I've skipped a few days of writing because of a big move... I'm going from Lovable to Vercel. This decision didn't come lightly. For the past few days, I've been working more with Claude Code and experimenting with projects locally, then pushing them to my Vercel workspace.
I've used Lovable since I first heard about them. Lovable is what introduced me to this new thing called vibe coding. I built my first few apps with Lovable, which then caused me to explore Replit, v0 and Bolt.new as well.
The costs were super effective. Cheap even. But over time, as AI costs and the 'token' subsidies hit their limits, I realized Lovable was becoming expensive. Knowing that it uses Claude in the background as one of its LLM's, I figured -- if I can learn how to use Claude Code and publish my projects to a platform such as Vercel, would there be a cost savings for doing so?
The answer, so far, is yes. While the journey has been a pretty expensive one (I didn't realize how to properly manage Claude Code usage until I burned through my limits and kept pumping money into it), I've figured out a proper way to handle my projects. Effectively, I'd be paying $31-ish Canadian dollars to use Claude Code to build 'as many' projects as I want... versus Lovable which at times cost me several hundreds of dollars (I even had a $1k spend month amongst my vibe coding apps).
In Lovable, every prompt, query and creation costs credits. There is no cap. There are no usage limits. You ask, it builds, you pay. Nothing wrong with that. If you're using Lovable, you pay for convenience, ease of use, and quick turnaround.
At my real estate brokerage, we plan to continue using Lovable for our marketing department. My team is comprised of both technical and non-technical team members who all love to use Lovable because of just how easy it is to launch a landing page, website, or any app for a marketing campaign. Compared to the cost of hiring a web designer and a developer, Lovable wins.
For my personal projects, I've shifted to Claude Code and publishing to Vercel to save a lot of money, and because I've figured out how to do it. If you're thinking of levelling up your technical skills, here's how the experiences compare.
On Lovable, you've got an amazing user interface with a preview pane of your project (live updates, changes show up quickly, visual editing), and a pane that shows your chat and prompts.
The equivalent on Claude Code is using the terminal to 'npm run dev' your project (basically spin it up so you can see it running locally on your computer), which allows you to use a browser window to see your project updated live, along with the chat on the terminal itself.
Advanced users (developers and more technical peeps) use Claude within their coding platform such as VS Code. While I'm not a developer myself, I've tried it this way too. The benefit is you get to see your entire file structure, and you can see the code itself. On terminal, you see what Claude Code shows you, and most of the time it's a whole bunch of code it's changing on its own, plus your back and forth prompt.
For publishing a project, Lovable is just too easy. You hit the Publish button, handle the settings, and you're done. With Claude Code, you have to choose a hosting provider (Vercel for example, while some use Render, and there are many other options). You have to set up the connection between Claude Code and wherever you're hosting your project. In my case, since I use Vercel, I generate a token that I give to Claude Code so it knows where to deploy my project.
As far as features go, Lovable has built-in security scans, a newer SEO feature that helps you optimize your project for search engine visibility, and a whole bunch of other bells and whistles. They have the ability to add skills (hint -- similar to Claude Code skills), publish your project to GitHub, instant infrastructure for databases, auth processes, email integrations, payment integrations... connectors to other apps... I can go on and on.
Is it worth the money you pay for it? Absolutely -- if your main thing is convenience, ease of use, and quick turnaround.
Can you save a lot of money if you get a bit more technical and use Claude Code plus your own hosting infrastructure? Yes, you definitely can.
So for me, I've been migrating my projects from Lovable to Vercel, and a big cost savings, and with only a little bit more effort put into the technical requirements to do this.
Oh -- and Fable 5 came out for Claude and I'm loving it. You'll see a whole bunch of other AI enthusiasts using it to generate 3D maps and other applications. So far, I've just used it to convert Lovable projects from being client side rendering to server side rendering, changing the framework to Next.js which is what Vercel uses.