Move your Lovable app onto a server you own

What does Lovable actually cost per month?

The plan price is the smaller question. What you actually buy on Lovable is credits, and the price of a credit depends on which plan issued it. On Pro a credit costs $0.25. On Business it costs $0.50. Buy more mid month and the rate changes again: a Pro top-up is $15 for 50 credits, which is $0.30 each, and a Business top-up is $30 for 50, which is $0.60 each. Topping up is the most expensive way to hold the same unit.

Lovable publishes example requests with their credit cost, which is more useful than any plan comparison because it tells you what a normal day costs. Putting the published examples next to the published rates:

Those are reasonable numbers. Nobody is being fleeced on a gray button. The reason to look at them anyway is that they set the scale of the free plan. Lovable grants 5 build credits a day on the free tier, up to 30 a month, plus 20 Cloud credits monthly and 4 AI credits. At half a credit for the cheapest published example, five credits is roughly ten trivial edits a day. That is a demo allowance, not a way to keep an app alive, and it is honest of Lovable to price it that way.

Do Lovable credits expire?

Yes, all of them, on four different clocks. This is the fact that changes how you should think about the balance sitting in your account, because it means the balance is not savings. It is a perishable good.

If unused, monthly plan credits expire two (2) months after they're issued, and annual plan credits expire one (1) month after your annual period ends.

Lovable pricing page, source

Daily grants are shorter still. They do not survive the day they were issued in:

Included grants of daily build credits expire at the end of each day and don't roll over.

Lovable pricing page, source

And unused usage grants behave the same way:

Unused usage-specific grants do not roll over.

Lovable documentation, Credits and usage, source

Think about what this does to behaviour. A balance with a deadline pushes you to spend it, and the only place to spend it is the platform that issued it. That is not a scandal, it is how a great many prepaid systems work. It is just worth naming, because it is the opposite of how a server bill behaves. A server you did not use this month simply cost you the same small number as always, and nothing evaporated.

Can I get a refund on unused Lovable credits?

No. Lovable is explicit about it, and to its credit the sentence is short and plain rather than buried in a paragraph of qualifiers:

Credits aren't refundable or redeemable for cash or any other value.

Lovable pricing page, source

There is also a line covering what happens to a balance in the situations where a balance ends:

In such cases, any remaining credits are deleted, unless otherwise required by the law.

Lovable pricing page, source

So the money moves one way. You convert dollars into credits, credits into edits, and there is no path back. Again, this is normal for prepaid platform currency. The reason it matters here is the combination: a unit that expires, cannot be cashed out, and cannot be moved anywhere else is a unit that only has value inside the product. Everything you have bought is stored in a place you do not control.

Is a Lovable credit always worth the same amount?

No, and Lovable says so directly. This is the single most underrated line on the pricing page, because it means the number in your balance is not a stable measure of anything:

The value of a credit and the rate at which they are consumed for a given action depend on your subscription plan and the feature used, and credits are not necessarily equal in value across different plans.

Lovable pricing page, source

Read that carefully. The value of a credit and the rate at which credits are consumed both depend on your plan and on which feature you used. A hundred credits is not a quantity of work. It is a quantity of a thing whose exchange rate is set by the vendor and varies by context. Forecasting a year of maintenance in that unit is not really possible, and no spreadsheet will fix it, because the missing information is not yours to have.

Compare that with the unit a server is priced in, which is a month. A month is the same length on every plan, for every feature, in every account, forever.

What happens when my Lovable app gets popular?

It starts costing more. Hosting on Lovable comes with an included grant, and apps that grow past it are charged from the same credit balance you use for building:

Apps that reach significant visitor traffic and/or size may start incurring cost on top of the included grant, which is covered by your credit balance.

Lovable pricing page, source

This is the part I would want to know before launching anything. Success on the platform is billed as an event. The month your app finally works, gets shared somewhere, and picks up real visitors is the month it starts drawing down the currency you were saving for features. And because that draw comes out of the same balance, a traffic spike does not arrive as a hosting bill. It arrives as the discovery that you can no longer afford to make changes.

A flat rate server behaves in exactly the opposite way. Bandwidth allowances at this size are generous, the price is fixed in advance, and a good week for your app does not cost you the ability to edit it. Amazon Lightsail's entry plan, for example, publishes 1 TB of transfer at $5 a month.

How much does a server of my own cost?

Between $4 and $20 a month for an app of this kind, paid directly to the provider, with nothing in between. These are the published entry prices from three providers most people have heard of:

The account is opened in your name, on your card. I never sit between you and the provider, and there is no monthly retainer to me. If you decide a year from now that you would rather someone else looked after it, everything needed is already in your possession and you owe me nothing.

The honest caveat: a server does not come with an assistant that writes features for you. If the app still changes every week, you will want some kind of coding subscription, and that partly eats the saving. This move is for the app that is built, not the app that is being built.

How do I move my Lovable app to my own server?

You send a link, and about a week later the same app answers on the same address from a machine you own. In between, in plain terms: the app and its database are set up on the new machine, the data is carried across and checked row for row, your domain is pointed over with the padlock working, a security layer goes in front, automatic backups start running, and the old copy stays live the entire time until the new one has been proven. The switch is the last thing that happens, not the first.

Nothing in that list is beyond a technical person with a free weekend, and I would rather say that out loud than pretend otherwise. Plenty of people do it themselves and are pleased they did. The reason to hand it over is not that any single step is difficult. It is that the expensive failures all live in the boring parts: a database copied while it was being written to, a domain that goes dark for six hours in the middle of a working day, a backup that nobody tested until the night it was needed.

What does the migration cost?

A fixed $500 for a straightforward app. That covers the app and its database moved, your domain working with the padlock, a security layer in front of it, automatic backups, and a short plain English guide to what you now own and where everything lives. Apps with more moving parts, background jobs, file uploads, payments, several services talking to each other, start at $1,000, and I quote that after reading the app rather than guessing from a description.

Against $4 to $20 a month afterwards, the one-off pays for itself inside the first year for most apps that were buying top-ups. If your Lovable spend is genuinely a small plan fee that never moves, it does not pay for itself, and I will say so rather than take the work.

When should you stay on Lovable?

While the app is still becoming itself. If you are shipping changes most days, throwing features away, and rebuilding screens because you learned something, per-credit pricing is a fair deal and the assistant is worth more than the money. Moving at that stage would slow you down and save you very little, and I have talked people out of it.

The moment to move is narrower and easier to recognise than people expect. It is when the app has stopped changing, started being used, and you have caught yourself hesitating before making a small improvement because of what it would draw from the balance. At that point the pricing model has begun making product decisions on your behalf. A finished app does not need an assistant standing by. It needs a machine, a database, a domain and a backup, at a number that does not move when your app has a good week.

Lovable cost guides

The questions people ask before they decide to move. Plain answers, every number taken from Lovable's own published pages.

• What Lovable actually costsA Lovable credit is $0.25 on Pro and $0.50 on Business. Here is what a real edit costs,
• How Lovable credits work, and when they expireLovable credits roll over while you subscribe but expire two months after issue. Daily g
• How to cut a Lovable billNine ways to spend fewer Lovable credits, ordered by what they save. Eight are free and
• Lovable vs a server you own: the real monthly costLovable is a plan fee plus credits plus traffic. A small server is $4 to $12 a month, fl
• What you actually own when you leave LovableYour Lovable app, its data and its files are yours and run elsewhere. Your credit balanc