How Much Does Base44 Cost?

The two buckets

Message credits vs integration credits, in plain language

This is the part of Base44 pricing that trips people up, because the two buckets sound similar and behave nothing alike. Think of it this way:

• Message credits pay for building. Every time you ask Base44's AI to create something or change something — a new screen, a new feature, a fix — that request spends message credits. A heavy building week burns this bucket fast. A finished app that nobody is changing barely touches it.
• Integration credits pay for running. Every time your app talks to an outside service — sending an email, taking a payment, syncing a calendar, posting to a messaging tool — that spends integration credits. A live app with real users burns this bucket every single day, whether you touch the builder or not.

That split is why the free plan feels generous at first and tight later. Building your first app mostly spends message credits, and 25 a month goes further than it sounds when you are learning. But the moment the app is live, the meter flips: your users, not you, are spending your credits, through integrations you set up once and forgot about.

Notice the ratio, too. Even the cheapest paid plan gives you twenty times more integration credits than message credits (2,000 vs 100). Base44 knows which bucket a live app drains. The limits in numbers go deeper on what happens when either bucket runs dry.

The real question

When the price stops being worth it

Here is the honest version of the value question. While you are building, Base44 is usually a bargain: one subscription stands in for a developer, a backend team, and hosting, and you get a working app in days instead of months. Nobody should feel bad about paying $16 or $40 a month for that.

The math changes when the app is done. A finished, stable app does not need a builder — it needs a database, logins, hosting, and integrations, all of which cost a fraction of a builder subscription when they run in your own accounts. Yet on Base44 you keep paying the builder's price forever, because the app only runs on Base44's servers. Stop paying, and you are left holding a code export that is not a running app.

That is the ownership angle, and it is the whole reason OffRamp exists. You do own your code — Base44's GitHub sync exports it, and that matters. But the running app, the database your users' data lives in, the logins, and the integrations are not something a code export carries. Ownership without portability is just a lease, and a lease gets more expensive the longer you hold it.

The rule of thumb: if your app is still changing every week, the subscription is earning its keep. If your app has been stable for months and the bill still arrives every month, you are paying builder prices for hosting — and it is time to look at moving it onto infrastructure you own. Before you cancel anything, read how to leave without losing your app and what the export actually contains: migrate first, cancel last.