Every AI builder has a plan at roughly $25 a month. They are not the same plan. The price is the same because everyone copied everyone, but what you get for it is measured in four different units, and the unit is the whole story.
I’m going to lay out what each one gives you at that price, as of the first week of September 2026, using their own pricing pages. I run JustCopy, so read this knowing that. I’ve tried to be fair enough that you could hand it to a Lovable fan and they’d nod.
The four units
Here’s the thing that makes comparison hard. At $25:
JustCopy sells you messages. A flat number per day.
Lovable sells you credits. A pool per month, and since August, the same pool also pays for hosting and your app’s backend.
Bolt sells you tokens. Ten million a month, and how fast you burn them depends on how big your project is.
Replit sells you a $20 balance that gets drawn down by effort, and when it’s gone, billing keeps going.
Same price. Four meters. Let’s take them one at a time.
JustCopy Starter: $24.99, 10 messages a day
You get 10 AI builder messages per day. That’s it. That’s the meter. About 300 a month, and it resets every morning whether you used yesterday’s or not.
What’s included alongside: 2 published sites, 2 custom domains, hosting for both, AI image and video generation, a brand kit, and a generated business plan. There is no separate hosting line item and no separate backend meter. Your published site stays up whether you’ve used your messages today or not.
The honest downside: you can’t burst. If you’re in a flow and want to make 40 changes in one sitting, you’ll hit the wall at 10 and wait until tomorrow, or move up to Professional at $49.99 for 25 a day. Some people hate that. I get it. The tradeoff is that you will never open your billing page and get a surprise. You know on the first of the month exactly what the bill is, and it’s the same as last month.
Also honest: a message is a message whether it’s “change the button color” or “rebuild the checkout.” We don’t charge more for a hard one. That’s great for you on the hard ones and slightly wasteful on the easy ones. Batch your small edits into one message and it evens out.
Lovable Pro: $25, 100 credits a month
Lovable’s Pro plan gives you 100 credits per month, and each message to the builder costs roughly a credit. Unused monthly credits roll over while you’re subscribed, and expire after two months. So in practice you’ve got about 100 changes a month, with some slack if you had a quiet month before.
Here’s what changed in August 2026 and what you need to know before you sign up. Lovable moved to one unified credit balance. That same 100-credit pool now pays for building your app, hosting it, running the built-in backend (their Cloud product), and any AI features your deployed app calls. Before, those were separate balances. Now they aren’t.
What that means in plain terms, from their own docs: if your app uses a database, storage, or auth, and you run out of credits, those services pause shortly after. Your data is safe. Your app is not up. Building also stops behind a blocking dialog until you top up.
So the honest metering on Lovable Pro is: 100 credits, minus whatever your live app consumes in a month, and the remainder is what you get to build with. For a static marketing site that’s basically 100. For an app with users and a backend, it’s less, and it drops as you get more users. That’s a fine model for some people. Just know that “100 credits” is the ceiling, not the floor.
Free tier is 5 credits a day, capped at 30 a month.
Bolt Pro: $25, 10 million tokens a month
Bolt meters in tokens, which is the most transparent unit and also the hardest to reason about. Pro starts at 10M tokens a month, unused tokens roll over, you get a 100MB upload limit, and Bolt’s branding comes off your site.
How many messages is 10M tokens? Nobody can tell you, including Bolt, because it depends on your project. Every message sends context to the model, and the context grows as your codebase grows. A fresh project might get hundreds of edits out of 10M. A project with a big component tree and a long chat history can burn through hundreds of thousands of tokens on a single change, because the model is re-reading a lot of code to make it.
The practical effect people report is that Bolt feels generous in week one and stingy in week four, on the same plan, doing the same amount of work. That’s not Bolt being sneaky. That’s just how tokens work. If you’re technical enough to keep your project lean and start fresh chats often, tokens are a fair deal. If you’re not, they’re a slow leak.
Free is 300K tokens a day, 1M a month, with Bolt branding.
Replit Core: $20, then pay as you go
Replit’s Core plan is $20 a month and comes with $20 of credit toward their most powerful models. The Agent draws that down using what Replit calls effort-based pricing: a simple request costs a little, a complex multi-step task costs a lot, and you don’t know the number until the checkpoint lands.
The part that matters at the bottom of the page: when the $20 is gone, Replit does not stop. It switches to pay-as-you-go automatically. There’s a spending cap you can set. It is not on by default.
Third-party write-ups on Replit pricing document real monthly bills for heavy users well above the subscription price, with one example itemizing over $200 in checkpoint charges in a single month on top of the plan. Replit itself published a recap after the backlash to effort-based pricing, which tells you how many people got surprised.
To be fair to Replit: it’s a full development environment, not just a builder, and if you know what you’re doing you can get an enormous amount out of it. But if the question is “what does $25 buy,” the honest answer is “$20 of runway and an open tab.”
Side by side
At $25 a month:
JustCopy: 300 messages a month (10 a day, flat), hosting and 2 domains included, no overages possible.
Lovable: 100 credits a month, shared between building and running your app, app pauses when they run out.
Bolt: 10M tokens a month, rolls over, actual message count depends on project size.
Replit: $20 of effort-priced credit, then automatic overage billing unless you cap it.
Which one should you pick
If you’re a developer who wants a real IDE and you’ll set a spending cap on day one, Replit.
If you’re technical, you keep projects small, and you want the cleanest, most inspectable meter, Bolt.
If you’re building a full app with a backend and you’re comfortable with a single balance that covers everything, Lovable, with the caveat that you should budget credits for uptime, not just building.
If you’re a small business or a solo builder who wants a fixed number, a fixed bill, a site that stays up regardless, and never wants to think about tokens or checkpoints, that’s the plan we built. Ten messages a day is a real constraint. It’s also the only one on this list you can explain to your accountant in one sentence.
Every one of these has a free tier. Try two of them on the same project this week and see which meter you’d rather live with. Ours is at justcopy.ai, and the free plan gives you 3 builds a day with no card.