AI build credits: daily limits, temporary grants and running costs
Why a free building allowance can run out before the month ends, and how temporary grants affect the cost of keeping an app running.
A free allowance for building an app and a grant towards running it cover different work. Daily limits can stop a build while monthly credit remains. Temporary hosting or AI grants can also end while the app is still in use.
The useful number is the one that explains what happens next. I want to know whether work can resume tomorrow, whether the month's allowance is exhausted, or whether a running service has started costing money.
Three kinds of allowance
| Allowance | What it controls | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Daily limit | How much building can happen in one day | Bolt Free's 300,000-token daily cap |
| Monthly balance | The total available during the month | Bolt Free's one-million-token monthly allowance |
| Temporary runtime grant | An allowance towards work done by the deployed app | Lovable's monthly Cloud and AI grants, described as temporary |
A daily reset doesn't replace the monthly balance
Bolt's free plan combines its daily cap with a monthly token allowance. Its free monthly balance resets on the first of the calendar month. Both limits matter at once.
For example, a project that begins with one million tokens and uses 280,000 on its first day has 720,000 of that monthly allowance left. Only 20,000 remains below the day's 300,000 cap. Those figures are the arithmetic for this example, not a claim about a measured build.
A new day can reopen daily capacity while monthly allowance remains. Once the month's million tokens are exhausted, a daily reset doesn't supply a new million. A short prompt is not a fixed-cost unit either: Bolt says sending project files to the model accounts for much of its token use.
Daily grants don't necessarily accumulate
Lovable provides five daily build credits on Free, capped at 30 per calendar month. Unused daily build credits expire at the end of the day, and new daily grants stop after the monthly cap. Five a day therefore doesn't mean 150 available build credits in a thirty-day month.
That is a timing constraint as well as an amount. A daily allowance that expires doesn't become a larger weekend balance just because no building happened during the week.
A temporary grant can hide part of the running bill
Lovable documents monthly Cloud and AI grants separately from its build allowance, and labels those grants temporary. They cover specific runtime uses rather than supplying extra build credits. An app's running cost can change when a grant changes, even if the app itself hasn't.
A fictional example makes the difference clear: £7 of eligible monthly hosting use minus a £5 allowance leaves £2 to pay. If that allowance ends and the same usage still costs £7, the bill becomes £7. These are assumed figures, not Lovable's tariff.
A service covered by a grant can be useful. The underlying £7 of work still exists in that example; the grant changes who is paying for it and for how long.
Building has finished; the app is still doing work
Lovable says published pages can continue serving at zero workspace credits while AI features stop or the built-in backend pauses. That matters for an app with authentication, stored data or model calls: a visible page isn't proof that the whole app remains operational.
For project costs, I separate the work needed to build and correct the app from the work it performs once people are using it. The free allowances belong beside those two jobs, with their reset and expiry rules. That is a more useful picture than a single 'free' label.
Bolt and Lovable: the product and workflow comparison
Why a green build isn't a finished product
Sources and further reading
Sources checked
