How I reduced my Lovable and Replit costs by 10x

I spent $2500 on tokens with Lovable, v0, Bolt, Replit, Cursor, etc. I tried different combinations, and the solution for reducing your token costs is becoming more technical.

Lovable, v0, Bolt, Replit, Cursor, etc, use the same LLM models. These tools charge a premium for convenience. The easier it is to set up, the higher the price.

For example, Lovable provides infrastructure like a domain, URL, database, and hosting. But once you start building and writing code with it, Lovable will be 10x more expensive than Cursor or Claude Code that do not provide infrastructure.

I’m happy to pay for convenience. But at some point, the price difference became too big, especially considering I’d spend most of my day in Replit.

90% of my bill with Replit, Lovable, v0 was for tokens to write code and not for infrastructure. So eventually I came to this setup:

1. Use Replit for infrastructure only (hosting, database, domain, etc.)

2. Use Cursor for building (10x cheaper than Replit for writing code)

This lowered my costs by 10x but still allowed easy setup.

You can open Cursor from Replit. All code you write with Cursor will be pushed directly to Replit via SSH:

I just hope Replit won’t block Cursor, since they’re competitors.