Up to 4 ways to do AI app builder (prompt to deployed app), side by side. Cost, tools, level, and workflow.
When the goal is 'paying customers by next week', a UI generator like v0 isn't enough — you also need auth, a database, and billing. Lovable covers the full stack from one chat. Pair with Claude for product decisions before you start prompting and the time-to-MVP collapses to hours.
The right shape when your bottleneck is UI iteration, not backend. v0's component output is production-quality (shadcn/ui idioms, Tailwind, accessibility), and Cursor or Claude Code handles the API + DB layer. Slower than Lovable to first deploy, but you keep full code ownership.
Lovable and v0 both assume you have a dev environment. Replit doesn't. The Replit Agent runs the whole loop in the browser — codegen, file editor, terminal, DB, and deploy. The right pick when local-setup friction is the actual blocker.