Base44 Pricing in 2026: Every Plan, What Credits Buy, and the Real Monthly Cost

It tends to happen in the second week. The prototype works, you have a list of fixes, and the counter in the corner says nine message credits are left until the reset date. You type the next fix anyway. The AI gets it half right, and the correction costs another credit.

One Trustpilot reviewer described that month in September 2026: credits gone on a complex build, features left unusable, and a refund refused under the no-refund policy. Their two-star review is one of 896 on Base44’s profile, and more than half of those are one-star.

The pricing page is accurate. It just answers a different question from the one you have. It tells you what a plan costs. It can’t tell you what a month of building costs, because that depends on how you prompt, which AI model your app calls, and how many people use what you ship. This guide works through each of those with Base44’s own numbers.

How much does Base44 cost per month?

Base44 has a free plan and four paid plans. On yearly billing they cost $16, $40, $80 and $160 a month. The pricing page says yearly billing is 20% off the monthly rate, which puts month-to-month prices at about $20, $50, $100 and $200. Every tier raises both credit allowances and unlocks a few features, and the features matter more than they look: GitHub sync and backend functions only start at Builder.

Two details are easy to miss. The free domain isn’t on Starter: the documentation limits it to Builder, Pro and Elite on yearly billing. And Elite is a range, not one price, because you choose the credit size when you subscribe.

What is a message credit, and what is an integration credit?

A message credit pays for the AI while you build. An integration credit pays for Base44’s built-in services while the finished app runs. Base44’s documentation separates them on purpose: message credits cover building, integration credits cover live operation. You can exhaust one and still have plenty of the other.

Message credits go when you ask the builder to plan, change or fix something. Editing visuals by hand costs nothing. Integration credits go when your app sends an email, uploads a file, generates an image, calls a language model, runs a workflow step or answers through an in-app agent. Reading and writing your app’s own database is free, and so are calls to outside services made with your own API keys, though each backend-function run uses a sliver of a credit, about 1 per 100 runs.

The part that surprises people is who spends the second meter. You spend message credits. Your users spend integration credits, every time they click something that sends an email or asks the AI a question. A quiet app barely touches the allowance. A busy one can empty it in days, and you won’t be at the keyboard when it does.

Does a bigger plan make credits cheaper?

No, not until Elite. Divide each plan’s price by its message credits and Starter, Builder and Pro all come out at 16 cents a credit on yearly billing, or 20 cents paid monthly. Only Elite’s entry size is cheaper, at about 13 cents. Moving from Starter to Pro buys you five times the credits for five times the money.

What the upgrade does change is the second meter. Starter gives 125 integration credits per dollar. Builder gives 250. So the honest reason to move from Starter to Builder is that your app is live and people are using it, or that you need GitHub sync and backend functions. A cheaper build isn’t on offer.

How many credits does one change cost?

Base44 doesn’t charge a flat rate per message. Its documentation gives estimates that it says can change and are calculated after the action runs: about half a credit for a simple text or visual change, about 1 for improving a small feature, about 2 for a complex module, and 3 to 4 for a change across the whole app. Discuss mode costs 0.3 a message.

Look at the language-model and agent rows. Base44 now publishes a firm estimate only for its Automatic model. Pick a different model for an in-app agent and its docs say the cost runs from about the same to several or many times higher, with GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 the most expensive, but they don’t give a figure. Base44 also says you can’t preview an integration action’s cost before it runs. You can check afterward: each prompt’s menu has a “Credits Used” entry. Read it on your first ten prompts and you’ll know your own burn rate better than any guide can tell you.

What happens when you run out of credits?

When message credits reach zero, building pauses until the next reset unless you change plans. When integration credits reach zero, Base44 emails you, and every action that needs them fails. Your app’s users see a generic error with no mention of credits. Database reads and writes still work, because they never used credits.

Base44’s documentation doesn’t say the app is taken offline, and we found no sentence promising it stays up either. The safe reading is that pages load and anything touching email, files, images or AI breaks until the reset date.

Base44 publishes no price for a small top-up. Its credits page gives two options, waiting or upgrading, and its billing FAQ suggests upgrading for an immediate refill and downgrading at the end of the cycle. It also closes the obvious loophole: you can’t cancel and re-buy the same plan for fresh credits.

How you upgrade matters. Moving from one monthly plan to a bigger monthly plan charges the full price difference, and your unused credits carry over for one more cycle. Any upgrade that involves a yearly plan is prorated, and leftover credits expire at the next reset as usual.

Which costs are not on the pricing page?

Most of what catches people is written down, just not on the page with the prices. Base44’s documentation and Terms of Service add the following.

• Unused credits expire at the end of every cycle, with no cash value (Terms of Service, section 10.4).
• All services are non-refundable, and credits spent on AI mistakes aren’t returned. Automatic error fixes are free on paid plans, but the prompts you write to correct a wrong result aren’t.
• You can’t switch a yearly plan to monthly yourself. Support can review a wrong-plan purchase, and an approved exception is refunded pro rata minus processing fees.
• Plans renew automatically at the price in force at renewal, and Base44 may change its fees (sections 11.2 and 10.3).
• New private apps have required a paid plan since February 6, 2026.
• Self-serve plans are paid by credit or debit card, in US dollars for most buyers. PayPal, bank transfers and virtual cards aren’t accepted.
• After the first year you pay to renew the domain yourself.

How much will your app cost? Three scenarios

These are estimates built from Base44’s published per-action costs. Your prompts won’t match ours, so treat the plan in the last column as a starting point and check “Credits Used” after a week.

The third row is the one to sit with. The number of users doesn’t change. Switch the agent from Automatic to a premium model and the integration bill can multiply several times over, and Base44 won’t tell you by how much until the messages have run. If your app has an AI feature, the model you select is the largest pricing decision you’ll make on Base44, and it’s a setting, not a plan.

What do paying users say about Base44 billing?

Base44 scores 2.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 896 reviews as of October 1, 2026. The split is unusual: 53% gave one star and 34% gave five, with little in between. People either got their app built or hit a wall, and the wall is usually about money.

In September 2026 reviews, the billing complaints were specific. One user said a paid annual plan was cancelled after a failed upgrade charge, leaving them on the free plan for three months. Another said the billing continued after they cancelled. A third ran out of credits mid-build and was refused a refund. The praise is just as concrete. A non-technical reviewer said on September 28 that they built a professional-looking site easily, and another said the builder had worked reliably for months.

Unhappy customers post on Trustpilot far more often than satisfied ones, so a low score overstates the odds of a bad experience. The pattern in the complaints is still useful. They cluster around the rules in the section above: no rollover, no refunds, and credits that go on fixing what the AI got wrong.

Which Base44 plan should you choose?

• Free to find out whether the builder understands your idea. Five credits a day is about five small changes.
• Starter for one simple app you aren’t changing every day. 100 credits is roughly 65 average changes in a month.
• Builder once the app is live with real users, or the day you need GitHub sync or backend functions. This is the tier most serious projects end up on.
• Pro for a month of intense building. It costs the same per credit as Builder, so there’s no reason to stay on it once the pace drops.
• Elite only when your users are burning more than 20,000 integration credits a month.

Pay monthly for the first two months. The 20% yearly discount is real money, but you can’t undo a yearly plan yourself, and you don’t yet know your burn rate.

Is Base44 cheaper than Lovable or Bolt?

On the sticker, yes, slightly. Base44 Starter is about $20 a month against $25 for Lovable Pro and $25 for Bolt Pro. The three use different units, so the sticker settles little. What differs in a way you can compare is what happens to credits you don’t use and whether you can buy more.

If you build in bursts, with a heavy month followed by a quiet one, rollover is worth more than a $5 lower sticker. If you build a little every week and your app sends a lot of email, Base44’s separate integration allowance is the better deal. For the full comparison, including what each lets you take with you when you leave, read Base44 vs Lovable, or see the eight Base44 alternatives we compared.