What is the cheapest AI app builder

Cheapest paid tier for each tool, plus what the free tier actually includes. Where a vendor bills per app rather than per account, that is called out — it changes the maths completely once you have more than one project.

Every tool in that table meters work in credits, and a credit does not mean the same thing twice. Lovable counts a credit per message — roughly 0.50 to 1.70 credits depending on task complexity in default mode, 1 credit per message in plan mode. Replit hands you a dollar-denominated balance: $25 of credits on the $25 Core plan. Emergent gives 100 credits a month on Standard. uooki gives 5,000 credits a month on Basic and states its own conversion on the pricing page (roughly 125 AI images at that tier).

That makes head-to-head credit comparison meaningless, and any page that ranks these tools by "credits per dollar" is comparing different units. The number that matters is how many complete attempts you get before the meter stops, and that depends far more on how many rounds of revision your project needs than on the headline price.

The structural cost difference is the billing unit, not the price. Bubble bills per project and Appy Pie bills per app per month, so a second and third idea multiply the bill. uooki, Lovable, Replit and Emergent bill per account, so extra projects cost credits rather than another subscription. If you build one app and keep it, per-app pricing can win. If you are still finding the idea worth keeping, it is the most expensive shape on the list.

Three costs that only show up after you have picked a tool:

uooki is the cheapest entry on the list that still ships a running product rather than a scaffold: $0 to start with 100 one-time credits, then $9.9/mo billed yearly. What you get back is a working web app, a finished research report or an interactive dashboard — not code snippets you then have to assemble, host and debug.

The honest limit: uooki produces web applications that run in a browser. It does not compile a native iOS or Android binary and does not submit to the App Store or Google Play. If a native store listing is the requirement, Bubble (React Native) or Appy Pie are built for that and uooki is not. If "works on any phone via a link" is enough — which it is for most internal tools, dashboards and prototypes — the web route skips the store fees and the review queue entirely.