Rendered at 04:47:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
sailfast 3 hours ago [-]
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!
paxys 40 minutes ago [-]
> How many years of insane growth would it take to pay back $400M at this rate?
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 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
ls-a 1 hours ago [-]
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.
enos_feedler 1 hours ago [-]
give me the name of a kid, what they've built with AI, what problem it solves and who is buying it.
asdev 9 hours ago [-]
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
sailfast 3 hours ago [-]
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.
paxys 1 hours ago [-]
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.
JamesSwift 6 hours ago [-]
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.
gosolozero 5 hours ago [-]
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?
himata4113 8 hours ago [-]
To put it more accurately: people who don't do software use loveable to build apps for people who do not use software.
adamnemecek 5 hours ago [-]
It's easy to be dismissive when it's this early.
chao- 7 hours ago [-]
>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.
edgyquant 7 hours ago [-]
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
asdev 7 hours ago [-]
show me an example and what do you mean by real money?
echelon 9 hours ago [-]
This is a sign that distribution matters.
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.
tikhonj 8 hours ago [-]
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!
shimman 6 hours ago [-]
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.
conqrr 2 hours ago [-]
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.
asdev 7 hours ago [-]
Depends what you mean by distribution, they are spending an arm and a leg on paid acquisition
dominotw 7 hours ago [-]
> Everyone knows the name Lovable.
not really. maybe last year.
ZeroCool2u 8 hours ago [-]
I don't disagree about distribution, but absolutely no one I know outside the tech bubble knows what Lovable is or has even heard of it.
hudn33 12 hours ago [-]
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?
doener 12 hours ago [-]
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.
doener 6 hours ago [-]
Thank you! I did not put much effort into mobile optimization so far. The game is clearly meant to be played on a Desktop computer.
willnz 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, I used Claude Code a lot, but Lovable is the fastest way to get a log-in system and database, so a great option for a true MVP.
chrisweekly 11 hours ago [-]
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.
dhdaadhd 4 hours ago [-]
Please do!
GenerWork 11 hours ago [-]
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.
skeeter2020 10 hours ago [-]
>> and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it
that implies that he's probably not paying for Lovable, and thus their 13B+ valuation is built on influencers and eyeballs?
GenerWork 3 hours ago [-]
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.
whoamii 9 hours ago [-]
Welcome to the stock market.
igravious 11 hours ago [-]
I have genuinely never heard of Lovable and I thought I was relatively plugged in to the tech zeitgeist :/
Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
dgellow 11 hours ago [-]
It was one of the earliest “create a whole web app from a prompt” type of product IIRC. The space is now more than crowded
cm11 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
adi_kurian 27 minutes ago [-]
illegitimi non carborundum
jbdamask 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ceehex 6 minutes ago [-]
one click deployments are stupid and useless. you should have the agent walk you through building the deployment scripts and process.
jnathsf 21 minutes ago [-]
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
ajayvk 7 hours ago [-]
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.
aleqs 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ajayvk 6 hours ago [-]
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...
indigodaddy 5 hours ago [-]
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/
ajayvk 4 hours ago [-]
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.
indigodaddy 4 hours ago [-]
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).
Also any feedback on the Git question?
ajayvk 4 hours ago [-]
Custom agents can be added if it supports ACP, the console UI has the config options for that.
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 3 hours ago [-]
Great, appreciate the feedback ty
3 hours ago [-]
edoceo 11 hours ago [-]
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.
navaed01 3 hours ago [-]
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
bix6 9 hours ago [-]
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.
xenospn 8 hours ago [-]
Churn for these no code businesses has to be off the charts. I wouldn’t count this revenue to hold once everyone had their first try.
eclipticplane 5 hours ago [-]
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.
minraws 5 hours ago [-]
Just to be clear that's ARR one month signups and short terms sign ups are included in this madness.
sixdimensional 10 hours ago [-]
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!
bix6 9 hours ago [-]
Half the raise is for marketing no doubt
mrhottakes 10 hours ago [-]
Where are all the big world-changing apps that were vibe coded on this platform?
swyx 3 hours ago [-]
if you are only seeking that in order to be impressed you are not very good at the business at tech
lysace 5 hours ago [-]
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.
patwater31 1 hours ago [-]
Fwiw loveable is fun and enables playful little apps. I enjoy it
maxdo 2 hours ago [-]
Why do you need if every llm vendor has their own harness , what is the moat ?
Spacex even have multi model one
orf 11 hours ago [-]
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.
jmathai 10 hours ago [-]
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.
feifan 11 hours ago [-]
Lovable sponsors Tanstack but Tanstack is an independent project
throw03172019 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Lovable funding is insane. And scary.
esafak 9 hours ago [-]
Did you user Cursor's Design Mode to make edits visually?
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?
radial_symmetry 4 hours ago [-]
Synthetiq > Lovable if you actually want to get into production in any sort of real organization
P4u1 11 hours ago [-]
This is not crazy. What's crazy is one of their favourte stories, Viver de IA [Brazil], a company that uses AI to build an AI education company.
boredumb 10 hours ago [-]
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
swatcoder 10 hours ago [-]
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.)
devmor 10 hours ago [-]
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.
edoceo 10 hours ago [-]
Obligations that go away when you declare bankruptcy and close the business.
devmor 6 hours ago [-]
That’s the implication, yeah. If growing to sell and bail out is your goal, do it.
If you like running your business and want to keep what you built, don’t.
nylonstrung 10 hours ago [-]
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
neongreen 6 hours ago [-]
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.
indigodaddy 5 hours ago [-]
Or just any agent on any VPS/VM. Or better yet exe.dev that has auth and TLS proxy/domains built-in, + Shelley Web Agent ready to go
neongreen 5 hours ago [-]
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.
indigodaddy 5 hours ago [-]
Valid points.
subygan 9 hours ago [-]
lovable is not aimed at devs though
pydry 6 hours ago [-]
the apps people make with it still need to be used by someone.
alexashka 9 hours ago [-]
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.
It makes Squarespace look like a good product!
mandeepj 8 hours ago [-]
Similar story: signed up at https://app.emergent.sh, funded by YC; total crap. Btw, they've raised over $100M
alexashka 6 hours ago [-]
Is it just money laundering?
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 7 hours ago [-]
It’s quite embarrassing how bad it is. Fair play to the founders making bank on the ai hype though
imagetic 1 hours ago [-]
who?
8 hours ago [-]
cnkkd 7 hours ago [-]
$400M for a Series C is an incredible milestone. The momentum behind AI dev tools right now is insane.
GenerWork 11 hours ago [-]
I feel like this valuation could be cut by 75% if Anthropic paid more attention to Claude Design.
pixelready 11 hours ago [-]
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.
chrisweekly 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah. IMHO Claude Design's current UX is so abysmal, it's borderline unusable. Kind of ironic, given its remit.
feifan 11 hours ago [-]
many such cases in Anthropic's product portfolio
Ancalagon 11 hours ago [-]
you should see what happened to Airtable recently. Much more than 75%
sarmasamosarma 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
redwood 3 hours ago [-]
"The last piece of software" still their tagline?
Taikhoom10 10 hours ago [-]
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?
It is crazy that people still use Lovable when we have codex and claude code....
hackernud3s 5 hours ago [-]
I have a client that prototypes things in Lovable and hands them off to me to get them working and deployed. He would be lost in claude code.
SlavikCA 7 hours ago [-]
any open source alternative?
epolanski 7 hours ago [-]
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.
dogmayor 11 hours ago [-]
blah blah bubble
k1w1 9 hours ago [-]
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.
bluelu 10 hours ago [-]
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.
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!
Lovable reported hitting $500M in annualized revenue last month and estimate $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.
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 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.
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.
not really. maybe last year.
And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
https://schmerz-radio.com/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/336140/Unavowed/
If I enter the game and rotate my phone horizontally it kicks me back to the front page.
1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
that implies that he's probably not paying for Lovable, and thus their 13B+ valuation is built on influencers and eyeballs?
Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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/
Also any feedback on the Git question?
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.
Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
I am less bullish on this idea that every peeps will have ideas for great things to build
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.
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!
Spacex even have multi model one
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 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.
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.
I think it's Cursor's selling point.
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.)
If you like running your business and want to keep what you built, don’t.
The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself
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.
“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.
"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!
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'.
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.
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/
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.
Adoption of AI application building technologies in most enterprises is much more about governance and security than it is about any particular coding feature.
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.