How do Lovable credits work?

One balance, three uses

• Building — each message that changes your project
• Cloud and hosting — the managed backend your published app uses
• In-app AI — AI features your own users trigger inside the app you built

How they are granted

• Free plan: a daily grant of build credits (capped monthly), plus a monthly allowance of Cloud credits.
• Paid plans: a monthly credit balance for your tier, plus the same daily build grant and monthly Cloud allowance.

What a message costs

Cost scales with complexity. Small cosmetic edits cost a fraction of a credit; a substantial feature costs more. Plan-mode messages are charged at a flat rate, which makes planning conversations cheap.

Expiry, in plain terms

• Daily grants expire at the end of the day and never roll over.
• Monthly plan credits expire a set period after they are issued.
• Purchased top-up credits last far longer than plan credits.
• Cancelling keeps what you have until the end of the billing period.

Numbers change; check Lovable's pricing page for today's exact figures before budgeting.

Where credits actually go

Credits are consumed per message that does work, not per minute you spend in the editor. In practice the big consumers are:

• Broad prompts. "Build my whole SaaS" makes the agent read and write across many files in one message.
• Fix loops. Repeatedly saying "try to fix" on the same error costs a message each time and often re-reads the same files.
• Large projects. More files and more context means more work per message.
• Undo-and-redo cycles. Reverting is free; rebuilding the same thing a third way is not.

Chatting without building — asking questions, planning, reviewing — is far cheaper than building, so use it liberally before you commit to a change.

How to get more out of the same credits

1. Plan first. Ask for a plan, read it, correct it, then approve. One accurate build beats three approximate ones.
2. Scope every prompt. Name the file, page or component and add "don't change anything else."
3. Batch small tweaks. Five copy edits in one message costs one message.
4. Stop fix loops early. After two failed attempts, ask for a diagnosis without changes: "explain the cause of this error, don't edit anything yet."
5. Give real content up front. Placeholder copy always costs a second round.
6. Use version history instead of re-prompting. If a change went wrong, revert and re-prompt precisely rather than layering corrections.

Reading your own usage

Check the usage view in your account to see consumption over time. Two patterns are worth watching: a spike on a single day usually means a fix loop, and a steady high burn usually means prompts are too broad. Both are fixable with scoping rather than a bigger plan.

Free vs paid work

Reverting, publishing, browsing your project, editing settings, and connecting a domain do not consume credits. Anything where the AI reads or writes your code does.

When a bigger plan is the right answer

If you are building daily, shipping features for clients, or running several projects, the cost per shipped feature is usually lower on a paid tier than the time cost of rationing messages. If you are learning, the opposite is true: work slowly, plan more, and build in small verified steps.