What a free app builder really gets you before the bills start

A free app builder lets you design and test an app without paying anything. But none of the four big names we checked (Bubble, Adalo, FlutterFlow and Lovable) lets you publish to the App Store or Google Play on its free plan. Once you go live, expect $25 to $59 a month, plus Apple's $99 yearly fee.

That's how the business model works, and it's no scandal. Once you know where the paywall sits, you can use a free tier for exactly what it's good at.

You put an app together from drag-and-drop blocks, or more and more often by describing it to an AI, without writing code and without paying up front. On almost every one of these tools, the free part covers the building stage. It isn't meant to run a live product.

The short version

• None of the four free app builders we checked (Bubble, Adalo, FlutterFlow, Lovable) lets you publish to the App Store or Google Play on its free plan.
• The cheapest paid plans run from $25 to $59 a month, and Apple adds $99 a year while Google Play charges a one-time $25.
• New personal Google Play accounts need 12 testers opted in for 14 days in a row before they can publish publicly.
• Bubble's free plan won't let you export your own data as a CSV, so ask how you'd get your data out before you build on any free tier.
• A progressive web app avoids the stores entirely and is often the cheapest way to get a real product in front of customers.

What does a free app builder actually let you do?

Bubble is the most honest about this: its pricing page labels the free tier as being for "projects under construction". And there's plenty to work with. According to Bubble's pricing page, the free plan comes with the web editor, the native mobile editor, on-device testing and 50,000 workload units a month. Workload units are Bubble's measure of how hard its servers work for your app. You can't buy extra on free, so a busy prototype just stops.

The other three work much the same way. You can build, click through the app on your own phone, show it to a co-founder or a potential investor, and find out whether the idea holds together. Plenty of ideas fall apart the moment someone tries to use a mock-up, and finding that out for £0 beats finding out after a five-figure build.

What you mostly can't do on free is put the app in front of the public under your own name.

Four free app builders compared, with their limits

We took each figure below from the vendor's own pricing or documentation pages, checked on 18 October 2026. Prices are in US dollars, since that's how all four charge.

Sources: Bubble, Adalo, FlutterFlow and Lovable's subscription plans.

Adalo's 500 records per app is tighter than it sounds. A record is one row of data, so every customer, booking or order uses one up. A small booking app could get through that allowance in its first few weeks of real use. Lovable limits something else entirely: how many times you can ask the AI to build or change something, rather than how much data you hold. And Lovable's credit rules say daily credits expire at the end of each day and can't be topped up on free.

We haven't timed an identical test app in each tool for this piece, and we won't pretend we have. Build speed depends far more on how clear your idea is than on the tool. It's the limits in the table that decide your bill.

Can you publish a free app to the App Store or Google Play?

Not from any of these four free plans. Bubble says outright that you need a paid plan for a live version of your app, and you need that live version before you can use TestFlight, Apple's beta testing service, or Google Play testing, let alone publish to the stores. Adalo's free plan allows zero published apps. FlutterFlow keeps one-click store deployment for paid plans.

Then the stores take their cut. The Apple Developer Program costs $99 a year, and Google charges a one-time $25 registration fee for a Play developer account. Google also has a hurdle that catches a lot of first-timers out. New personal developer accounts must run a closed test with at least 12 testers opted in for 14 days in a row before they can apply to publish to everyone. No dozen friendly users lined up? That's a fortnight you hadn't planned for.

Add it up over a first year with an app on both stores. Adalo is the cheapest route to the stores among the four: $432 for a year of Starter, $99 for Apple and $25 for Google, so $556 in all. On Bubble Starter it's $708 plus the same $124 in store fees, which comes to $832. Neither figure is outrageous. It just isn't free, and you'd want to know that before promising your board a free app.

Can you get your data and code out later?

Vendor lock-in means your app only works inside the tool that built it, and on free tiers it's an easy risk to miss. Bubble's free plan won't even let you download your own data as a spreadsheet: its manual says the CSV export button "is available to users with a paid Bubble plan". FlutterFlow keeps code download for paid plans as well. So if you build on the free tier and the idea takes off, getting your work out becomes yet another reason to upgrade.

Lovable is the odd one out. Its free plan includes Git sync, which puts a copy of the code in your own GitHub account, the standard place developers keep code. You can't edit or download the code inside Lovable without paying, but the code itself isn't trapped. If you think a developer might take the project over one day, that matters a lot.

Before you put real customer details into any free builder, ask the dull questions. Where is the data stored? Can you export all of it, with the links between records intact? What happens to the app if you stop paying? Ten minutes now beats a painful rebuild later. We covered the same problem with an AI builder in our piece on when Base44 is enough and when it's a risk.

The free route that skips the app stores

A progressive web app, or PWA, is a website that installs on a phone's home screen and behaves like an app. No store, no review queue, no developer fee. For a lot of businesses we think it's the better first step, because customer portals, booking tools, internal apps for staff and order trackers rarely need to be in a store at all.

The old objection was that iPhones treated web apps as second-class. That's mostly gone. Apple added push notifications for Home Screen web apps in iOS 16.4, announced in February 2023, so a web app can now nudge customers just like a store app.

There's still one catch on the free plans: none of the four gives you a custom domain. To run a public web app at your own address, Lovable Pro at $25 a month is the cheapest of the four, with no store fees on top. We go through when this route makes sense in our guide to progressive web app costs and timelines.

Which free app builder suits which business?

Want a working demo by Friday, and can you describe the idea clearly? Start with Lovable. It's the quickest way from an idea to something you can click, and Git sync means you aren't starting from scratch if it works. Treat what it builds as a draft, though. Get someone technical to look over how it handles logins and customer data before anyone outside the business touches it.

Bubble suits web-first products with real logic behind them, such as marketplaces, portals, and tools with user accounts and payments. It's the most capable of the four and takes the longest to learn. Adalo is the simplest way to a basic phone app in both stores, and the cheapest of the four for that. FlutterFlow makes sense if you already expect to hand the app to developers, because paid plans let you download the code and carry on in a standard setup.

Our view is that most business owners should use a free tier to answer one question only. Will people actually use this? Build the smallest version, put it in front of ten real customers, and watch. If the answer's yes, the next decision is whether to stay on the builder and pay monthly, or build properly. That's where an MVP development partner earns its keep, and where custom software starts beating monthly fees that grow with every user.

When free has done its job

A free app builder is a very good way to test an idea and a poor place to run a business. Once you have users, data you care about and a monthly bill, it's time to weigh the real cost of staying put against building something you own. If you'd like a straight second opinion on which route fits your idea, Swarm Labs in Manchester is happy to talk it through.

Tell us about the app you're planning

Sources

1. Bubble: Pricing
2. Bubble Manual: Data tab
3. Adalo: Pricing
4. FlutterFlow: Pricing
5. Lovable Docs: Subscription plans
6. Lovable Docs: Plans and credits
7. Apple Developer: Enrollment
8. Google Play Console Help: Register for a developer account
9. Google Play Console Help: App testing requirements for new personal developer accounts
10. WebKit: Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS