EST. 2026 · ESTIMATES ±40%
How much to vibe code?
Pick what you’re building. Get the bill before you build it — Lovable credits, Bolt tokens, Replit dollars, iteration tax and debug surcharge included.
HOWMUCHTOVIBECODE.COM
* YOUR ESTIMATE *
builder profile: normal human
~3 mo on Bolt.new Pro ($25/mo)
ALL PLATFORMS
✂ CHEAPEST: BOLT.NEW
Tokens are complexity-priced, and debugging loops are the killer — users have burned 2M+ tokens in a day fixing one bug. Prices verified 2026-08-10.
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Why trust these numbers
Real units
We price in each platform's native credits, tokens and dollars — not hand-wavy round numbers. Lovable credits are credits. Bolt tokens are tokens.
Iteration tax
Nobody one-shots an app. Your prompting style multiplies the bill ×1.2–×8, and every estimate here carries a debug surcharge on top.
±40% honest
These are ranges, not quotes. We show the maths, the sources and the dates instead of pretending to a decimal point.
Read the methodology →The platforms, one line each
- Lovable
billed in credits
Credits roll over on paid plans, but a complex prompt can eat over a credit per message. Refactors and redesigns burn fastest.
Lovable pricing guide → - Bolt.new
billed in M tokens
Tokens are complexity-priced, and debugging loops are the killer — users have burned 2M+ tokens in a day fixing one bug.
Bolt.new pricing guide → - Replit Agent
billed in $ credits
Effort-based checkpoint pricing: a request that looks simple to you can bill like a big one if the agent works hard on it.
Replit Agent pricing guide → - v0 by Vercel
billed in $ credits
Excellent for UI, weaker past the frontend — backend-heavy features tend to need extra rounds or another tool.
v0 by Vercel pricing guide → - Cursor + Claude
billed in $ usage
Cheapest per unit of work by far — if you can read the code. The learning curve is the real price of admission.
Cursor + Claude pricing guide → - Claude Code
billed in $ usage
No credits to count — rolling 5-hour windows and weekly caps, quoted only as multipliers of Pro. Hit the cap mid-build and you wait, upgrade to Max ($100–$200/mo), or pay API rates. Cheapest of the dollar-billed tools — if you can read the code it writes.
Claude Code pricing guide →
What does it cost to build…
A printed receipt for every build type, on every platform.