AI App Maker Tools on One App Spec: Where Free Stops

An AI app maker will build a real, hosted app from a description for free, right up to a line that every vendor's landing page leaves out. The line is different for each tool. On Base44 it's 25 message credits a month. On Figma Make it's 150 AI credits a day and a Full seat. On Replit, as of today, the pricing page doesn't show a free plan at all, while the app-builder page still says "get started free". This article holds one small app spec against the tools on the first page of results and shows, from their own pricing pages, which parts of the spec each free tier covers and where you'll be asked for a card.

I haven't built this spec on every tool this week, and I'm not going to pretend I have. What I can do is read the pricing pages carefully, which is apparently rare, and give you a spec small enough that you can run it yourself on a free tier in an afternoon.

The Spec

A bookings app for a small sports club. It is deliberately ordinary, because ordinary is where free tiers get tested.

Club Bookings

1. Members sign in with email. No public sign-up; an admin adds members.
2. A bookings table: date, court, member, status.
   Members create and cancel their own bookings. Admin sees all of them.
3. When a booking is created, send the member a confirmation email.
4. A public page, no sign-in, shows this week's free slots.
5. The app runs on the club's own domain.

Acceptance:
- A member cannot see or cancel another member's booking.
- Double-booking the same court and slot is refused.
- The confirmation email arrives with the right date and court.
- The public page loads signed out and shows no member names.
- The domain resolves to the app over HTTPS.

Five requirements and five checks. Every requirement maps to something a maker either includes in its free tier, sells on a paid tier, or doesn't document. That mapping is the article.

Where Free Stops, By Requirement

Prices and limits below are from each vendor's pricing page as fetched on 2026-09-15. They move often. The links are the source; the table is a snapshot.

Read the last row first. It's the one that decides whether you finish the spec or stop halfway with a working sign-in and no bookings table.

Base44's pricing page prints the clearest numbers on the SERP. Free is 25 message credits and 100 integration credits a month, up to five apps, with authentication, database, and analytics as core features. Starter is $16 a month billed annually for 100 message credits, and the paid tiers add GitHub integration and a free domain for a year. The landing page says everything you build belongs to you.

Anything's pricing page shows Pro at $19 a month with 20K credits and Max at $199 with 220K, and a feature table that starts "Everything in Free, plus". What Free actually includes in credits isn't printed. Pro is where private projects, custom domains, and removing the Anything branding live.

Figma's pricing page gives Starter 150 AI credits a day, capped at 500 a month, and says Figma Make requires a Full seat. A Professional Full seat is $16 a month with 3,000 credits. Publishing and Make connectors sit on higher paid plans. The Make solutions page is the one that promises real code, connecting to a codebase, and opening a pull request, which makes it the only tool in this table whose exit path is a PR rather than a download.

Replit's pricing page today lists Core at $20 a month, or $18 billed annually, Pro at $100, and Enterprise. There's no free plan card. Core includes "up to 30 hours of chat on Free Mode" and "up to 60 projects on Free Mode", and the page doesn't define Free Mode. Meanwhile the app-builder use-case page still says free AI app builder and get started free, with built-in database, auth, secrets, free hosting, and a custom domain. I can't reconcile those two pages from the outside. My read is that "free" on the landing page means the Free Mode inside a paid plan, and I'd sign up expecting to pay $20 before the bookings table exists.

Rork and Jotform are on the first page too. Rork's pricing page renders in the browser only, so I have nothing to quote. Jotform's Starter plan is free with Jotform branding, but it's a form-app generator, a different category from the four above, and I wouldn't try to build the bookings spec on it.

Spending 25 Messages On This Spec

Base44's free tier is the tightest documented meter, so it's the useful one to plan against. Twenty-five message credits a month. Assume one message costs one credit, which is my assumption and not a statement from their page, and budget the spec before typing anything.

Fifteen messages for fixes sounds generous until the first "the cancel button cancels everyone's booking" arrives. My rule with any generator is that the expensive messages are the corrections, not the features, because a correction that isn't precise costs two more. So the budget really says this. Write the data model and the acceptance checks into the first message, and you might finish on the free tier. Discover the double-booking rule on message nineteen, and you won't.

The 100 integration credits are a separate meter. One email per booking is fine for a club. It would not be fine for a store, and that is the kind of arithmetic worth doing before the demo works and the app is already in use.

The Money Outside The Maker

Every page on the first page of results says free. None of them mentions the costs that are not theirs to waive.

A domain of your own costs money every year, and the maker's "free custom domain" offers cover the connection, not the registration. If the spec were a phone app, Apple's Developer Program is a $99 annual membership and a Google Play developer account is a US$25 one-time registration fee. No maker on this list can make those go away, and the ones that advertise "ship to the App Store" are describing a button that leads to a form that asks for the $99.

Then there's the second month. The free tiers above reset monthly, and a club app that members actually use will generate the corrections and the emails that eat both meters. The question isn't whether you can build it for free. It's whether you can keep it running for free, and for this spec the honest answer is "for a while, on Base44, if the first message is good."

Can I Create My Own App Using AI?

Yes, and for a spec this size the makers above will get you a working version faster than writing it yourself. The boundary is what happens when the app needs a change the maker's interface can't express. Base44 gives you in-app code editing on Free and GitHub on paid. Figma Make opens a pull request into your codebase. Anything lists code export as a feature row without printing which tier. Replit doesn't document export on either page I read.

That column is the one I'd weigh most, because in my own monorepo every project that survived did so because I could open the code in an editor when the tool ran out. A demo that lives entirely inside someone else's interface is a demo until proven otherwise. The best AI app builder ranking on this site scores Lovable, Bolt, v0, and Bubble on exactly this lock-in question, so I won't repeat that set here.

Can ChatGPT Build Me An App?

ChatGPT can write every file of this spec, and its Codex agent can build the repository, run the tests, and fix what fails. What neither does is host it. There's no "publish" button that gives you a URL, a database, and an email integration in one click, which is the thing an AI app maker actually sells.

So the real comparison is a maker versus ChatGPT plus hosting. If you go the second way, the guide to building an app with AI covers getting from idea to a deployed repository, and the deployment guide covers the hosting step, including the free options. It's more steps. It's also the version where the code was yours from the first minute.

Can I Create An App With AI For Free? With No Money?

For free, yes, with the meters above. Base44 Free covers all five requirements on paper, with the domain connection being the one to test first. Figma Make Starter gets you a working prototype with real code but publishing sits on a paid tier. Anything Free exists but its allowance isn't published. Replit, per its pricing page, starts at $20.

With no money at all, meaning not even a domain, the spec's fifth requirement is the one to drop. Run on the maker's subdomain, keep the branding, and treat it as a working prototype. That's an honest free app. If you'd rather own the code from the start and still spend nothing, the vibe coding for beginners guide walks the path where the tool is a free coding assistant and the hosting is a free tier, which costs more time and no money.

Which AI Is 100% Free?

None of the makers on the first page. Every free tier above is capped by messages, credits, hours, or a seat, and the ones that don't print the cap still have one. "100% free" in the related searches is a wish, and the closest real thing is a free tier whose cap you can see. I'd rather have Base44's visible 25 than an unprinted "generous" allowance, because a number I can see is a number I can plan against.

Which AI App Maker Is Best?

For this spec, on a free tier, with the pages as they read today, I'd start on Base44 because its free tier documents every meter and includes auth, database, and hosting. I'd pick Figma Make if the app is going to live in a codebase I already have, since it's the only one whose exit is a pull request. I'd budget $19 or $20 from the start for Anything or Replit and not expect the free tier to get me to the domain step. And I'd read the export row before the price row every time.

My concern with all four is the same one I have with any hosted builder. The free tier is sized to get the demo working and the second month is where the meter, the domain, and the corrections all arrive at once. Run the spec, count the messages, and decide with that number instead of the landing page.

Run It Yourself

Copy the spec, pick one maker, and put the data model and the five acceptance checks in the very first message. Count every message after that. When you hit the cap, write down which requirement you were on. That single number, requirement reached per free tier, is more useful than anything the first page of results is offering, and it's the number I'd want before paying for month two.