I’m using Lovable heavily for PM prototyping and it’s great. I think, if anything, current subscription may be too cheap! They’re probably want to get a huge mass of users now, eg they recently had a free usage weekend.
The comments on the Add Ons are spot on, I think:
“Lovable is creating lots of new software founders who will eventually spend lots of money on vendors. That money will flow, but Lovable currently captures zero of it.”
Having a Lovable App Store sounds like an excellent tool.
I think you must be the killer use case. As a programmer this is not good enough yet to warrant my time using it for production code (nor are its competitors)
However if I need to prototype for throwaway it would be ok.
These things right now compete with Figma and wire frames. Hopefully they lead ultimately to better UX in software.
> These things right now compete with Figma and wire frames
I think that is exactly correct. And beyond Figma or wireframes, they can actually be launched to see if they get traction and have product market fit.
Of course, I've seen tons of "throwaway" code that somehow never gets thrown away, and then, somewhat paradoxically, iteration velocity craters as the dev team tries to get a "prototype" to handle real load.
So what I'm saying is that I think things like Lovable are fantastic tools, but I'm quite confident they will be horribly misused and some poor sap will have the job of getting this stuff actually working with edge cases, security issues, scale, etc.
My prediction: this will look basically exactly like Visual Basic in the late 90s. VB was also heralded as "non-expert programmers can make apps just by drag and drop!" I actually think VB was a great product, the problem was most VB programmers were not, so VB apps took on a very negative connotation: like you could tell it was coded by a "VB coder", so you expected it to suck.
As a product designer, I'm seriously looking at using Lovable for quick ideation and prototyping. Showing users a series of Figma screens can be nice, but virtually everybody responds better to an interactive prototype.
The comments on the Add Ons are spot on, I think:
“Lovable is creating lots of new software founders who will eventually spend lots of money on vendors. That money will flow, but Lovable currently captures zero of it.”
Having a Lovable App Store sounds like an excellent tool.