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 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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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!
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 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.
Similarly I find your comment dumb. First off a huge portion of their user base are not technical. What are they going to do? Use Cc or Codex and then attempt to host their db, frontend and backend somewhere. No chance.
Secondly, a lot of the apps built on lovable are for internal purposes and not necessarily used publicly.
Honestly I could go on and on with various points to refute your dumb comment.
Is lovable worth 13B? Probably not, but I completely get why people think it is. It serves a market of non technical people that want to build apps and websites without having to use something horrible like Wordpress.
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.
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.
hey it's their PR statement who insists it's not just for prototype but real apps which do real work are being used in production. "where are they?" is a fair question
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.
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.
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
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.
>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
I mean 200k/MRR for one company most of these are not pure tech but people in a domain (the 200k one, while I don’t feel comfortable outright stating it is a car buying application you could likely find with a cursory search) who use tech to scale. So I have worked with lawyers, therapists, people from other countries etc to bring apps to that market using their domain/market knowledge as an edge.
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 think you're failing to see the forest through all those trees. The value of software will plummet as barriers to entry fall and people become more capable of creating exactly what they need for their own specific purpose.
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.
> at least I’d imagine that’s what happens - Claude just knows how to manage AWS for you
AWS has $100+bn reasons per year to not let that happen. As techies learned slowly through the evolution of the internet: political power > money > tech.
People still need a platform to host their app. AWS is far too complicated for the average person. Even with AI to help. The user still needs to get past the registration screen and put their credit card. Most will panic and run as soon as they see the letters "AWS", "IAM" and "EC2"
Then as soon as their agent hits the first bug "port already in use" they will run... Any brave soul who remains, after spending a whole day solving similar issues back to back, will be like "The port has been freed up, my nginx proxy has been configured, my nginx has been launched with systemd and my app server too! The socket ulimit has been increased, I still can't see my app!!!" Then Claude be like "Well of course, silly human! To achieve this simple task, you would have to update your security group inbound firewall rules, duh!"
Then the user be like "Claude, we fixed everything! I cannot see my app still!" Then Claude be like "You goofball, we didn't even get round to purchasing your domain name, moving it to CloudFlare DNS and configuring the A record, CNAME and AAAA record for IPv6 in your Zone file... Not to mention the MX record. You also need to obtain a signed SSL/TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt, then modify your nginx config to install the SSL certificate... Oh then we'll need to configure your nginx to act as a terminating reverse proxy for your WebSocket connection... Oh actually before we do any of that we should set up your schema validation logic and access control logic on your app server with rate limiting and backpressure monitoring... Then we'll set you up on Git version control with a CI/CD pipeline with precommit and PR hooks to run your test suite and code linting... Then we want to keep the registration and login flow of your app real simple, like stupid simple, so we'll get you a Keycloak instance acting as an OAuth2/OIDC identity provider for authentication with an email verification step which will involve us configuring the realm and creating an OAuth client and setting up the SMTP email server... Too easy!
Totally agree - but do you think that is a 13 billion dollar moat that Anthropic would not be able to solve through branded integrations and connectors?
I’d imagine they’re already working with folks like Stripe, AWS, etc on exactly this at the moment potentially? I guess that’s where Lovable comes in. And now the money makes sense. Do the raise and become an acquisition target so one of the labs doesn’t have to do it themselves.
I suppose that Anthropic or any of the other companies that develop foundational AI models do this. This would be a vertical integration strategy. However, they would spend less time developing the best foundational models, so they might not want to keep a more focused product vision, and keep their capital focused on build better models and improving Claude.
Yes, they will be able to do this, but it's a lot of work, and Lovable has a pretty good head start.
I was open minded about it until I did a job search for "Lovable" on the biggest career website in my country and couldn't find a single job related to it in the entire country. For any other tech stack, any major town or city would give you many pages of results. Surprising.
To be fair, I doubt a job role would include the name of a specific product. A business posts a hiring ad for a Graphic Artist, not for an Adobe Photoshop Artist.
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'.
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.
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).
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
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.
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?
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!
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.
I worked directly with them. I guess youtube isn't recommending the videos to you but you can find them all there. Atleast do the minimum before you refute. A single kid created complex opensource software that is being used by all these apps too, and it has been acquired by supabase. That dudes software is infested with AI bugs. I'm really doing you a favor by telling you all of this. I advise you to stop caring about software and adapt to become more product oriented.
Also AI will generate better code than you ever will in your entire career, bugs included.
The software world might split into programming language scientists who care about "code" and product-oriented who care about the tangible product. Anyone in between (who fight about what code looks like) should disappear.
I know, it’s still funny to me after all the years here. It works for some and doesn’t for others and it always looks insane from the outside before it works.
Presumably they'll aim for IPO or getting acquihired before then. Most startups these days aren't meant to build anything lasting, they're designed to line up an exit from day zero. It's an established, mature business model now.
The whole business model is poisonous and extractive. 90% of the businesses launched aren't valid, and then the few that are get bought up by oligopolists/monopolists.
I'd bet on them. Brand and models will get cheaper. Can engineer to use cheaper open models. Secret sauce can be in that context engineering and becoming a "cloud" themselves to get cheaper inference.
How is that different than literally any other SaaS raising big rounds? Profitability is apparently only important for AI companies, and even being more profitable than most SV startups since the inception of this site is not good enough.
That thinking is going to die pretty soon. Unless you’re building the groundbreaking foundations that requires heavy capital profitability is going to be a huge concern and soon - but that’s just one undercapitalized man’s opinion :)
Also - profitability or margin makes a big difference. Most folks are capable of selling $2B for $1B. Obviously not the case here if they’re doing 500M on a 400M raise, but you get the point.
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.
I think software engineers might be in a echo chamber around Lovable and apps like this. It would have been a surprise to me too, as I also build software for a living, but it just so happens that I also run a company - in the same space as lovable - so I can give you some real examples:
1. Dance school management SaaS
2. Classified sites for Netherlands
3. An old school website hosting service
All of these were built by entrepreneurs who do not have a tech background. And by no tech background, I mean most of them dont know github, some of them dont know reddit and some of them dont know linkedin. The way they 'backup' their work is by taking successive dumps of the entire folder on local.
They already know that the business of software is one of the better businesses out there. Till now the option they had was to outsource to a dev shop - which will set them back to $10k-$50k atleast - but they intutively understand that the business may or may not work. So they were on the fence.
Now they build themselves - each of the three above have spent around $2k-$5k on our platform over the last quarter. Some of the businesses are working, some not so much - some are trodding along. So these guys do some updates here and there - are figuring out marketing over time - but if it seems like its not taking off, they start building the next thing on their mind. And once they 'understand' a platform they stick to it. Couple of grands dropped to build their next idea is the cheapest they have ever paid.
Lovable is effectively "next gen Wix", which itself was "next gen Wordpress", which was "next gen Dreamweaver". It's simply the natural evolution of products that solve the problem "build a website without being a coder".
Every generation is hailed as the end of all things, because it's always better than the previous one, but the core need they serve are the same.
Not at all - how do you build a classified site on Wix/Framer ? Afaik they are for only static/marketing sites - plus a cms to host a blog.
These are all apps with multi-tenancy - database backed - payment integrations - the works. The classified site (marketcity.org) has features like user chats/dms, social media sharing, paid upgrades etc.
Actually now the capabilities are dramatically increasing - you can now vibecode like a python based image/video processing pipeline directly - all through a webapp. And very soon - something more ambitious, like finetune an LLM - again all through a simple chat webapp.
Lovable is well suited to take over from Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress ... any static websites or simple apps that amount to a shop front. It's a market most serious software developers don't care about but still needs to be serviced and catered to.
This is because even in most serious tech companies the main website is considered marketing rather than part of the product.
Doubt. My daughter wanted to make a static web to publish illustrated stories she made an such. I happened to have a Loveable subscription I forgot to cancel so I figured she can at least prototype it there.
Well, it did the web site alright, the process was smooth. She even asked AI to translate stories and it just did.
But the problem is that it was not what I would call a static web site: it was React bullshit, a SPA. The content was actually in typescript !!! Given that it's not actually static content it won't get indexed.
(And I really doubt SSR would be a good solution here.)
GP might be right though. It'll ship with and advertise a few components that do require a degree of dynamics that Wix/Squarespace can't do as easily, and people will jump.
Why do I think that? Because that's exactly what happened to regular webshit coding some decade+ ago. That's how SPAs were born. That's why React is a thing in the first place. Long time ago, someone figured how to make a complex app in a browser, then someone else figured some trivial aspect of the site looks nicer when done in JS (back in the ancient times where networking was slow and bandwidth was tight), and suddenly every static page everywhere got rewritten into a bloated SPA, and spawned a whole absurdly well-paid industry to support it.
This is not the kind of problem most people care about. It looks good, it works, it's good enough. They will likely build their audience outside of search engines anyway.
Thx for the replies - also didn’t occur to me that the company may want to build their own data centers to get off expensive token dependencies if the LLMs are core to the business. I keep considering these like raw software plays but they’re not always - and if you can’t use the capacity in the end you can always rent it to somebody else. Probably a no brainer for investors to loan money for chips these days… though I think more brains should be looking at that play.
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
This is where I suspect most value with LLMs are _currently_.
Of all my friends the ones actually gaining measurable value from LLMs are not product developers but rather entrepreneurs in some service business that have automated processes they previously needed to hire someone for.
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.
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?
> Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders.
I'm pretty young (early 20s), but have been coding, reverse engineering, and hacking away for about 10 years at this point. It's not like they're funding middle school children, how is it possible? These tools are all so new.
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
My personal mental model is that this is the AI version of the low-code web app tools that have existed for a while (like Outsystems, Power Apps...). Those tools are a bit of a nightmare for devs to work with and they have all sorts of limitations. Yet they still carved themselves a fairly significant niche in the market, as they allow building apps fairly quickly and cheaply... as long as you stick to simple apps. I don't know if Lovable will be able to capture that market, but that's how I try to make sense of this.
My hypothesis based on my discussions with non tech friends. If you can go from (prompt > website > deployment), such that you have a site on the web basically from behind one login.
That's very valuable, I basically think (we) devs often overestimate the average persons willingness to learn tech. Similar to dropbox back in the days.
Of course nothing is stopping OpenAI, Claude to do literally the same, maybe they already have? I don't follow the scene that much.
> 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.
With Claude Code etc. you still have to decide on a tech stack, frameworks or libraries to build on. Lovable is basically an agentic harness with Tanstack Start and Supabase setup for you + quick integrations for services online businesses typically use.
Basically like a JS dev boilerplate + agent in a box.
Their main advantage is they were kind of a first mover in that space before harnesses or agents etc. were even discussed.
The problem with your mental model is that you're thinking the product is "code" when the product is "a finished product"
CC is a horrible product for building a finished website. With CC you still have to host it somewhere. On Vercel, get a DB somewhere or tell it to use SQLite, which no one knows what that is. You have to install it and use a terminal which no one knows how to do.
Even if you already know how to code, surely you can imagine a product that is EXACTLY CC but also has hosting, infra, etc built in. e.g. CC + Supabase. You might not use it, but for sure it is easier.
In terms of what products get built and how it's sustainable, think internal tools and what people who can't code would like to build but weren't able to.
Internal tools, things like CreatorIQ is ~$30k a year. It would be nice to make an internal tool just to manage the creators you have and save that money
External Projects, A friend built a fantasy leauge for niche sports is making money on it.
I would love to hear the argument as to why CC is better for those two use cases when the products work great, its cheaper than CC (both are subsidizing so that is not a good rebuttal), and there is less maintenance (in the future, you could imagine loveable automatically sweeping projects for deps, security issues, etc)
If you're a non technical person and just want to vibe code a website, I would suspect that Codex/Claude Code is far too intimidating for them. It requires a level of pre-existing knowledge. Lovable definitely caters to making these things accessible to a non-technical audience, which there's definitely a market for.
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?
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.
People are throwing a lot of shade on Lovable - mostly while comparing the output of non-technical people, with the output of the HN audience.
"Excel is the second best tool for everything". While, from a technical POV, we can have a trillion billion objections to making anything in Excel.
But it has brought down the cost/barrier of doing numbers based knowledge work - and have enabled more and broader experimentation.
Sometimes an Excel sheet should have been a "real" app. No doubt about that.
When we observe someone use something, we have to assume that there's some "truth" in that demand. Lovable, and companies like it, have enabled someone to accomplish things that they couldn't before.
That empowered group are now churning out half-baked stuff, that won't get used. And decent POCs that will become "real" apps.
... I challenge anyone who objects to Lovable, to give us the current status on their first web-app related project. My first 10 projects are either dead, or never got far enough to touch the internet.
But some have stuck.
Every critique I've seen of Lovable has been that while it is very easy to get started, once you cross a certain point with your app-building, it simply becomes too expensive, and complex to continue build on manually. Just like real software, ya know.
"For most people, turning an idea into software once required so much capital, technical fluency, and time that many ideas never came to life. Lovable’s first chapter was about changing that. "
That goes so well with "Lovable raises $400M Series C"
The irony can be amusing, but one could easily argue that "turning their idea into software" did not require them to raise $400M (indeed, they did it without this raise).
And it could also be argued that "serving 60 million projects" and scaling from there is a different game requiring more than a few clicks in a vibecoding platform
I love using Lovable. It's so much better than Codex/ClaudeCode and producing a fully working application quickly. Don't need to spend hours deploying it, giving it a database, payments, analytics, etc. It just works much faster and simpler.
I was skeptical about Lovable as software engineer until I saw it used.
Last month I visited warehouse in Berlin.
People who work there(with no technical background) build over 15 lovable apps for themselves -> starting from checkin system, to very sophisticated dashboards.
Those were non technical people, and they did all with no engineers or IT.
Those apps they were using were better than 90% of internal apps I've seen in my career.
There's one time I meant to search somebody's email address in our internal system but I accidentally searched it in Google instead because I forgot to put in the custom search operator in the URL/search bar
I actually got a Google search result back because a business's internal CMS and marketing systems had gotten indexed which had their full email list with the capabilities to delete and send newsletters. The email address I searched had subscribed to this business's newsletter which got it indexed
It appeared it was built by Lovable
I'm all for vibe coding too but there's a good chance when people do it they are leaking data like this
But then I remember all the absolutely horrible half finished internal software most companies have(never enough time, often afterthought, cutting corners etc) and then I saw those internal Lovable apps made by people who actually needed those.
And now it's not so clear anymore!
Half baked ugly app does by the engineer who doesn't need it and don't want to fix bug vs pretty Lovable app made by people who use it everyday.
Like I don't use Lovable myself because I can make my own software already, but I definitely changed my opinion after I saw it int he wild and compared to all the internal software I saw in the past 20 years.
For me Vibe coding is mostly making apps via AI by people who have no domain knowledge in what they are doing or no technical expertise.
If you technical or do have tons of domain expertise in the are(like those warehouses worker that did things for themselves) - I wouldn't call it vibe coding personally.
It just regular product development in my eyes and i would try to separate two cases.
I think the main connotation of vibe coding is cluelessly producing code that's notably poor quality. But at this point I think the term is becoming a mixture of gatekeeping and denial. The reality is that the latest models are reliably producing competent to excellent quality code and architecture, even without particularly insightful prompting. And I see no reason to think they won't continue to improve for the foreseeable future.
Recently I had a bug in a program I'm writing with Claude. I manually figured out the issue and gave it the steps to solve it. But the thing that surprised me is that the newest model immediately pointed out what the bug was (which I did not say) and it was not at all obvious, even from the steps I told it to take to fix it. Since then I've been being much 'lazier' with the models and having just as good of results.
No idea what Lovable adds to the picture. I always thought the site was a bit sketchy because of that. Prompt engineering has always been overblown, and they're just working as a middleman between people and Claude. But hey they now have $400M and I do not, so props to them.
One of my cousins built an ERP for a factory he was managing. It looked great, and seemed to work great. He has no technical background, and seeing the app work gave me real paranoia about my job security.
However, when I looked underneath the code, it was a mess. Biggest problem I saw in the brief time I spent looking at it's internals was that it wasn't using foreign keys in database. Sales invoices had customer info duplicated, and not referenced from the customer table like any sane developer would do. Same thing with purchase orders and supplier info.
AI coded apps look great at surface level, but contains huge footguns underneath.
Did they validate the result? Is it correct / accurate? If it is, then it passes the “good enough” test. For non-tech folks who just vibe code a fix, “technical debt” is not in their vocabulary. And if it works well, I don’t see the issue.
There was research showing how AI performance degrades as you go from green field into support. My guess ERP in question will break after some time as agent will add more bugs than new features. Plus recovering data will be extremely difficult.
I recently consulted for a vibe-founder who built yet-another ai voice chat and what shocked me about lovable was the lock-in. The supabase backend is completely inaccessible except through the lovable interface. You don’t have a supabase account, you can’t manage any of it directly.
The limits are also restrictive unless you wanna empty your bank account. I guess cheaper than paying us full time though.
Has anyone looked closely at the security of all these Lovable-generated apps? There have been reports of serious security issues in apps built with Lovable, especially around backend/database configurations. Curious how Lovable plans to address this
Read today that Lovable is basically just an Anthropic front end. Seems to me that when Anthropic is ready to eat this niche, they'll easily outcompete Lovable.
hudn33 | a day ago
And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
doener | a day ago
https://schmerz-radio.com/
pkaye | 22 hours ago
doener | 19 hours ago
https://store.steampowered.com/app/336140/Unavowed/
doublerabbit | 22 hours ago
If I enter the game and rotate my phone horizontally it kicks me back to the front page.
doener | 19 hours ago
GenerWork | a day ago
skeeter2020 | 23 hours ago
that implies that he's probably not paying for Lovable, and thus their 13B+ valuation is built on influencers and eyeballs?
whoamii | 22 hours ago
GenerWork | 15 hours ago
igravious | a day ago
Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
dgellow | 23 hours ago
chrisweekly | 23 hours ago
1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
dhdaadhd | 16 hours ago
willnz | 19 hours ago
edoceo | a day ago
Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
GenerWork | a day ago
pixelready | 23 hours ago
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.
chrisweekly | 23 hours ago
feifan | 23 hours ago
Ancalagon | 23 hours ago
orf | 23 hours ago
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.
feifan | 23 hours ago
jmathai | 23 hours ago
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.
dogmayor | 23 hours ago
P4u1 | 23 hours ago
boredumb | 23 hours ago
devmor | 23 hours ago
edoceo | 22 hours ago
devmor | 18 hours ago
If you like running your business and want to keep what you built, don’t.
swatcoder | 22 hours ago
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.)
sixdimensional | 23 hours ago
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!
bix6 | 22 hours ago
Taikhoom10 | 22 hours ago
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/
nylonstrung | 22 hours ago
The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself
subygan | 22 hours ago
pydry | 18 hours ago
neongreen | 18 hours ago
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.
indigodaddy | 18 hours ago
neongreen | 17 hours ago
“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.
indigodaddy | 17 hours ago
jvwww | an hour ago
Secondly, a lot of the apps built on lovable are for internal purposes and not necessarily used publicly.
Honestly I could go on and on with various points to refute your dumb comment.
Is lovable worth 13B? Probably not, but I completely get why people think it is. It serves a market of non technical people that want to build apps and websites without having to use something horrible like Wordpress.
bluelu | 22 hours ago
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.
mrhottakes | 22 hours ago
lysace | 17 hours ago
swyx | 16 hours ago
agos | 10 hours ago
k1w1 | 22 hours ago
Adoption of AI application building technologies in most enterprises is much more about governance and security than it is about any particular coding feature.
throw03172019 | 22 hours ago
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.
esafak | 21 hours ago
throw03172019 | 18 hours ago
esafak | 18 hours ago
I think it's Cursor's selling point.
throw03172019 | 13 hours ago
bix6 | 22 hours ago
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.
xenospn | 20 hours ago
eclipticplane | 18 hours ago
minraws | 17 hours ago
asdev | 21 hours ago
echelon | 21 hours ago
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.
ZeroCool2u | 20 hours ago
tikhonj | 20 hours ago
shimman | 18 hours ago
conqrr | 15 hours ago
asdev | 19 hours ago
dominotw | 19 hours ago
not really. maybe last year.
himata4113 | 20 hours ago
adamnemecek | 17 hours ago
chao- | 19 hours ago
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.
edgyquant | 19 hours ago
asdev | 19 hours ago
edgyquant | 3 hours ago
JamesSwift | 18 hours ago
gosolozero | 18 hours ago
oblio | 8 hours ago
Otherwise the single prompt stuff is fodder for a million clones.
somenameforme | an hour ago
sailfast | 16 hours ago
paxys | 13 hours ago
berkay | 11 hours ago
oblio | 8 hours ago
AWS has $100+bn reasons per year to not let that happen. As techies learned slowly through the evolution of the internet: political power > money > tech.
jongjong | 8 hours ago
Then as soon as their agent hits the first bug "port already in use" they will run... Any brave soul who remains, after spending a whole day solving similar issues back to back, will be like "The port has been freed up, my nginx proxy has been configured, my nginx has been launched with systemd and my app server too! The socket ulimit has been increased, I still can't see my app!!!" Then Claude be like "Well of course, silly human! To achieve this simple task, you would have to update your security group inbound firewall rules, duh!"
Then the user be like "Claude, we fixed everything! I cannot see my app still!" Then Claude be like "You goofball, we didn't even get round to purchasing your domain name, moving it to CloudFlare DNS and configuring the A record, CNAME and AAAA record for IPv6 in your Zone file... Not to mention the MX record. You also need to obtain a signed SSL/TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt, then modify your nginx config to install the SSL certificate... Oh then we'll need to configure your nginx to act as a terminating reverse proxy for your WebSocket connection... Oh actually before we do any of that we should set up your schema validation logic and access control logic on your app server with rate limiting and backpressure monitoring... Then we'll set you up on Git version control with a CI/CD pipeline with precommit and PR hooks to run your test suite and code linting... Then we want to keep the registration and login flow of your app real simple, like stupid simple, so we'll get you a Keycloak instance acting as an OAuth2/OIDC identity provider for authentication with an email verification step which will involve us configuring the realm and creating an OAuth client and setting up the SMTP email server... Too easy!
sailfast | an hour ago
I’d imagine they’re already working with folks like Stripe, AWS, etc on exactly this at the moment potentially? I guess that’s where Lovable comes in. And now the money makes sense. Do the raise and become an acquisition target so one of the labs doesn’t have to do it themselves.
mateo411 | 15 minutes ago
Yes, they will be able to do this, but it's a lot of work, and Lovable has a pretty good head start.
jongjong | 8 hours ago
alchemism | 4 hours ago
cute_boi | 21 hours ago
hackernud3s | 18 hours ago
alexashka | 21 hours ago
"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.
It makes Squarespace look like a good product!
mandeepj | 20 hours ago
alexashka | 18 hours ago
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'.
merrvk | 19 hours ago
jbdamask | 20 hours ago
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.
ajayvk | 19 hours ago
aleqs | 19 hours ago
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.
ajayvk | 19 hours ago
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...
indigodaddy | 18 hours ago
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/
ajayvk | 17 hours ago
indigodaddy | 17 hours ago
Also any feedback on the Git question?
ajayvk | 16 hours ago
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.
indigodaddy | 16 hours ago
jnathsf | 13 hours ago
ceehex | 12 hours ago
nadermx | 20 hours ago
cnkkd | 20 hours ago
epolanski | 19 hours ago
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.
SlavikCA | 19 hours ago
ddj231 | 18 hours ago
radial_symmetry | 16 hours ago
sailfast | 16 hours ago
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!
popalchemist | 16 hours ago
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.
enos_feedler | 12 hours ago
fragmede | 9 hours ago
ls-a | 14 hours ago
enos_feedler | 14 hours ago
lofties | 12 hours ago
ulfw | 10 hours ago
ls-a | 2 hours ago
Also AI will generate better code than you ever will in your entire career, bugs included.
The software world might split into programming language scientists who care about "code" and product-oriented who care about the tangible product. Anyone in between (who fight about what code looks like) should disappear.
paxys | 13 hours ago
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.
agos | 10 hours ago
paxys | 9 hours ago
sigilis | 9 hours ago
weird-eye-issue | 7 hours ago
sigilis | 4 hours ago
oblio | 8 hours ago
TeMPOraL | 8 hours ago
oblio | 4 hours ago
hahahaa | 7 hours ago
Kiro | 4 hours ago
oblio | 4 hours ago
This stuff isn't hard if you keep an open mind.
sailfast | an hour ago
Also - profitability or margin makes a big difference. Most folks are capable of selling $2B for $1B. Obviously not the case here if they’re doing 500M on a 400M raise, but you get the point.
Aurornis | 12 hours ago
The raise is not a loan. They sold equity in the company.
Their revenue is already greater than $400mm
sailfast | an hour ago
lbreakjai | 11 hours ago
sonink | 10 hours ago
1. Dance school management SaaS
2. Classified sites for Netherlands
3. An old school website hosting service
All of these were built by entrepreneurs who do not have a tech background. And by no tech background, I mean most of them dont know github, some of them dont know reddit and some of them dont know linkedin. The way they 'backup' their work is by taking successive dumps of the entire folder on local.
They already know that the business of software is one of the better businesses out there. Till now the option they had was to outsource to a dev shop - which will set them back to $10k-$50k atleast - but they intutively understand that the business may or may not work. So they were on the fence.
Now they build themselves - each of the three above have spent around $2k-$5k on our platform over the last quarter. Some of the businesses are working, some not so much - some are trodding along. So these guys do some updates here and there - are figuring out marketing over time - but if it seems like its not taking off, they start building the next thing on their mind. And once they 'understand' a platform they stick to it. Couple of grands dropped to build their next idea is the cheapest they have ever paid.
Oras | 8 hours ago
toyg | 8 hours ago
Every generation is hailed as the end of all things, because it's always better than the previous one, but the core need they serve are the same.
sonink | 8 hours ago
These are all apps with multi-tenancy - database backed - payment integrations - the works. The classified site (marketcity.org) has features like user chats/dms, social media sharing, paid upgrades etc.
Actually now the capabilities are dramatically increasing - you can now vibecode like a python based image/video processing pipeline directly - all through a webapp. And very soon - something more ambitious, like finetune an LLM - again all through a simple chat webapp.
owebmaster | 7 hours ago
That's on you. Wix, framer and WordPress can do it easily
sailfast | an hour ago
s_dev | 9 hours ago
This is because even in most serious tech companies the main website is considered marketing rather than part of the product.
killerstorm | 9 hours ago
Well, it did the web site alright, the process was smooth. She even asked AI to translate stories and it just did.
But the problem is that it was not what I would call a static web site: it was React bullshit, a SPA. The content was actually in typescript !!! Given that it's not actually static content it won't get indexed.
(And I really doubt SSR would be a good solution here.)
TeMPOraL | 8 hours ago
Why do I think that? Because that's exactly what happened to regular webshit coding some decade+ ago. That's how SPAs were born. That's why React is a thing in the first place. Long time ago, someone figured how to make a complex app in a browser, then someone else figured some trivial aspect of the site looks nicer when done in JS (back in the ancient times where networking was slow and bandwidth was tight), and suddenly every static page everywhere got rewritten into a bloated SPA, and spawned a whole absurdly well-paid industry to support it.
toyg | 8 hours ago
jaapz | 7 hours ago
They built something, it does what it's supposed to do. What do they care it's using react?
spockz | 6 hours ago
sailfast | an hour ago
redwood | 16 hours ago
navaed01 | 16 hours ago
I am less bullish on this idea that every peeps will have ideas for great things to build
tripledry | 8 hours ago
Of all my friends the ones actually gaining measurable value from LLMs are not product developers but rather entrepreneurs in some service business that have automated processes they previously needed to hire someone for.
maxdo | 15 hours ago
Spacex even have multi model one
patwater31 | 14 hours ago
imagetic | 14 hours ago
cm11 | 13 hours ago
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.
adi_kurian | 13 hours ago
adi2907 | 12 hours ago
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.
aurareturn | 11 hours ago
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.
Frieren | 11 hours ago
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?
4k0hz | 9 hours ago
yogorenapan | 9 hours ago
> Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders.
I'm pretty young (early 20s), but have been coding, reverse engineering, and hacking away for about 10 years at this point. It's not like they're funding middle school children, how is it possible? These tools are all so new.
Frannky | 12 hours ago
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
keeptrying | 12 hours ago
Its a beautiful thing.
yfontana | 9 hours ago
tripledry | 9 hours ago
That's very valuable, I basically think (we) devs often overestimate the average persons willingness to learn tech. Similar to dropbox back in the days.
Of course nothing is stopping OpenAI, Claude to do literally the same, maybe they already have? I don't follow the scene that much.
rramon | 7 hours ago
With Claude Code etc. you still have to decide on a tech stack, frameworks or libraries to build on. Lovable is basically an agentic harness with Tanstack Start and Supabase setup for you + quick integrations for services online businesses typically use.
Basically like a JS dev boilerplate + agent in a box.
Their main advantage is they were kind of a first mover in that space before harnesses or agents etc. were even discussed.
motoxpro | 6 hours ago
CC is a horrible product for building a finished website. With CC you still have to host it somewhere. On Vercel, get a DB somewhere or tell it to use SQLite, which no one knows what that is. You have to install it and use a terminal which no one knows how to do. Even if you already know how to code, surely you can imagine a product that is EXACTLY CC but also has hosting, infra, etc built in. e.g. CC + Supabase. You might not use it, but for sure it is easier.
In terms of what products get built and how it's sustainable, think internal tools and what people who can't code would like to build but weren't able to.
Internal tools, things like CreatorIQ is ~$30k a year. It would be nice to make an internal tool just to manage the creators you have and save that money External Projects, A friend built a fantasy leauge for niche sports is making money on it.
I would love to hear the argument as to why CC is better for those two use cases when the products work great, its cheaper than CC (both are subsidizing so that is not a good rebuttal), and there is less maintenance (in the future, you could imagine loveable automatically sweeping projects for deps, security issues, etc)
dbbk | 6 hours ago
vivzkestrel | 12 hours ago
- bolt is the best product out there. paste the same prompt and see for yourself
rakel_rakel | 12 hours ago
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?
grey-area | 11 hours ago
“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.
prolly97 | 10 hours ago
"Excel is the second best tool for everything". While, from a technical POV, we can have a trillion billion objections to making anything in Excel. But it has brought down the cost/barrier of doing numbers based knowledge work - and have enabled more and broader experimentation. Sometimes an Excel sheet should have been a "real" app. No doubt about that.
When we observe someone use something, we have to assume that there's some "truth" in that demand. Lovable, and companies like it, have enabled someone to accomplish things that they couldn't before. That empowered group are now churning out half-baked stuff, that won't get used. And decent POCs that will become "real" apps.
... I challenge anyone who objects to Lovable, to give us the current status on their first web-app related project. My first 10 projects are either dead, or never got far enough to touch the internet. But some have stuck.
TrackerFF | 10 hours ago
Lerc | 9 hours ago
That goes so well with "Lovable raises $400M Series C"
sebastiennight | 7 hours ago
And it could also be argued that "serving 60 million projects" and scaling from there is a different game requiring more than a few clicks in a vibecoding platform
UtahJazz777 | 8 hours ago
podviaznikov | 8 hours ago
Last month I visited warehouse in Berlin.
People who work there(with no technical background) build over 15 lovable apps for themselves -> starting from checkin system, to very sophisticated dashboards.
Those were non technical people, and they did all with no engineers or IT.
Those apps they were using were better than 90% of internal apps I've seen in my career.
weird-eye-issue | 7 hours ago
I actually got a Google search result back because a business's internal CMS and marketing systems had gotten indexed which had their full email list with the capabilities to delete and send newsletters. The email address I searched had subscribed to this business's newsletter which got it indexed
It appeared it was built by Lovable
I'm all for vibe coding too but there's a good chance when people do it they are leaking data like this
podviaznikov | 7 hours ago
But then I remember all the absolutely horrible half finished internal software most companies have(never enough time, often afterthought, cutting corners etc) and then I saw those internal Lovable apps made by people who actually needed those.
And now it's not so clear anymore!
Half baked ugly app does by the engineer who doesn't need it and don't want to fix bug vs pretty Lovable app made by people who use it everyday.
podviaznikov | 7 hours ago
owebmaster | 7 hours ago
podviaznikov | 6 hours ago
It seems like "product development" to me and not vibecoding.
weird-eye-issue | 6 hours ago
podviaznikov | 5 hours ago
For me Vibe coding is mostly making apps via AI by people who have no domain knowledge in what they are doing or no technical expertise.
If you technical or do have tons of domain expertise in the are(like those warehouses worker that did things for themselves) - I wouldn't call it vibe coding personally.
It just regular product development in my eyes and i would try to separate two cases.
somenameforme | an hour ago
Recently I had a bug in a program I'm writing with Claude. I manually figured out the issue and gave it the steps to solve it. But the thing that surprised me is that the newest model immediately pointed out what the bug was (which I did not say) and it was not at all obvious, even from the steps I told it to take to fix it. Since then I've been being much 'lazier' with the models and having just as good of results.
No idea what Lovable adds to the picture. I always thought the site was a bit sketchy because of that. Prompt engineering has always been overblown, and they're just working as a middleman between people and Claude. But hey they now have $400M and I do not, so props to them.
dpacmittal | 3 hours ago
However, when I looked underneath the code, it was a mess. Biggest problem I saw in the brief time I spent looking at it's internals was that it wasn't using foreign keys in database. Sales invoices had customer info duplicated, and not referenced from the customer table like any sane developer would do. Same thing with purchase orders and supplier info.
AI coded apps look great at surface level, but contains huge footguns underneath.
pixelatedindex | 3 hours ago
kikimora | 2 hours ago
allthetime | an hour ago
The limits are also restrictive unless you wanna empty your bank account. I guess cheaper than paying us full time though.
LeonKnst | 5 hours ago
abc123abc123 | 3 hours ago