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#lovable#code#claude#more#still#site#design#market#product#got
Discussion (40 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Doesn't matter how many Lovable clones there are. Everyone knows the name Lovable.
This caters to the overwhelming majority who cannot use tools like Claude Code or that prefer an all in one solution.
Open source models only help Lovable improve its own margins. They can stop paying the Anthropic or OpenAI tax and tailor the models to exactly their use case and UX.
And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
https://schmerz-radio.com/
If I enter the game and rotate my phone horizontally it kicks me back to the front page.
1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
that implies that he's probably not paying for Lovable, and thus their 13B+ valuation is built on influencers and eyeballs?
Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
A year ago they had 180k paying customers. If we generously put them all on biz at $50/mo that’s $9M/mo or $108M/yr. Pro gives half that. They say now they have $500M run rate. So 5x+ growth in a year? Nice.
Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
Adoption of AI application building technologies in most enterprises is much more about governance and security than it is about any particular coding feature.
I can't help but feel deep down somewhere inside though - boy.. $400M is so much money - whenever I see these kind of huge raises, I kind of wonder, how likely is it to fail when you have been granted such an enormous opportunity, plus all the other money they've raised.
This question isn't limited to Lovable of course.. but it's just.. wow.. it's so much runway... will they end up spending it wisely? I feel like a lot of companies end up spending this on scaling out sales, sales engineering, marketing, advertising, splinter/side efforts, tons of hiring/headcount expansion, global expansion, acquisitions... and this often makes the companies big, slow-moving behemoths, but does it really advance the core mission, technology, infra, etc.?
Will be interesting to see where this takes lovable. Congratulations to their team!
I ended up dropping it for a design guide from designer and then used Cursor to build an Astro site section by section instead of the whole page. The flexibility of having code to view and edit was way better than these black box programs.
Lovable funding is insane. And scary.
They have a different approach to lovable, replit, etc... They don't let the gpt models translate directly into program code, but into an intermediate language which is then compiled by a compiler. Generation speed is blazingly fast, and so far results look great.
I really like that I can work on an app without having to wait between my prompts and can see the results nearly instantly.
Apparently it's safer too, as code generation is deterministic. But I did not check that yet, as I only recently got access.
He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it.
For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site.
I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.
I assume Lovable had to build around constraints to reach non-technical people at the time. But the models and tooling have improved such that those constraints are melting away. I'm not sure what advantage Lovable has in the long run.
"When remixing a template, I agree to take responsibility over project security, compliance, data, and operations. The templates are provided for educational purposes and do not guarantee functionality or security out of the box."
With copy/paste disabled, so I had to type it out.
I rest my case, your honor.
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Update: Spent 2 more minutes - I cannot believe anyone invested a penny in this. It makes those other dozen failed web site editor things look very well made and thought out.
It makes Squarespace look like a good product!
But the odds of your business catastrophocally collapsing on itself or being aggressively gutted in an acquisition would go sky high, and all those starry eyed people you recruited to help you along the way become way more like to encounter surprise layoffs or unexpected and severe equity dilutions.
A lot of it is really about where your heart is as a human. If you want to take a lucrative cut on selling an image to bigger and bigger investors and don't much care what happens to your idea or any of the "little people" along the way, then you probably should chase those funding rounds. But if you're actually passionate about your vision or have a more compassionate and paternalistic attitude towards the people you convince to work for you, you're doing the right thing with the bootstrapping.
(I'm sure you know all this, though. Nobody bootstraps without thinking about this stuff, and recongizing that that they just can't stomach the tradeoffs of doing otherwise.)
The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself
You probably need vertical integration to build real AI businesses; it feels like Silicon Valley forces new paradigms, while AI feels like something that can be bundled in with existing companies. Clouds are still the distribution, the pre AI enterpise domiance remains through bundling.
Maybe OpenAI can do something special by owning the whole stack?
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-struggle-of-openai/
If someone with clout at Anthropic takes it up as a champion and pushes it into the portfolio of apps at the importance of Claude code, it could be an amazing product, eventually a threat to Adobe, Lovable, Canva market share. It needs a better direct editing layer like 2-way figma sync, so you’re not stuck only prompting for every small adjustment. It could really use smart routing of image generation requests to a nano-banana level image generation model for the images that get poured into the ui mockups (so you don’t need to round trip to external sources by hand). And of course, like all modern LLMs doing visual work, it lacks “taste” if not given extensive examples during prompting.
Right now it feels like a fun proof of concept that could be killed at any time ala Google’s many “I got my PM promoted at launch and then was promptly abandoned” projects.