Builder Price Watch — Issue #0
The AI app-builder pricing landscape, tracked weekly. This is the baseline issue.
Coverage: 14 tools · 8 with clean data · 2 rebrands discovered · snapshot 2026-04-02
TL;DR
- Everyone converged on $20. Cursor Pro, Windsurf Pro, and Replit Core (discounted) all sit at exactly $20/mo for solo devs. Bolt and Lovable are at $25. The anchor is set.
- The ceiling is $200. Cursor Ultra and Windsurf Max both land at $200/mo. Neither blinks.
- Softgen is picking a fight. $33/year + pay-as-you-go, with marketing copy that explicitly calls out "$20-200/mo subscriptions." That's a direct shot at the two bullets above.
- Lovable priced per-workspace, not per-seat. "$25/mo shared across unlimited users" is quietly the most aggressive team pricing in the category.
- Two silent rebrands: Databutton → Riff (riff.ai), Srcbook → Mocha (getmocha.com). Both redirect at the DNS level, no announcement needed on the pricing page.
- Replit is running a promo: Core shows $25 crossed out → $20 (20% off), Pro shows $100 → $95 (5% off). Both annual-billed.
The grid
| Tool | Free tier | Solo | Team | Power | Billing unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| v0 (Vercel) | $0 + $5 credits | — | $30/user/mo | $100/user/mo | Token-metered (transparent) |
| Bolt.new | $0, 300K tok/day | $25/mo | $30/user/mo | — | Tokens (10M/mo on Pro) |
| Lovable | Yes | $25/mo* | $50/mo* | — | Credits (100/mo) |
| Replit | Yes | $20/mo |
— | $95/mo |
$-denominated credits |
| Cursor | Hobby (limited) | $20/mo | $40/user/mo | $60 Pro+ / $200 Ultra | Usage multiplier |
| Windsurf | $0, "Light" | $20/mo | $40/user/mo | $200/mo | "At API price" pass-through |
| Base44 | $0, 25 msg | $16/mo | $40/mo | $80 / $160 | Message credits |
| Softgen | — | $33/yr | — | — | License + wholesale AI |
*Lovable's $25 and $50 tiers are both "shared across unlimited users" — per-workspace, not per-seat.
What actually matters this week
1. The credit-opacity spectrum
How much is a "credit" worth? Depends who you ask.
- v0 is the most transparent. They publish actual token prices: input $1-30/1M, output $5-150/1M across four model tiers (Pro / Max / Max Fast variants). You can do the math before you buy.
- Replit is dollar-denominated. "$25 of monthly credits" on Core, "$100 monthly credits" on Pro. One credit = one dollar of compute. Clear.
- Base44 counts messages. Free: 25 message credits/mo. Top tier: 1,200/mo. Plus a second currency — "integration credits" (100 → 50,000 across tiers).
- Bolt counts tokens. Free: 300K/day, 1M/month cap. Pro: 10M/month, no daily cap.
- Lovable just says "credits." 100/month on both paid tiers. What's a credit? The pricing page doesn't say.
Why you care: If you're building against any of these, or evaluating which one to build on, the unit economics are wildly different. "100 credits" at Lovable and "10M tokens" at Bolt are not comparable without a translation layer. That's the gap.
2. Softgen's contrarian bet
"Skip the $20-200/mo subscriptions. $33/yr license + wholesale AI at 30-50% less than other tools."
That's not subtle. Softgen is betting that the category is overpriced and that buyers will do the math. $33/year works out to ~$2.75/mo for platform access, then you pay wholesale for AI usage on top.
The risk for them: if "wholesale AI" still costs the user $15-20/mo in practice, the positioning collapses. The risk for everyone else: if it doesn't, $33/year resets the anchor.
Watch this one.
3. Lovable's unlimited-seat pricing
Both of Lovable's paid tiers ($25/mo Pro, $50/mo Business) say "shared across unlimited users."
Compare: Cursor Teams is $40/user/mo. Windsurf Teams is $40/user/mo. v0 Team is $30/user/mo. A 5-person team pays $150-200/mo elsewhere and $25-50/mo at Lovable.
Either Lovable's credit pool is the real constraint (100/mo isn't much across a team), or they're buying market share hard. Probably both.
4. The $40/user team tier is a Schelling point
Cursor Teams: $40/user/mo. Windsurf Teams: $40/user/mo. Cursor Bugbot: $40/user/mo.
When three SKUs from two competitors land at the same number, nobody's doing bottom-up cost modeling. They're pricing against each other.
Rebrands & redirects
Two of our 14 targets redirected to new domains between targeting and scraping:
- databutton.com → riff.ai — Databutton is now Riff. The new pricing page is JS-rendered and didn't yield clean text in the first pass; the free tier includes 10 credits. Will re-scrape with a headless browser next week.
- srcbook.com → getmocha.com — Srcbook is now Mocha. Same JS-rendering issue. Title: "Mocha Pricing: Affordable AI App Building Plans."
Neither rebrand appears to have a press push yet. You heard it here.
Scrape health
| Status | Count | Tools |
|---|---|---|
| Clean data | 8 | v0, Bolt, Lovable, Replit, Cursor, Windsurf, Base44, Softgen |
| JS-rendered (need headless) | 3 | Create.xyz, a0.dev, Mocha (née Srcbook) |
| Rate-limited | 1 | Marblism (Vercel Security Checkpoint) |
| Redirect, partial data | 1 | Riff (née Databutton) |
| 404 | 1 | Tempo (pricing URL moved) |
Next week
- Headless-browser pass on the 3 JS-rendered pages
- Second snapshot → first real diff (what changed in 7 days?)
- Add: Magic Patterns, Gamma, Builder.io, Onlook to the target list
Builder Price Watch ships every Tuesday. One vertical, watched closely, with interpretation. No 260-tool dashboards. Just: here's what changed and here's what it means.
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