1. As AI fundamentally changes how software delivers value, pricing should evolve, too.

The SaaS industry was largely built on seat-based pricing. It’s simple and predictable—easy for users to budget for and straightforward to reflect in financial planning. But seat-based pricing doesn’t always capture the value software actually creates. That’s why, like Lovable, many AI companies are moving to output-based pricing, rather than simply charging for access to their products.

Today, Lovable has a free plan, two paid self-serve plans, and an enterprise plan. Each plan provides access to a dedicated workspace, with unlimited users at every level—a departure from its previous seat-based model. Pricing is now based on credit consumption, which serves as a proxy for the outputs users generate in each workspace, regardless of how many people participate along the way. The shift encourages collaboration while better reflecting how customers actually use Lovable.

“Don’t corner your customers into a model that is purely optimized for retention and recurring revenue,” said Verna. “You really need to give them the flexibility to buy how they want to buy.”

Lovable’s monetization strategy also includes broad access to its freemium tier, both for self-serve users and for participants in its partner hackathons and promotions. Verna sees this as essential in a category where users must abandon old ways of doing things and learn what’s possible by experimenting with new tools. Ultimately, she said, that experimentation helps users understand Lovable’s value, which is key for customer acquisition and retention. “We don’t see the freemium tier as a cost center—it’s our marketing budget,” Verna said.

The strategy is paying off. After investing hundreds of millions of dollars on the freemium tier over the last 12 months, Lovable is seeing double-digit conversion rates from those users. By comparison, recent research from ChartMogul found a median conversion rate of 8% across B2B software products. Meanwhile, Lovable’s partnership with “Lenny’s Newsletter,” which gives paid subscribers free access to Lovable, has converted at more than 40%.

2. Continual pricing iteration is the new normal.

The AI market is moving too fast for companies to treat pricing as fixed. That’s a shift from even the recent past, when companies often waited a few years for their products to mature before revisiting pricing. At Lovable, Verna sees pricing as something that should change as often as products and packaging. In fact, the company refined pricing multiple times in one year—launching annual plans, adding credit rollovers, removing per-seat pricing, introducing top-ups, and more.

Conventional wisdom suggests that this pace of change would frustrate customers, but that has not been the case at Lovable. Because pricing iteration has been part of the model from the beginning, customers have easily adapted to the new options.

In some cases, those changes came directly from customer feedback. For example, users made it clear that traditional subscriptions didn’t always fit the way they built with Lovable. Many were interested in ad hoc credit-purchasing options to support their building cycles, which often happened in streaks, rather than consistently over time. That option was much more appealing than having to upgrade to the next subscription tier, even with the option to downgrade later.

“It’s very important to keep up with the market change right now and constantly iterate on your pricing and packaging. We have established a precedent with our customers that we are evolving our monetization model as fast as we’re evolving our product, and they have been very receptive,” said Verna. “I think it’s critical to establish that Lovable is a living, breathing thing.”

What’s more, the top-ups didn’t reduce Lovable’s ARR, as some might have expected. Instead, the company’s top users began purchasing top-ups so consistently that the behavior started to resemble recurring revenue. “We’re seeing a repurchase rate for top-ups that is just as high as, if not higher than, subscription renewal rates,” said Verna. “You can see the overall revenue collected is going up and up as we give our users the flexibility to transact the way they want.”

3. Speed is essential in the AI market.

Amid the AI land grab, the companies that win are those that move fast, whether they’re enhancing their go-to-market strategy, adjusting for product-market fit, or evolving pricing. But speed depends on a strong, smoothly functioning foundation, including robust internal systems and processes. Modern billing and payments infrastructure is particularly important, according to Verna, since outdated or inflexible systems can slow a company’s progress. After building its billing and payment processing infrastructure with Stripe, Lovable was able to launch usage-based billing with just two weeks of developer time.

Monetization strategy should be a key priority, not an afterthought. Verna owns that responsibility at Lovable, with input from a monetization council that includes the CEO and the heads of finance, sales, and marketing. Once these stakeholders align on whether pricing decisions work for both users and the business, an implementation team puts the changes into motion.

Ultimately, Verna said, remaining competitive comes down to talking to and learning from customers—watching how they behave and understanding what motivates them. “You know what needs to change in your monetization model,” she said. “Trust your intuition.”