Lovable, Monetization, and the Vibe Coder Economy¶

| These are all just notes from a 30-minute conversation I had with somebody. A fun little exercise, as you will see.

When people ask me what a hot take is, here's mine: more agent tools and AI tools should be pricing on outcomes and trying hard to figure out what that means. This aligns with my broader thoughts on pricing AI tools as headcount alternatives.

The question hit me personally as a small investor in Lovable and a consultant focused on value-based pricing: Why am I not building my consulting business, my courses, my job board on Lovable instead of spreading them across Stripe, Maven, Circle, Kit, and Podia, It's because I could only possibly pay $100/month, and for that, they could not possibly offer me the features I need to.

There's an emerging class of creators, called "vibe coders", who can build functional applications through AI tools without traditional programming expertise. They have ideas, they have distribution, they can ship. But they get stuck on the boring stuff.

Hitting the Stripe Wall¶

Here's my reality: I have a course that generated about $800,000 last year. But it required me to pay about \(8,000-\)9,000 a year in subscription software like Kit.com and Podia, as well as over $100,000 in fees to Maven. And I'm happy to do so because Maven handles things like a little bit of marketing email automation as well as other tools, and someone on support to help me process group sales commissions, discount codes, etc. Have a job board that does \(2,000-\)3,000 a month, but it's all set up through Zapier integrations because I don't really want to figure out how to write code that does interfaces with Stripe.

For something as small as a job board that makes $2000 a month, I could make it better. But as I've learned from my consulting journey, sometimes the infrastructure complexity isn't worth the marginal gains. I could add subscription tiers, group discounts, automated listing management, upsells. But I don't want to figure out Stripe testing, webhook handling, refund flows, and all the fintech minutiae that turns building into accounting.

This is the paradox of AI coding tools. They make creation effortless but leave monetization painful.

Considering Revenue Sharing¶

What if AI platforms flipped the model entirely? Instead of charging me monthly credits to build, what if Lovable took 5% of whatever I make? Suddenly, their incentive aligns perfectly with mine. They don't make money unless I make money.

Instead of charging me monthly credits to build, what if Lovable took 15% of whatever I make after some total revenue, What would it take for me to be completely happy with that?

Heres some examples of what I'd want:

One-click monetization infrastructure. Give me templates for subscriptions, one-off purchases, group deals. Connect it to auth in an opinionated way. Handle the Stripe complexity behind a simple interface. Helped me set up test accounts and test payments and process refunds with the admin UI, so that I don't feel like an idiot figuring out all of this stuff myself.

Real support that scales with success. That 15% doesn't just disappear into platform profits. Sure, some could become credits for platform features, But what if some other value gets enabled at higher price points? What if I allowed lovable to take 30% of my revenue? Do I get better customer support? Who knows?

Migration and optimization services. When your Supabase bill starts hurting, Lovable could help you migrate to more cost-effective infrastructure. When you need CDN optimization or database scaling, they're incentivized to help because your success is their success.

As a consultant myself, I know people would happily pay 5% for this level of support. It's similar to how I structure my consulting services - focusing on outcomes rather than hours. The alternative is hiring agencies, managing multiple vendors, or learning infrastructure management while trying to run a business.

Compare that to piecing together Stripe, customer support, infrastructure management, and scaling expertise across multiple vendors. Even 15% starts looking like a bargain.

The Lovable Partners Program¶

Imagine this as a structured "Lovable Partners Program." You opt into revenue sharing, and suddenly you have access to white-glove services that most platforms could never economically provide.

But here's the genius part: every forward deployed service becomes training data, And if you are one of the ones handling the payments, you know exactly who to reach out to.

The first time Lovable helps someone migrate from Supabase to a dedicated Postgres instance, it's expensive. They might even eat some of the integration costs. But they capture every step: the schema analysis, the query optimization, the auth migration, the deployment changes.

This creates a compounding advantage, similar to what I describe in my data flywheel concept. If I hire some team on Upwork to handle my Supabase migration, Lovable learns nothing. They can't capture the code paths, the edge cases, the solutions that worked. But if they do it in-house through the Partners Program, every manual service eventually becomes a automated capability.

The platform gets better at helping all vibe coders succeed, while the early adopters get premium support during the learning phase. It's a flywheel that benefits everyone.

Usually, successful AI-built apps eventually outgrow their platforms. Traffic scales, costs climb, and builders face the dreaded migration to "real" infrastructure. It's like being kicked out of college for doing too well.

But with the Partners Program, success triggers support rather than abandonment. The platform becomes your technical co-founder, paid for by success rather than equity or hourly rates. And every challenge they help you solve makes them better at helping the next vibe coder facing the same problem.

The Billion Dollar Mission¶

What if Lovable's mission became: Pay out $1 billion to vibe coders.

This reframes everything. Customer success means revenue success. Platform improvements mean better monetization tools. Growth means more builders making more money.

Why This Matters¶

We're watching the emergence of a new creative class. This reminds me of Kojima's philosophy on empowering users rather than just providing tools. People who can build functional software through natural language and intuition rather than syntax and systems thinking. They have taste and distribution, they understand problems, they can ship solutions but the long tail of the business is where they get stuck.

But they shouldn't have to become fintech experts to make money from their creations.

The platforms that figure out frictionless monetization – and align their incentives through revenue sharing – will capture this wave. The ones that stick to traditional SaaS pricing will watch their best users graduate away.

If you're building in this space or thinking about monetization models for AI tools, I'd love to hear your thoughts. The future feels wide open right now.

For more on my thoughts about AI and business models, check out my AI truths from the trenches and MVP development strategies.