Vibe coding limitations: Unexpected costs - Lovable Tutorial

Now we've been vibe coding for a little while now, but how much has it cost us? Let's go through and cover how much it costs to build with Lovable and host our applications. So going back to our application here, every time we issue a command to our AI model, we can click on the three dots at the bottom here to see how much that action costs. So in this case, to fix a security bug we fixed last time, it costs us 1.3 credits. Now if we scroll up, we can see what other functionality has cost us credits. Adding data into the database costs us half a credit. And if we keep scrolling up, we can check more. So this one was free because it was a security feature. And as we saw, security feature changes are free and level. If I hover over my project name, I can see how many credits I have and how many I've used. Let's click on it. So currently I'm on the Tier 1 Pro plan where I have 100 credits, and I'll get 100 credits at the end of next month. So to build this application a few times, I've used around 30 credits. So that's about 30% of $25 a month. So let's call that $10. So it's not free to vibe code more complex applications. There are free tiers, but usually you have to pay to build something a little bit more substantial. Now, one of the things to keep in mind is how much your time is worth as compared to the absolute dollar cost. If you know how to fix something very quickly in the coding mode, you can go through and edit it yourself. This way you'll save on the AI costs. At the same time, if it takes you 30 minutes to find a bug, that would take the AI model one minute, you're making a trade-off between time and absolute costs. If we go to the Lovable website, we can see the different plans that are available. There are higher tiers of pro plans where you can get more and more credits. There is a business plan that allows you a few more capabilities. You can see here the opt-out of training data that we talked about in the last video, as well as other capabilities like internal publishing, SSO and so forth. And finally, there's the enterprise plan if you're working at a big company. These are the plans that can get quite expensive because there are more tailored needs. And one more thing in the pro plan is that there's the usage-based cloud and AI capabilities. If we open up this documentation here on lovable cloud and lovable AI, you can see the different features that we're using. We enabled this at the beginning to allow us to do user authentication as well as build the backend features. So you can see here, we get $25 of free usage a month for now until the end of 2025. This might change in 2026 when you're watching this video. And if we scroll down, we can see the other capabilities here as well. So we have databases, authentication, storage, and edge functions. In this case, we're trading our costs for the ease of integration and deployment. It's very easy to integrate a backend and a database and authentication that might take a developer a few hours to a few days to set up. If we click on the left-hand side to Lovable AI, this is a pretty interesting capability that Lovable has added. Rather than needing to add a custom API key from a provider like Gemini, GPT, or Anthropic, instead, what we're going to do is we're going to use Lovable's AI gateway to actually do this functionality. So we scroll down, we've enabled this feature already, we have a default model, and we have the usage and pricing, where we get $1 free AI usage per month, and after that, it costs more. If we go back to our project here, and click on Cloud, click on AI, let's make this a little bit bigger here, We can see the number of requests that we've done and to which model. Now on the billing side, this should be within our $1 range. But for example, if we go back to our preview and users keep using this import and generation feature, it can get pretty expensive for us. So keep that in mind. And one more thing that I want to show you is how you can actually monetize your application. For example, if you want to make this import from URL as a paid feature, you can use the Stripe integration that's offered through Lovable. Let's go back to Cloud, scroll down on Overview, go to Usage, so we can see our costs here. We can also see it by Project Breakdown. And we can scroll down and go to Connectors. Here we can connect Shopify or Stripe, which are ways that we can monetize our application. So Stripe for payments and Shopify for e-commerce. Maybe we want to sell some kind of plushie as part of our rabbit mascot. that's also an option to monetize our application. So if we click on Stripe, you'll see what permissions we'll need to set up, and it'll take a little bit of extra time. So even though integrating Stripe is beyond the scope of the course, I wanted to show you how you could monetize your application potentially to offset some of the hosting and development costs. And there we go. We've covered the costs for lovable core, as well as cloud and AI functionality. And in the next chapter, we're going to explore more potential projects that we can build, as well as contextualizing VIBECODING in an enterprise environment. I'll see you there!