has to arrive on a mid-tier plan. Because tokens and credits never convert, the honest tiebreaker is a week on both free tiers with the same feature. Budget from what each actually consumed.