Is Lovable getting monetization wrong?

I work for a very small startup. Our CTO heavily uses lovable for our internal tools. Think dashboards, user management ... A somewhat standard UI over CRUD operations.

In previous roles, we either used some SaaS platform and would end up designing features based on the limitations of the tools, or we'd spin up a team to roll our own tailored solution. (or, God forbid, use Oracle and pay consultants a small fortune to do it for us).

With lovable, our CTO can validate assumptions and iterate on their own. Even if the code was absolutely garbage and we deleted all of it, this alone saves us a ton of man hours per feature. There's an entire lossy communication loop that's been removed.

Now, the code is only ok. We generate API clients from openapi definitions but it will struggle to properly orchestrate them. It will absolutely not have sane defaults anywhere, and will abuse the "any" type.

You still need a human in the loop, but my back of the napkin calculation is we'd have to hire two full time developers to do the work it's been doing for us.

Why does your CTO not use cursor or whatever other code IDE tools to build on your own standard internal stack?

At least that would allow them to handoff to other members of the team.

Lovable operates at a higher abstraction level. You describe what you want, the UI magically updates, you never have to see the code.

Changes made by lovable aren't anything special. They live in their own branch, and get periodically merged to master, so you can carry on working on it as if it was any other project.

I assume it’s because they don’t actually know how to code at all or how to use developer tools for that matter.