Base44 too expensive? Your app can run for $0 a month

On Base44 you pay while you build the app, and you keep paying after it's built. The message credits run out in days of building, and to get more you have to move up a plan, from $20 to $50 to $100. Once the app is done and people use it, the bill keeps coming every month anyway, because the plan is the only way to keep the app online. Either way it's $50 and up, every month, for as long as you have the app.

I paid it too. When I finally moved my app off Base44 onto free hosting and a free database, and started paying for the AI directly, I saw how little that $50 had been buying.

Base44 sells everything as one plan, and every limit pushes you to a bigger one

On Base44 you can't pay for just what you need. Every plan bundles a monthly allowance of message credits for building in the chat, a pool of integration credits for what your app does when people use it, and the hosting, the database and your users' logins. For a real app that plan is Builder, $50 a month, because three Base44 apps in four use something only Builder has, like backend functions, integrations, automations or connectors.

And $50 is only where it starts. Builder's 250 message credits can go in a few days of real building, and when they're gone the chat stops until next month, unless you move up to Pro. Plenty of owners tell the same story. One ran out of credits on Free, bought Starter, was out again three hours later, bought Builder, and got four more hours. Every AI answer, email and upload in your app uses up integration credits from one monthly pool, so more users means a bigger plan. New apps, made since October 18, can only store as much data as their plan allows. And how much traffic your app can handle depends on the plan too. Whatever you don't use is gone at the end of the month, and you can't buy more of anything on its own: Base44 stopped selling extra credits, so a bigger plan is all you can buy. That's how people end up on Pro at $100, Elite at $200 and Elite 5 at $600, and companies go higher still. One of them is on Elite 8, $900 a month.

And when you're done building, nothing gets cheaper. There's no hosting-only plan, so a finished app pays a builder's subscription for as long as it's online. For over a year, owners have been asking Base44 on its own feedback board for a cheaper plan for apps that are done, and none of those requests has been answered. One of the posts is titled “Why should I keep paying for building tools I no longer need, just to keep my app hosted?” Another owner called it a “Catholic marriage” with Base44, one you can't get out of. That's Base44's business model: you pay for building every month, whether you're building or not.

Base44 buys everything it sells you from someone else

Look at what the $50 actually pays for. The servers are rented from a hosting company, and so is the database. When your app uses AI, the answer comes from Google, OpenAI or Anthropic, and Base44 charges you credits for each one. The emails are sent by an email company, and the uploads go into rented storage. Base44 buys the AI calls, the emails and the storage from those companies for fractions of a cent, and sells them back to you in credits, at whatever price your plan sets. An email costs it a few hundredths of a cent, and costs you 10 to 100 times that. An upload costs it half a thousandth of a cent, and costs you about a thousand times that. An everyday AI answer costs it seven hundredths of a cent, and costs you 6 to 14 times that.

At the start of this year, once the AI and the servers were paid for, Base44 kept almost nothing of each dollar you paid it. Now it keeps about 60 cents, and its prices didn't go down at all. Even the chat you build in runs mostly on Base44's own AI model now. For most of the messages you send in it, Base44 pays no AI company anything, and it still charges you 20 cents a credit. So most of the $50 is money Base44 keeps. You can buy all of it yourself, straight from the companies that make it, for a lot less.

Building with AI is $20 a month from the AI companies, and you get far more for it

Base44's $20 plan gives you 100 message credits a month, and Builder's $50 gives you 250. Most changes cost about a credit, so that's a couple of hundred changes a month at most, and whatever you don't use expires. Owners say the same thing in their own numbers. One on Elite said Base44 was worth maybe $25 to $50 a month to him, and he was paying $200.

ChatGPT Plus costs the same $20 and comes with Codex, OpenAI's coding tool. You tell it what to change, and it changes your app's code, the way Base44's chat does. On its everyday model, Plus gives you 350 to 3,000 messages every five hours, and 15 to 160 on its top model. Claude Pro is also $20 a month and comes with Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, which works the same way.

Builders like Base44 and Lovable sell you the AI by the message, from an allowance that runs out every month, and the more you build, the bigger the plan you need. From the AI companies it's $20 a month, and only for the months you build. On Base44, $20 buys 100 messages for the whole month. At OpenAI, it buys more than that every five hours.

The same app runs for $0 a month on normal providers

Then there's running the app, the part you pay for forever. On Base44 that's the plan, $50 a month and up. A normal app pays each company directly for its piece, and this is what the pieces cost.

• Hosting is free. Vercel, the industry's go-to hosting for web apps, has a free tier with 100 GB of traffic and a million requests a month, more than most Base44 apps will ever use. It stays free until very high traffic. The traffic that finally costs you $20 a month there is traffic Base44 only lets through on Elite and up, at $200 a month and more. That's not a worse price for the same thing. It's ten times the price, and it keeps climbing.
• The database is free. MongoDB Atlas, the most used database of its kind and the same kind your app already runs on at Base44, has a 512 MB tier that's free forever. A typical Base44 app's database is about 20 KB, so 98 apps in 100 fit in it with room to spare. The files your users upload get 10 GB of free storage on top.
• The AI and the emails in your app cost cents. On your own account with the AI company, an everyday AI call costs less than a tenth of a cent, and the first 3,000 emails a month are free. For apps that have already left Base44, the AI bill comes to a few cents a month, a few dollars at the most. Running your functions and workflows, and reading and writing your own data, costs nothing per use.
• More users don't push you up a plan. How much traffic your app can take doesn't depend on a plan, and your users don't spend credits. More users cost you nothing until you outgrow the free tiers, and past that you pay for what the app uses. On Base44 every step of growth is the next plan up, and each of those plans costs many times what the same growth costs anywhere else.

Two Base44 apps in three can run entirely on free tiers. The rest, the ones with screens that update live or a lot of backend functions, need one small server, about $7 a month. So the app you pay Base44 $50 a month or more for costs $0 a month to run, or $7.

What keeps a lot of people paying is the picture of real hosting as a big server with a big bill. One owner priced it at $800 to $1,000 a year and stayed on Base44 instead. A Base44 app is nowhere near that size. The $7 server above can take around 700 requests a second, which is hundreds of people using the app at the same moment, and most Base44 apps never even need the server. Hosting gets expensive at very high traffic, and almost no Base44 app has it.

Why a cheaper plan, the export or Claude Code won't get you to $0

When the bill gets too high, people try one of three things first. None of them gets a working app to $0.

1. Dropping to a cheaper plan. Starter, at $20, takes away backend functions, integrations, automations and connectors, so any app that uses one of them stops working. Free takes your custom domain too, and gives the whole app 100 credits a month for every AI call, email and upload, shared by all of your users. There's no cheaper plan that keeps a real app working.

   Everything that stops working the day your app drops to Free

2. Exporting the code and putting it on free hosting. What you can export is your screens and your backend functions, as code. Everything the app does when someone uses it, like signing them in or saving a record, runs on Base44's servers, in code Base44 doesn't give out. Put the export on Vercel and the pages load for free, but everything behind them runs on Base44, on your Base44 plan. To make it run on its own, someone has to write that whole backend again, and for an app with users in it, that's months of work.

   What's in Base44's export, and everything that isn't

3. Connecting Claude Code or ChatGPT to the app. People in Base44's groups tell each other to connect ChatGPT or Claude Code to their app and build there instead of in Base44's chat, and it does stop you spending message credits. But the connection only works on Builder, so you still pay the $50, and your users still use up your integration credits with every AI answer and email. Building gets cheaper that way, but the app still runs on Base44, at Base44's prices.

   What connecting Claude Code to a Base44 app changes, and what it doesn't

Every one of these keeps your app running on Base44's servers, and as long as it runs there, you pay for a Base44 plan. To pay what a normal app pays, your app has to run like a normal app.

Your Base44 app can run like a normal app, without being rebuilt

The prices above are what normal apps pay. A normal app has its own backend, the part that signs users in, keeps the data and does the actual work, and its owner has the code for it. That's what lets the owner put each part wherever it's cheapest, and work on the code with whatever AI tool they like. A Base44 app doesn't have that. Everything it does runs on Base44's code, one shared codebase that runs thousands of apps, and nobody outside Base44 gets a copy of it. So to move a Base44 app without changing it, all of that code has to be written again first.

I did that for the app I was paying $50 a month to keep alive. It took months of work, and once that app ran without Base44, I turned the work into a tool that moves any app built on Base44 the same way. That's EscapeBase44.

You sign in with Base44 and pick the app. It moves together with the backend Base44 never gave you, rebuilt as code that sits in your own GitHub, and that code is what lets it run anywhere, free tiers included. Each part of the app goes on the cheapest account that fits it, free tiers first, at the providers the rest of the industry runs on, and the app only gets a $7 server if it needs one. Every one of those accounts is yours. Your records, files, functions and workflows move with it, and your users keep signing in with the passwords they have now. They won't see any difference in the app. The move doesn't touch your app on Base44, so people keep working in it while the new one comes up. Then you cancel Base44.

From then on the only bills are the providers'. The app runs for $0 a month, or about $7 if it needs a server, and building is $20 a month to the AI company, in the months you build. There's no monthly bill from Base44, and none from EscapeBase44.

You own the whole codebase now, the backend too. Claude Code, Codex or a developer can work on any of it, and every change goes live from your own GitHub. If you'd rather keep building in a chat with a preview, the way Base44 works, you get that too after the move. It comes with $20 of credit, and after that you pay for each change, with no plan and nothing that expires.

People who moved went from $600 a month to $12, and from $50 to $0

Here's what a few owners paid Base44 before they moved this year, and what running the same app costs them now.

• Frankie builds software for cleaning companies and was paying $600 a month for Base44's Elite 5. It now runs for about $12 a month, all in, and Frankie's Base44 workspace is back on Free.
• Mansel runs a CRM with more than a hundred backend functions. He was paying $400 a month for Elite 3. The CRM now runs on one server for about $7 a month.
• Rish paid Base44 $50 every month for a service portal for IT and telecom infrastructure. The portal now costs $7 a month to run.
• Julia built an app for sorority recruitment and paid $50 a month for Builder. Her hosting is now $0, and her AI has cost 60 cents in total since July.
• Cher paid $100 a month for Pro. Her app now runs for $0.

Normal apps don't cost what Base44 charges. You don't have to pay $50 a month and up to keep an app alive, and you don't have to pay by the message to build one with AI either. It's too expensive, and it doesn't have to be.

Base44 cost FAQ

• Is Base44 worth it?

  Not at its prices. For building, $20 a month from the AI companies buys far more messages than Base44's $20 or $50 plans, and you pay it only in the months you build. For running, the hosting, database and AI calls Base44 bundles into $50 a month cost $0 to a few dollars a month on normal providers, and Base44's price climbs as more people use your app.

• Why is Base44 so expensive?

  Because Base44 sells everything as one plan, with a limit on everything in it, and the only way past a limit is the next plan up. Everything in that plan is bought from other companies, the AI calls, emails and storage for fractions of a cent, and Base44 now keeps about 60 cents of every dollar you pay it. Bought directly from those companies, the same things cost $0 to $20 a month.

• How much does Base44 cost per month?

  $20 on Starter, $50 on Builder, $100 on Pro, $200 on Elite, and $100 more for each Elite level up to $1,200. Any real app needs Builder, because backend functions, integrations, automations and connectors only work from Builder up. The price buys message credits for building and integration credits for the app's use, and both expire every month.

• What will my app cost per month after I leave Base44?

  $0 a month for two apps in three, on free tiers for the hosting, the database, the functions and the files, with AI on your own account for cents. Apps with screens that update live or a lot of backend functions need one small server, about $7 a month. Building is separate, and you pay for it only in the months you build.

• Is building cheaper outside Base44?

  Yes, by a lot. Base44's $20 plan gives you 100 message credits a month, while ChatGPT Plus, also $20, comes with Codex and 350 to 3,000 messages every five hours on its everyday model. Claude Pro is $20 too and comes with Claude Code, and you pay for either one only in the months you build.

• Is Vercel really free?

  Yes. Vercel's free tier gives you 100 GB of traffic and a million requests a month, and it stays free until very high traffic. Past that, Vercel's paid plan is $20 a month, and the traffic that gets you there is traffic Base44 only serves on Elite and up, at $200 a month and more.

• Do I need a big server to run my app?

  No. Two apps in three need no server at all, and the rest run on one server for about $7 a month, which handles around 700 requests a second from logged-in users. A typical Base44 app's whole database is about 20 KB.

• What happens when my app gets big?

  You pay for what the app uses, not for the next plan up. Hosting goes from $0 to $20 a month on Vercel's paid plan, the database from $0 to about $8 a month, and AI costs what your users actually use, cents to a few dollars. On Base44 the same growth is a bigger plan every time, $100, then $200, then more, many times what it costs anywhere else.

• Are there any recurring fees to EscapeBase44?

  No. The move is one payment. After it, the only bills are the providers' own, paid to them directly, and if you keep building in our AI chat, you pay per change, with no subscription.

• Will I pay for two hostings?

  Only until you cancel Base44. Your Base44 app keeps running while the move happens. Once the new one is up and you've seen it work, you cancel the Base44 plan, and the only bills left are the providers'.

• What if I just downgrade to Free?

  The app stops being usable. Everything that needs Builder stops working, your custom domain stops serving, and whatever is left has 100 credits a month, shared by all of your users.