Is Lovable getting monetization wrong?

I'm a non-tech worker in a non-tech industry, let me state two things:

- Software today is written to cover as many use cases with as many features to target as many users a possible.

- End users very often only use a tiny slice of the program's capabilities, but still pay for the entire program.

This creates a situation where the people writing software see it as a monumental undertaking to get good functional programs (it is), and end users see programs as having annoying learning curves with lots of bloat and "unnecessary" features.

LLMs do an excellent job of fixing this for end users because it allows them to easily create a program that does the handful of tasks that they normally need to use MegaSoftware for. And it's tailor made exactly for the use case. And the LLM can tell you exactly how to use it.

I can give a brief example where I used gemini to create a CAD file transposition tool that utilized a simple GUI tailor made for the files my company works with. This allowed us to forgo a (very) expensive CAD software package to work through converting our archive of files. A probably 2M LOC program could be skipped because we only needed 3k LOC functionality.

I really cannot stress enough how often this is the case, and why SWEs see LLMs as weak tools while end users see them as gods.

There will still be a need for huge software packages in the future, but I know I never again have to pay for a huge class of "here is a large solution space that covers your small scope problem" software.

To bring it home, loveable understands this, an sees that the futures has lots of non-tech people "writing" software. Standard IDEs are not the tools your mom will use to make a "Friends and family birthday reminder" app.

I don't get how this company makes money. Everyone who uses these tools is just building prototypes. They get to 60-70% functionality, but when it comes to actually productionize and launch, 99% of these projects will get abandoned. The churn has to be absurdly high, maybe people are just forgetting to cancel their subscriptions. Or they're just marketing very hard and getting new sign ups/subscriptions, but will crash and burn soon enough.

I’m using Lovable heavily for PM prototyping and it’s great. I think, if anything, current subscription may be too cheap! They’re probably want to get a huge mass of users now, eg they recently had a free usage weekend.

The comments on the Add Ons are spot on, I think:

“Lovable is creating lots of new software founders who will eventually spend lots of money on vendors. That money will flow, but Lovable currently captures zero of it.”

Having a Lovable App Store sounds like an excellent tool.

I recently used lovable to create the scaffolding for an app. It did a great job, far better than I expected.

However, it also squishes everything into one JS file, making it unwieldy for anything moderately complex. After I fell off the happy path (integrating onnx was basically impossible), I had to spend a fair amount of time reworking it.

I’m probably not the target audience though. And I got the end result faster than I would’ve, and it’s better looking.

Is there really a reason why should I pay for vibe coding apps like this when I can vibe code for free and unlimited with Google's Gemini?

i see one crazy real leverage: every prototype built here is a frozen snapshot of someone's product thinking in motion. like u can literally watch how ppl prioritize flows, kill features mid-wireframe, choose friction over flexibility. it’s raw cognitive output

if lovable ever starts versioning those moves, storing reasoning behind edits, even lightly, u got a time-series of product intuition across thousands of users. that’s applied decision memory.

there's a window here to become the place where product sense gets archived and replayed.

> building the software that can build all other software

All other software?

I'm afraid I stopped believing the author at that point...

I don't think the idea sticks with me. The final products of these services are never reliable.

Right now, except for some hyperscalers, any similar service has integrated their deployments to some hyperscaler which means any day 2 operations will happen in someone else's computer (supabase, azure/aws, etc). On top of that, you have third party services that you need to integrate and manage their pricing plus auth. That alone is another challenge. Let's not even start with stateful data and migrations which is almost non existent.

The main problem is these tools don't tackle day 2 operations so it will be handled to some developer to make it happen which means exporting your code to some VCS service which I think it's only github. Right there, it's a threat for lovable and others. On top of that, there's not a real feedback loop between manual integration (external dev making it prod ready) and keeping the MVP workflow. Also, there's no real way these services can say "you are free to touch these components without breaking incompatibility with our system, anything else here be dragons".

In other words, You need to own the ecosystem to make more money. Funnel the capabilities to your own ecosystem.

The marketing is good. Especially on LinkedIn, for non technical people. But I am not convinced. Lovable is a nice Website or App builder. Nothing for professionals, unless they want to build an prototype. Even building MVPs is nearly impossible. It's like v0 from Vercel or anything you can do with other Agents like Claude or Co-Pilot. Lovable is promising a bit to much for my taste.

Perhaps me just stupid and do prompts bad, but I can't make Lovable come up with anything really differentiated as a design. I'm curious if folks have tips on how to use it well as I really love the idea behind it.

Cybersecurity will be booming in 2026, trust me bro :)

I fully support vibe-coding in corporate env., plese bring more :D

Lovable should allow max flexibility to its users, allow them to monetize