Building a free website with Loveable

The latest report in our series looking at online website builder tools, and this time it’s Loveable. This was carried out a little while ago and, as with the rest of this series, it’s been done by my 12 year old son, who’s technical – but 12, so doesn’t have any business experience or much experience of online systems.

Loveable: a review

I recently tried using Loveable to create a website for a made-up business, Magenta Interiors, in order to see what it was like as a website builder. These are my findings for anyone who is looking for a good website builder to use to start their business.

To begin with, I went to the Loveable website and chose to get started for free. Instead of using the Google account I was logged in as I decided that I wanted to use one of my other accounts. However, when I chose that option, put in my email and created a Loveable password, it said that they would send me a verification email to check it was me. That was normal and standard, but what was frustrating was that every time I clicked on the continue to sign in link in the email it just kept saying “an error occurred”. However many times I tried, it wouldn’t let me verify my email. In the end, I had to choose to “continue with Google account”, instead of “continue with email”. That was annoying, and a vital bug, but I could still use Loveable, just not how I ideally wanted to. That said, some users might not be able to use the platform if this happens, which isn’t a good start.

Anyway, once I was eventually in, I answered a series of questions, before choosing to get AI to make my website. I only had 5 daily free credits, capped at 30 per month, which isn’t ideal. But, compared to other AI services, these credits do go quite far to be fair. With 5 credits I was able to make my website, then edit it numerous times. The interface was very clear, with two AI modes, plan and build. Both use credits, but build used far more. I used “plan” to begin with, then used “build” to make it. When I was using “plan” I gave it my idea, then asked for its input. It then gave me a series of questions as to what I wanted my site to look like, and I could select an option for each. It only took, maybe 2 to 3 minutes to make my entire website, then probably a minute for each edit. There was a handy feature called Visual edits which allowed you to select a specific element of your website and then ask AI to change something about it.

The only problem was that once I ran out of AI credits, after only a few revisions to my initial site, there was no way to keep editing it. Within Loveable itself, as far as I could see, there is no native way to edit your website without AI credits. There were videos online about how to manually edit a Loveable website, but they all involved using external services, such as linking your github account, and many others.

The AI was one of the best that I’ve seen, and I created a very impressive website with my 5 credits. It had 3 pages (not including a portfolio section where each entry had its own individual page). However, none of the text was mine, because the only way I could see to edit anything was to use the AI. I did set my site live though, and I ran a bunch of security checks. The URL was far better than what you sometimes get on other free plans. It ended up as magenta-design-hub.lovable.app, which isn’t ideal, but not too bad. Compared to the figma URL I ended up with (yin-matte-94183660.figma.site), it was quite good.

Overall, I really enjoyed using Loveable. However, I don’t think it is the right choice if you want an easy, free all-in-one website builder. On the other hand, if you don’t mind syncing your accounts with other programs and services, or are willing to pay for more AI credits, then I think it is capable of making an AMAZING website. You can make an online shop by integrating it with Shopify, or edit it manually by syncing it with GitHub, or linking it with Supabase, AWS, Stripe, Snowflake, Slack, WordPress, Miro, Perplexity, ElevenLabs, Linear, Notion, Sanity, PostHog and countless more to achieve a wide variety of features and tools.