Anywhere from about $35 to $40,000, depending on who does the work and how much of the app needs it. A single bug fix on Fiverr starts around $35, Upwork lists full-stack and React developers at $16 to $75 an hour, and agencies that publish rescue prices charge a few thousand dollars for an audit and $10,000 to $40,000 for a full rescue.
Upwork lists typical rates of $16 to $35 an hour for full-stack developers, $51 to $75 for React developers and $60 to $120 for penetration testers.
Source: Upwork, Hourly Rates by Skill and Experience, 12 May 2026
Prices by route, October 2026
- Doing it yourself: Lovable Pro is $25 a month for 100 credits, and Business is $50. You can top up credits when you run out. The real cost is your time, and the chance that a prompt hides the symptom and leaves the cause.
- Fiverr: on 29 Oct 2026, the first page of results for "lovable app fix" showed 52 gigs. Starting prices ran from $5 to $750, and the median was $35. That price is the smallest package, and Fiverr adds a buyer service fee at checkout.
- Upwork freelancers: Upwork's own rate guide lists $16 to $35 an hour for full-stack developers, $51 to $75 for React developers, $40 to $90 for cybersecurity developers and $60 to $120 for penetration testers.
- What Upwork clients offer: I read the 100 most recent Upwork job posts matching "Lovable", posted over about two weeks up to 29 Oct 2026. The 35 fixed-price posts had a median budget of $500, from $5 up to $4,000. Half of the hourly posts capped the rate at $30 or less.
- Agencies, hourly: a LITSLINK list of ten US companies that clean up vibe-coded apps puts their rates between $25 and $99 an hour.
- Agencies, fixed packages: Relux publishes a $3,000 rescue audit (1 week), a stabilization sprint from $10,000 (2 to 3 weeks) and a full rework at $15,000 to $40,000. Rocking Tech in the UK charges £1,950 for a code health review, and cites market prices from £5,000 for light stabilisation and £15,000 to £40,000 for a backend rebuild.
Why the numbers are so far apart
The cheap end and the expensive end are buying different things. A $35 gig fixes one bug you can describe in a sentence, like a button that does nothing or a form that won't submit. An agency audit reads the whole codebase, the database rules and the payment flow, then writes up what it found. The hourly rate matters less than the number of hours, and nobody knows that number until someone has looked at the code.
The Upwork budgets show the same gap. $500 buys about 14 hours at $35 an hour, or 4 to 8 hours at a security tester's rate. That covers one or two contained fixes. It rarely covers a review of the whole app. One Lovable and Supabase security review posted at $1,500 had more than 50 proposals three days later. Getting offers is easy. Telling which of those 50 people will actually check your database rules is the hard part.
What usually needs fixing
Security comes up most often, and the public scans show why.
- In May 2025, a scan of 1,645 Lovable projects found exposed Supabase endpoints in 170 of them, about 10.3% (CVE-2025-48757).
- In October 2025, Escape scanned more than 5,600 public apps built on vibe-coding platforms, most of them on Lovable. It found more than 2,000 vulnerabilities, over 400 exposed secrets and 175 cases of exposed personal data.
- Veracode tested more than 100 AI models on 80 coding tasks in 2025. When there was a safe and an unsafe way to write the code, the models picked the unsafe one 45% of the time.
What makes one app cost more than another
- Payments. Every plan, product and webhook is one more flow to test from start to finish.
- User roles. An app with admins, teams and customers needs a database rule for every table and every role.
- How much code the AI wrote. Long prompting sessions often leave duplicate components and dead code that someone has to read before changing anything.
- No staging copy. Without a place to test, every fix goes straight to real users, so it has to be slower and more careful.
- Fix or finish. Fixing what exists costs less than fixing it and also building the features that were never finished.
Hourly or fixed price?
With an hourly contract, you carry the risk. If the job takes twice as long, you pay twice as much. With a fixed price, the developer carries it, which is why fixed quotes usually come after an audit or a call. Either way, get the scope in writing: which issues, what counts as done, and what happens if more turns up.
How to keep the bill down
- Write down every bug you already know about, with the steps to see it. Paying someone to rediscover them is wasted money.
- Fix security before features. A data leak costs more than a late feature.
- Give read-only access first. Never send production keys, the Supabase service_role key or an admin password in a chat message.
- Set up a second Supabase project for testing, so fixes are checked away from real users.
- Agree how you will both work on the repo, so your next Lovable prompt doesn't undo a fix.
Where my prices sit
I sell this work, so here are my numbers next to the ones above. A Launch Audit is $490 and takes 3 business days. If it doesn't find at least 5 concrete, actionable issues, it's free. A Quick Fix for one blocker is $750. A Fix & Launch Sprint is $2,500, $4,500 or $6,500 depending on size, and the audit fee is credited in full if you book it within 14 days. Care after launch starts at $750 a month.
That puts me above most Upwork budgets and well below agency rescues. Which one fits depends on how much of your app needs work, and an audit from anyone is the cheapest way to find out.
First published on badii.studio. I review and fix apps built with Lovable, Bolt and other AI tools before launch.