Lovable agency: finish your app and get it live

Updated 24 August 2026 · 9 min read

You described your idea to Lovable, Bolt, v0 or Cursor, and within hours you had a stunning prototype. Then the trouble started: login breaks, the database never quite connects, credits melt away, the AI loops on the same bug. You are not alone, this is the most common trajectory in AI app building. This page covers what a Lovable agency actually does, what is salvageable in your project, whether to hire a Lovable developer instead, and how your app gets live for €299.

Why AI-generated projects stall

Tools like Lovable and Bolt are excellent at what they really do: prototyping an interface. Describing a screen, watching it appear, iterating on the design. But a usable product is an interface plus everything you cannot see:

• Authentication: creating an account, logging in, resetting a password, protecting private pages. Blocker number one.
• The database: data actually saved, linked together and secured. Misconfigured access rules are a classic vulnerability of generated projects.
• Emails: confirmations, password resets, notifications that actually arrive.
• Deployment: your own domain, HTTPS, and an app that stays up.

That invisible 30% is developer work. No prompt replaces it, and it is where almost every stuck project is stuck.

First, protect your project

This is the reflex nobody has and everybody wishes they had. Before attempting any repair, save the current state. In Lovable, connect your project to GitHub if it is not already, then create a commit with a clear message like "state before rescue". You will always have a restore point, even if the next ten prompts make things worse.

Also copy your environment variables and API keys somewhere outside the tool. They are the most painful thing to reconstruct when changing hosting, and they are what is systematically missing when a project reaches us.

Diagnosis: find exactly where it blocks

"My app doesn't work" covers five very different problems, with different severity and different fixes. Here is how to know which one is yours.

1. User login does not really work

Typical symptoms: sign-up seems to succeed but the user is not logged in, the session drops on refresh, the confirmation email never arrives, or everyone can see everyone's data. By far the most common blocker.

Severity: high, but very fixable. Authentication can be rebuilt cleanly without touching your screens.

2. Your data is not protected

Symptoms: you never configured access rules on your database, or the tool showed you a security warning you clicked past. Concretely, anyone who knows where to look can often read your entire database.

Severity: critical if you already have real users. To be fixed before any public launch, no exceptions.

3. Emails never send

Symptoms: sign-up confirmations, password resets or notifications that never arrive, or land in spam. Almost always a missing email service and an unauthenticated domain.

Severity: medium, and underrated. An app whose emails do not send is unusable in practice, even if everything else works.

4. You cannot deploy on your own domain

Symptoms: it runs on the tool's preview URL, but you cannot publish it on your domain, or the security certificate never provisions.

Severity: low technically, blocking commercially. Usually a DNS configuration issue that takes an hour when you know where to look.

If the build itself is what fails, rather than the domain, the cause is almost always one of nine well known differences between the preview and a real production build. They are listed one by one, with the fix for each, in our Lovable deployment troubleshooting guide.

5. Every fix breaks something else

Symptoms: you are prompting the same error for the fifth time, credits are melting, and the project is regressing. The code has accumulated too many inconsistencies for the AI to find its way alone.

Severity: this is the real stop signal. Continuing to prompt at this stage costs more than handing the project over.

What is salvageable?

The good news: more than you think. Across the projects that reach us, the split is almost always the same.

• Screens and design: kept in the vast majority of cases. It is what these tools do best, and the longest thing to redo.
• Journeys and product logic: kept. Your prototype is a visual specification far more precise than a twenty-page document.
• Authentication and access rules: rebuilt almost systematically, properly, once.
• Data structure: reorganised most of the time, keeping the data you already have.
• Deployment: redone on hosting you control, with your own access.

In other words, starting over from scratch almost never makes sense. The time you spent was not wasted, it defined the product.

Your 3 ways out

Option 1: keep prompting

Sometimes it works. Often, each fix breaks another one, and every attempt burns credits. If you are reading this page, you have probably already given this option its chance.

Option 2: hire a classic freelancer

It works, but the entry ticket is steep: several days billed at $400 to $700 each, often preceded by "we should start over, this code is not recoverable". For a project you first want to test, the maths are hard.

Option 3: use a Lovable agency

That is exactly our lane. We work with AI-generated code every day: we know how to read it, sort it, keep what is healthy and rebuild what is not. Your prototype is not waste, it is an excellent visual spec.

What is a Lovable agency, exactly?

The term is new and a little loose, so it is worth pinning down. A Lovable agency is not a general web shop that added a line to its services page. It is a provider whose daily work is picking up AI-generated projects, which takes three habits that traditional development does not give you:

• Reading code fast that nobody on the team wrote. A Lovable project can be a hundred prompts stacked on each other. You need to know within hours what stands up and what is scenery.
• Knowing the failure modes of these tools. Database rules left wide open, API keys exposed on the client, access control enforced only in the interface. They are always the same, and none of them show up on screen.
• Getting the app out of the tool. Plenty of projects work fine inside Lovable and break the moment they move to a real domain with real users.

The question worth asking a Lovable agency is not "can you code", it is "what do you keep from my work". A provider who answers "nothing, we start over" before looking is charging you twice for the same thing.

Hire a Lovable developer, or use a fixed-price studio?

Both are legitimate, and they suit different situations. Hiring a Lovable developer by the day gives you flexibility and someone who stays with the project. It also gives you an open-ended bill: day rates sit around $400 to $700, and a stuck project rarely takes one day. If you already know your app needs weeks of work, that is the honest route.

A fixed-price studio does the opposite: it caps the risk. You know the number before you start, and the scope is agreed in writing. That only works when the project fits inside the scope, which is why our diagnosis is free and comes before any payment. If your project is genuinely too big for €299, we say so and point you towards a day-rate developer rather than take the job.

If you would rather see the level of finish before talking to anyone, there is a gallery of ten complete demo apps you can click through without signing up.

How it works, concretely

1. You send your project link through the form, with a word on where it blocks. Nothing to pay.
2. Within 24 hours you get a written diagnosis: what we keep, what we rebuild, what the finished app will do, with a secure payment link.
3. You approve, we build. Clean authentication, secured data, working emails, deployment on your domain. Live within 72 hours.
4. You get everything. The repository, the access, and a handover guide. Keep iterating in Lovable or hand the code to any developer: it is yours.

Common questions

How much does a Lovable agency cost?

The European market reads as four tiers in 2026: a technical audit on its own runs €1,500 to €3,000 over one to three days, and leaves you with a report rather than a working app; a takeover with security fixes runs €5,000 to €12,000 over two to four weeks; a full takeover with new features starts at €12,000 over four to eight weeks; a day-rate developer bills €400 to €700. MonMVP sits at the entry tier, €299 flat, on a deliberately narrow scope: get the app working and live, not rewrite months of technical debt.

Can another developer pick up Lovable code?

Yes, and it is the most reassuring fact in the whole situation. Lovable does not produce a proprietary format. It generates React with TypeScript, Tailwind CSS for styling and a Supabase database, which is the standard modern web stack. Any professional developer can open your project and work on it. The two recurring weak points are Supabase RLS policies left open or set too permissively, and access checks written only in the React interface, which anyone can bypass from browser dev tools in about thirty seconds.

What if my project is too big for €299?

Then we say so in the 24-hour diagnosis, in writing, before you have paid anything. You lose nothing by asking.

Do I have to start over from scratch?

Rarely, and almost never entirely. The prototype serves at minimum as a precise visual spec, and part of the front end is usually reusable.

Which tools do you take over?

Lovable, Bolt.new, v0 and Cursor projects, and more generally any AI-generated web codebase. If in doubt, send the link, the diagnosis is free.

Read next: Lovable vs Bolt vs Cursor vs v0, which one to pick →