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SaaS Prototyping with Lovable

🚀 My experience of the Lovable "Free Weekend" Experiment

I spent some time over the weekend exploring Lovable, and it turned out to be a pretty fascinating (and at times frustrating) experiment.

âś… Pros:

  • Built a working proof-of-concept in record time. What would’ve taken a week manually came together in just a few hours.
  • All the usual Lovable strengths: effortless deployment, simple interactions, and ease of use.
  • The “try to fix it” feature is genuinely impressive when it works.

❌ Cons:

  • As complexity increased, quality degraded. Requests started looping or regressing.
  • Features that previously worked couldn’t be restored, even after 10+ tries.
  • Their biggest misstep: shutting off the free plan mid-weekend. The whole premise was “full access for free,” and pulling the plug early was a pretty big marketing fail. It really underscored the gap between the promise of AI and the actual experience.
  • The UI output is rough, and making changes to styling or layout is a real challenge. = I considered the paid plan—until I saw it only includes 100 credits. Compared to the free plan’s 5/day, that’s a modest upgrade with little value for money.

🔍 Takeaways:

  • I now have the foundation of an app I want to seriously develop and take to launch.
  • Lovable is great for rapid prototyping, but it often gets stuck in loops instead of trying new solutions.
  • It works well as a sandbox for building isolated components that can be extracted and refined later.

The initial 30 minutes were exciting—"this is so cool!"—but the limitations quickly surface as soon as you want to make even slightly non-trivial changes. It can definitely accelerate side project development, but you still need a capable engineer to curate and refine the code.

đź’ˇ Final thought:

Lovable is what AltaVista was to Google. Early and interesting—but there's still a long road ahead.