When Lovable is the right choice for your site, and when it costs you dearly

A few weeks ago I made a proposal I believed in. It ended with me sending the prospective client to Lovable, and with a lesson I’ve carried with me ever since.

The proposal

A prospective client gets in touch about a personal project she cared about a lot. Not a company website: an idea of her own, precise, one she could already see in front of her. She knew how it should look, how it should work, what it should convey.

The problem was the budget. What I was asking to build it was out of reach.

Instead of lowering my price or cutting the scope, I proposed a third way: instead of me building it, I teach her to build it. Six one-to-one sessions, AI tools to generate the site by describing it in words, with me alongside for the technical steps. A much lower cost, a result that matches her idea exactly, and full independence at the end.

I was excited. On paper it was the perfect solution: she got what she wanted for a fraction of the price, and I brought to the table the part where I’m genuinely useful, the method and the technical skills, without having to squeeze a project whose spirit was different from the work I usually do.

I offered the first session for free, as a trial.

How it went

Badly.

Not her fault. The fault of a calculation I got wrong.

I thought about the price in euros and stopped there. But the path I was selling her had a second price, one I hadn’t written down anywhere and had never pointed out to her: weeks of time, the effort of learning something completely new, and the discipline to keep going even when you don’t understand what’s happening.

That price she couldn’t pay. Not because she wasn’t capable: because it wasn’t the right currency for her, at that moment, for that project.

Halfway through the session I realized it. At the end I recommended Lovable, and she lit up. It was clearly the answer she’d been looking for from the start.

The iron triangle

Thinking it over, I remembered a concept that has existed in project management for decades: the iron triangle. Fast, cheap, well made. You can pick two, never three.

Applied to the question “how do I get my site online”, it works almost perfectly, and it explains why three people with the same goal end up on three completely different paths.

A professional builds it. Fast and well made. The site is designed to grow, it doesn’t break at the first hiccup, and you don’t have to learn anything. In exchange it’s the most expensive path.

You learn and build it yourself, with someone guiding you. Cheap and well made, or nearly. The result looks a lot like the first, and on top of that it’s truly yours: you know how it’s built and you can work on it. But the timeline stretches, and it’s all on you.

You generate it with Lovable, or one of the similar tools. Fast and cheap. In an afternoon you have something online that looks like a website. You pay the price in quality, and above all you pay it later.

None of the three corners is the right one in absolute terms. They’re three different currencies, and everyone has the one they have in their pocket.

What Lovable does well and what it doesn’t

I want to be fair, because it’s a tool I recommended myself and I have no interest in making it sound worse than it is.

Lovable does something remarkable: it closes the gap between the idea and something you can see. You describe what you want in words and within minutes you have pages that exist, look decent, and are online. For someone with an idea in their head and no tool to get it out, that first time is liberating. And the cost is negligible compared to any alternative.

The limits all show up later, and they come in two kinds.

The first are the ones you see. You want a change the tool didn’t anticipate, and you find yourself asking for it ten different ways until you give up. The content grows and the structure that worked for five pages no longer holds. One day you want to take the project elsewhere and discover that moving it is more complicated than you thought.

The second are the ones you don’t see, and they’re the worst. The pages are slow. The content structure is designed to look good, not to be found. Nobody decided which page answers which search, because nobody thought about it. The site exists, looks fine, and simply doesn’t reach anyone. There’s no moment when something breaks and you notice: there’s just traffic that never arrives, and the traffic you never had doesn’t show up on any chart.

That’s the difference that matters. Lovable gives you a site. It doesn’t give you a site that brings in clients, and it doesn’t claim to.

How to choose, for real

If you’re deciding how to get your project online, the useful question isn’t how much it costs. It’s which of the three currencies you have in your pocket, and what happens if you get it wrong.

Start here: does your revenue depend on this site?

If it does, the cheap corner is almost always a false start. You save a few thousand euros and lose much more in leads that never arrive.

If instead it’s a personal project, an idea you want to see exist, a place of your own on the internet, then Lovable can be the right choice and not a cut-rate compromise. Having it online today is worth more than having it perfect in six months, and the risk you’re taking is low: if it doesn’t work, you’ve lost an afternoon and twenty euros.

And if you really have the time and headspace to learn, the third path is the most underrated of the three. Not because it saves money: because at the end you know how your thing works. But it’s an investment in months, not euros, and it deserves the same seriousness you’d bring to signing a quote.

What I’m taking home

I gave away an hour and sent a prospective client somewhere else. On paper it’s a lost deal.

In practice it’s when I learned to ask a question I didn’t ask before. When someone tells me there’s no budget, I no longer jump straight to the cheapest alternative. First I figure out what currency that person can pay in, because money is only one of the three, and asking someone to pay in a currency they don’t have is the most elegant way to waste their time.

You can’t get around the iron triangle. You can only choose in advance which side to be on, knowing what you’re leaving on the table.

If you don’t know which side you’re on

The question everything hinges on seems easy: does your revenue depend on this site? In practice almost nobody can answer it before trying. People who have done well for years through word of mouth say no, then realize that word of mouth brings people who look at the site anyway before calling. People who say yes often have in mind traffic they’ve never measured.

Everything else depends on this answer. If it’s no, the fast and cheap corner is perfectly fine and I have nothing to sell you. If it’s yes, spending little at the start is almost always the most expensive way to do it.

If you’re about to make this decision, tell me about it.