Base44 Pricing in 2026: Plans, Credits, and Real Costs

Quick answer: As of August 2026, Base44 has a free plan plus four paid tiers, priced (billed annually, per month) at $16 Starter, $40 Builder, $80 Pro, and $160 Elite - or $20, $50, $100, and $200 on month-to-month billing, per the official Base44 pricing page. Every plan meters two separate things: message credits, which you spend while building with the AI, and integration credits, which your live app burns every time users trigger a built-in action like an email, an LLM call, or an image generation. The plan price is only the floor. Your real monthly cost is the plan plus whatever runtime credits your users consume, plus a domain, plus the work of finishing and hardening the part the AI does not build. Base44 is owned by Wix, which acquired it in June 2025 for about $80 million.

Base44 is one of the better AI app builders for getting from an idea to a working internal tool in an afternoon, and its pricing looks refreshingly simple on the pricing page: five tiers, one number each. The catch is that the number on the card is not the number you pay. Base44 runs on a credit meter, and credits are the part almost nobody models before they sign up.

This guide breaks down every current plan and price, explains how the two credit types actually meter, and does the arithmetic on the gap between the headline price and the real total once credits, domains, and the hard production work are counted. Read the credit section before you read the plan table, because credits are what decide your bill.

How Much Does Base44 Cost in 2026?

Base44 pricing in 2026 is five tiers: a free plan and four paid plans - Starter, Builder, Pro, and Elite. Here is the full breakdown as of August 2026. Prices are shown both as month-to-month and as the effective monthly rate when you pay for a year up front, which is roughly a 20 percent discount across every tier.

These figures are cross-checked against independent pricing breakdowns from No Code MBA and AxonBuild, which agree on the tiers, credit allotments, and the annual discount. Base44 has revised its plan structure more than once since launch, so treat any specific figure as a snapshot: confirm the current numbers on the pricing page before you commit, because tiers and credit allotments move.

The thing to notice in that table is the shape of the two credit columns. Message credits climb slowly - 25 to 100 to 250 to 500 to 1,200. Integration credits climb fast - 100 to 2,000 to 10,000 to 20,000 to 50,000. That asymmetry is the whole story of Base44 billing, and the next section explains why.

What Are Message Credits and Integration Credits?

Base44 meters two different resources, and confusing them is how people get surprised by a bill. Here is the plain-language definition of each.

Message credits are what you spend while building. Every prompt you send the AI to create, modify, or debug something in your app costs message credits, per Base44's own credits documentation. One thoughtful prompt, one credit - but a messy debugging session where you re-prompt the same fix five times costs five. Message credits are a development-time meter. They stop mattering the moment you stop editing.

Integration credits are what your live app spends. After you publish, every time a user triggers a built-in action - sending an email, calling an LLM, generating an image, running an automation - the app burns integration credits. This is a runtime meter, and it scales with how many people use your app and how heavily each action leans on AI. Base44's docs describe an integration action as costing a credit per call; independent breakdowns note that heavier operations like LLM calls and media generation consume more than a single lightweight action, so a chat feature or an image generator drains this pool far faster than a plain form submission.

Two consequences fall out of this design, and both matter for budgeting.

First, the two pools do not convert. You cannot spend leftover message credits on integration usage or vice versa, and Base44 confirms that unused credits of either type do not roll over - they reset at the end of your cycle. Running out of either one pauses that side of your app: no message credits, you cannot edit; no integration credits, your users' actions stall. Base44 users have publicly asked for rollover, which tells you it is a real friction point, not a hypothetical one.

Second, integration credits are the meter that scales with success. Message credits are bounded by your own effort during a build. Integration credits are bounded by your users, which is exactly the variable you cannot predict and, if the app works, the one that grows. An app nobody uses costs the plan price. An app that takes off can blow through its integration allotment mid-month and force an upgrade you did not plan. We go deeper on this dynamic across builders in AI app builder pricing and the hidden costs.

What Do You Actually Pay Beyond the Plan Price?

The plan price is the floor, not the bill. Here is the honest total once you count the things the pricing card leaves off.

Runtime integration credits. Covered above, and it is the big one. If your app has any AI feature that users hit - a chatbot, a document summarizer, an image generator - the integration meter is your real variable cost. A Pro plan's 20,000 integration credits sound generous until a few hundred active users each trigger a handful of LLM calls a day. When you run dry, your only in-product options are to wait for the reset or upgrade a tier, so a heavy-usage month effectively reprices you to the next plan up.

A domain is not included. The Builder plan and above let you connect a custom domain, but the option to connect one is not the same as buying one. You still purchase the domain from a registrar and pay its annual fee yourself, on top of the Base44 subscription. It is a small line item, but it is a real one that the plan price does not cover.

The completion and hardening work. This is the largest hidden cost and the one no builder puts on a pricing page. Base44 will get you to a convincing, working app fast. It will not, on its own, finish the last stretch: airtight authentication, permissions that never leak one user's data to another, integration failure handling for the payment that half-succeeded or the API that timed out, and the security and maintenance work of running software that real people depend on. That stretch is roughly 30 to 40 percent of a production product, and it lands on you or on whoever you hire.

Here is a realistic picture of the gap between the sticker and the total for a small live app.

None of this makes Base44 a bad deal. It makes "the price to prototype" and "the price to run in production" two different numbers, and the pricing page only quotes the first. For a fuller picture of the product beyond price, see our Base44 review for 2026.

Is Base44 Owned by Wix?

Yes. Base44 is owned by Wix, which acquired the company in June 2025 for approximately $80 million in cash, with additional earn-out payments tied to performance milestones. The startup was founded by Maor Shlomo and was only about six months old at acquisition, and Wix has since disclosed that the founder stands to receive further milestone payments running into the tens of millions as targets are hit. Wix framed the deal in its own announcement as a bet on AI-driven "vibe coding."

Why does ownership belong in a pricing article? Because it tells you two useful things. First, Base44 is now backed by a large public company, which lowers the "will this vendor disappear" risk that hangs over younger tools. Second, Base44 is part of a broader Wix strategy, which means its pricing and roadmap will be shaped by how it fits alongside Wix's own products over time. If you are weighing the two together, we compare them directly in Wix vs Base44.

Which Base44 Plan Is Right for You?

The plans map cleanly onto stages, and the honest advice is to buy for the stage you are in, not the one you hope to reach.

Free is for finding out whether Base44 clicks for you at all. Twenty-five message credits with a five-per-day cap is genuinely tight - it is enough to build a small toy and feel the workflow, not enough to ship anything. Treat it as a demo, not a plan.

Starter ($16 to $20/mo) is the first real plan, and it fits a solo builder iterating on a prototype. The constraint is the 100 message credits: if you are the kind of builder who converges by re-prompting, you will feel that ceiling during an intense session. Integration credits are low here too, so Starter is for building and light testing, not for a published app with users.

Builder ($40 to $50/mo) is where most serious projects should start. It adds the custom domain, backend functions, and typically GitHub integration, and its 10,000 integration credits are the first allotment that can support a real, if small, live app. If you intend to publish something people actually use, this is the practical floor.

Pro ($80 to $100/mo) is for a live app with genuine, if modest, traffic. The jump to 20,000 integration credits and 500 message credits is aimed at apps that are past validation and into use. If your app has any AI feature that users hit repeatedly, this is the tier where the integration meter starts to be the thing you watch.

Elite ($160 to $200/mo) adds sub-accounts and the largest credit pools, which is why it is pitched at agencies and people managing multiple client apps. For a single product, you would move here because your integration usage demands it, not because you want the features.

A fair way to sanity-check the value is against comparable tools. Base44's per-tier pricing sits in the same band as its closest rivals, and the differences are more about credit generosity and product depth than headline price - we lay that out in Base44 vs Lovable and across the field in the best Base44 alternatives.

Where Does Base44 Wall You?

Every AI builder has a wall, and being honest about Base44's is more useful than praising it. The wall is not the price. It is the same last 30 to 40 percent that stops every tool in this category.

Base44 is excellent at the first stretch: describe an app, get working screens, data that saves, and a demo that convinces. For internal tools and prototypes with a handful of trusted users, that may be the entire job, and paying for a Builder or Pro plan to get there is a good deal. The wall appears when you try to turn that demo into something real people depend on.

It is the specific, unglamorous list. Authentication that is actually secure. Permissions that guarantee one user can never read or write another user's data, on every code path, forever. Integrations that handle the failure cases, not just the happy path - the webhook that fired twice, the payment that half-completed, the API that was down for ninety seconds. Data that stays correct when many people use the app at once. And the ongoing operational work of hosting, monitoring, patching, and securing software that is now load-bearing for someone's business. The credit meter does not help you here, because this is not work the AI does for a credit. It is work someone has to own.

That is the real cost gap. The Base44 subscription is a known, modest number. The cost of carrying that final slice to production - in your own hours or a developer's - is the number that decides whether the project ships. Any honest read of Base44 pricing has to include it, because it dwarfs the plan fee for anything meant to be real.

Where Creatr Fits

We build, host, and run production-grade software for you, and it is worth being precise about where that fits next to Base44 rather than pretending it is always the answer.

Base44 is a tool you operate. You do the building, you manage the credits, and you carry the hard 30 to 40 percent yourself - the authentication, the permissions, the failure handling, the ongoing operations. That is the right trade when you want to be hands-on, when the job is a prototype or an internal tool, or when a modest live app fits inside a Pro plan's credit pool. For that, Base44 is a genuinely good product and the plans above are fair.

Creatr is the different shape. Instead of a subscription and a credit meter you manage, you get the finished, hosted, running product delivered to you, with the first build shipped in 24 hours. There are humans in the loop rather than a builder you operate alone, and you own the code outright rather than renting a place to run it. The hard part - the exact 30 to 40 percent that walls a Base44 app before production - is the part we are built to carry, so it does not land back on you as unbilled hours.

The honest boundary is the one this whole piece draws. If you want to build it yourself, iterate hands-on, and your usage fits inside a plan, Base44 is a strong choice and you should use it. If you want the result delivered and running without owning the difficult, expensive last stretch, that is where we fit. Either way, model the credits before you commit to a plan - the sticker is the floor, not the bill. If the delivered-and-running shape is what you want, start with Creatr.