Don't Fall Into the Vibe Coding Trap: What to Know Before Building on Lovable or Base44
This post is for anyone planning to build a project on Lovable, Base44 or similar platforms.
Four things worth knowing before you start, based on first-hand experience:
1. The data isn't yours
These systems run on Supabase, but the account is opened in their name, not yours. You pay for it and you don't own it. Which means your customers' details sit inside a system that can be closed to you. You can set it up on a Supabase account you control, but at that point the economics of the whole project fall apart.
2. SEO is very weak
Pages are usually not static, so you end up spending credits just to get them served to search engines through Cloudflare workers. If you don't come from a technical background, this is the stage that can stall the entire project, and by the time you find all the problems you have lost a lot of valuable time.
3. Credit costs make no sense
This morning I made a small fix to a landing page. It cost me around 12 dollars. For comparison: I pay 20 dollars a month for Claude and run several projects with endless updates.
4. And the most important one: migrating to your own servers is complex and can break the system
The more you build, the more locked in you become. So my recommendation is to keep these platforms for lightweight work only. Landing pages, brochure sites, static. Not complex projects.
What does work
These platforms are a good product for someone with no technical background at all, and for a learning period. They genuinely did excellent work in the past and gave people real technical independence. But right now, in my view, they don't offer an advantage that justifies the risk of walking into a serious financial trap.
My recommendation for a serious project: build with Claude or Codex, which put the project together in a single command and do it better, and take a server on Hetzner where the costs are very reasonable. That way you own everything, including the responsibility to back up your own data. Don't forget that part.
Anyone weighing up how to set up their next project, before they start, is welcome to get in touch.