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Bolt.new
AI ToolsFreemiumPrompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web apps — StackBlitz's AI app builder that hit $40M ARR in five months.
73/100
7 min readScreenshots
Bolt.new is StackBlitz's AI-powered web app builder that turns a text prompt into a deployed full-stack app running in the browser. It is fast, fun, and flawed — brilliant for scaffolding, painful for polishing, and expensive if you are not watching the token meter.
Bolt.new is StackBlitz's AI-powered full-stack web app builder — you describe an app in plain English and Bolt generates the code, runs it live in the browser, and deploys it to production with one click. We rate it 73/100 — a genuinely magical prototyping tool that collapses a weekend of scaffolding into a 20-minute prompt, with real trade-offs around token cost, debugging, and production readiness.
Bolt.new launched on from Eric Simons's StackBlitz, a 7-year-old Oregon-based startup that had quietly built the WebContainers technology powering StackBlitz.com. The bet: run a full Node.js stack — filesystem, terminal, package manager — inside a browser tab, then hand the keys to an LLM so an AI agent can prompt, edit, install packages, run code, and ship the result to production without ever leaving the tab.
The bet worked. Bolt hit $4M ARR in 30 days, $20M ARR in 60 days, and $40M ARR in five months, making it one of the fastest-growing software products in history behind ChatGPT. In StackBlitz closed a $105.5M Series B led by Emergence Capital and GV at a $700M valuation, bringing total funding to $135M. The open-source reference implementation on GitHub has 16.3k stars under the MIT license, and the main product has powered over one million websites through a deployment partnership with Netlify.
stackblitz/bolt.new, and community forks like bolt.new-any-llm let you swap in Ollama, Gemini, Groq, or DeepSeek instead of the hosted model.
Sentiment is genuinely split. On Product Hunt, Bolt's original launch racked up 1,239 upvotes with founders calling it "the fastest way from idea to landing page I have ever seen." On the flip side, Bolt holds a brutal 1.4/5 on Trustpilot, where the complaints cluster around opaque token consumption, billing issues, and slow support responses.
The most-cited Reddit critique from r/SideProject: "Bolt got me to a demo in 20 minutes. It took me two more weeks to add auth and a real database. I should have started with replit-cloud-ide" class="internal-link">replit" class="internal-link">Replit or Emergent." Multiple Redditors report burning 5–8 million tokens on a single Supabase auth bug before giving up and writing the fix by hand. The consistent praise: speed of first draft, quality of generated UI with Tailwind or Shadcn, and the click-to-edit inspector. The consistent pain: token costs on iterative debugging, auth/database edge cases, and the moment your app outgrows what the agent can hold in context.
Bolt uses a token-metered freemium model. All plans include hosting and unlimited databases; tokens are how you pay for the AI agent's work.
| Plan | Price | Key Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month | 300k tokens/day, 1M/month, 10 MB uploads, 333k web requests, Bolt branding on sites |
| Pro | $25/month | 10M tokens/month with rollover, 100 MB uploads, custom domains, no branding, AI image editing, 1M web requests |
| Teams | $30/user/month | Everything in Pro plus centralized billing, SSO-lite admin controls, private NPM registry, design-system knowledge |
| Enterprise | Custom | SSO, audit logs, dedicated account manager, 24/7 priority support, data governance |
Token overage is the thing to watch. Redditors regularly hit the 10M cap in under two weeks during active development; buying extra tokens quickly pushes real monthly spend past $100 for serious users.
Best for: Product managers, designers, founders, and developers who need a working MVP in hours, not weeks. Side-project builders validating ideas on evenings. Agencies delivering clickable prototypes to clients. Anyone who has a clear idea and wants to skip the yak-shaving of bootstrapping Next.js, auth, a database, and a deploy pipeline.
Not ideal for: Teams shipping to production with strict uptime, security, or compliance requirements — Bolt is still rough on long-horizon debugging and will happily re-architect working code on a reprompt. Also not ideal if you are deeply cost-sensitive: the pay-per-token model can bite when the agent goes in circles on a tricky bug.
Pros:
Cons:
The AI app-builder market split wide open in 2025. Lovable (Sweden) matches Bolt on speed and edges it on UI polish for consumer apps. v0 by Vercel leads on component-level fidelity inside a Next.js shell. Replit with Agent 3 offers a deeper, more traditional IDE experience and better long-project continuity. Emergent.sh and Windsurf Wave target developers who want an AI that understands existing codebases, not just greenfield prompts.
Yes, with eyes open. For $25/month, Bolt.new replaces the first weekend of a side project — the part where you pick a framework, set up auth, wire a database, and configure a deploy pipeline — with a 20-minute prompt. That is genuine, discontinuous value. The caveat is that Bolt is much better at starting than finishing: the closer you get to production, the more the generated code fights back. Treat it as the world's best scaffolder and velocity-multiplier for early ideas, not as a replacement for a senior engineer on a maturing codebase, and the 73/100 feels earned.
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