Idun Blue vs Lovable — one builds software, one runs a business

The short version

People ask us this more often than they ask about any course platform, and the question is usually a version of: AI can build software now, so why would I pay for a platform?

Here is the answer.

Lovable is an AI software engineer. You describe a web app in plain language and it writes one — frontend, database, authentication, hosting — and publishes it. The code is yours, it syncs to GitHub, and it is yours to run, update and secure.

Idun Blue is not a way to build software. It is a creator business that already exists. A course, a lesson, a member, an offer, an order, a refund, a tag, a sequence and a drip schedule already know what they mean and what they do to each other. You do not describe them into being. You fill them in.

So the question is not which tool is better. It is: do you want to build and maintain software, or do you want to run your business?

What Lovable actually is

Taken from Lovable’s own pricing page and documentation on 3 September 2026:

• A prompt-to-app builder. Lovable describes itself as “an AI software engineer, which enables anyone to build for the web.” You chat, it builds.
• Lovable Cloud, a built-in backend on Supabase’s open-source foundation: database, authentication, storage, edge functions, scheduled jobs, secrets and AI. Hosting regions are Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, chosen once and not changeable afterwards.
• Hosting with automatic HTTPS, global delivery and no visitor or bandwidth cap. Custom domains require a paid plan.
• Payments through a built-in Stripe or Paddle integration, including checkout components, webhooks and subscription management.
• Transactional email — authentication mail and app mail such as order confirmations, 50,000 a month included on paid workspaces. The documentation is explicit that marketing email is not supported.
• Your code. Asked who owns the projects and code, Lovable’s own answer is “You do” — with two-way GitHub sync, so you can clone it, work locally and deploy elsewhere.
• Pricing in credits, not seats: Free $0, Pro $25/mo, Business $50/mo, Enterprise on volume pricing, with unlimited workspace members on every plan. Credits cover building, running and AI; monthly plan credits expire two months after they are issued.

What Idun Blue actually is

One workspace where the parts of a creator business are already wired to each other:

• Courses with modules, lessons and drip scheduling, video and audio transcoded to HLS, quizzes and course certificates. Members use the Idun Blue app for iPhone and iPad, or the web app on your own domain.
• Offers and payments through your own Stripe account, one-off or subscription, with coupons, order bumps, upsells, receipts and refunds — and SEK, EUR or USD with EU VAT, reverse charge and OSS built in. We take 0% of your sales.
• Email — broadcasts, multi-step sequences and automations triggered by purchases, tags and course progress.
• Website, pages and sign-up forms, community, bookings and live events, on your own domain.
• Podcast and Instagram. The podcast gets a real RSS feed, and Instagram posts are planned and scheduled from Studio.
• Idun AI, which works inside Studio and writes pages, course outlines, offers and emails from what is already in your workspace. Everything arrives as a draft you approve. If you would rather use your own ChatGPT or Claude, connect it through Studio for Mac or as an MCP client.

Idun Blue is free during the beta and then costs SEK 1,000 a month excl. VAT.

The four things that are harder than they look

You can get a first version of a course site out of Lovable in an afternoon. Lessons, a login, a Stripe button. It will work.

The distance between that and a business you can leave running is made of four specific things.

1. Video

A course is mostly video, and video is the part that looks free and is not. An upload has to be transcoded into several bitrates, packaged as HLS, put behind a CDN and delivered to someone watching on a train with two bars of signal — and it has to resume where they stopped. A storage bucket is not that. You would add a video host and pay for it separately, and it is usually the largest line on a course platform’s infrastructure bill.

Idun Blue transcodes and streams your video. It is one of the things you are actually buying.

2. Email that arrives

Lovable’s documentation is clear that newsletters and promotional email are out of scope; its email feature is for signups, password resets and order confirmations. That is a sensible boundary and we would draw it the same way — sending marketing email well is its own product. It means domain authentication, warm-up, bounce and complaint handling, unsubscribe that actually unsubscribes, sequences that pause when someone buys, and a suppression list you never send to twice.

If your launch is a sequence of emails to a list, that is not a feature you add to a generated app. It is the second product you now maintain.

3. The money edge cases

Selling once is easy. What is hard is everything after the happy path: a renewal that fails and the three retries after it, a refund that has to revoke access to the right course and nothing else, VAT at the buyer’s rate across the EU, a receipt with the right company details on it, an OSS report that reconciles.

None of it is impossible to build. All of it is the kind of thing you discover in month four, from a customer, on a Sunday.

4. Who is responsible when it breaks

This is the real difference, and the most honest way to show it is a public record.

In 2025, security researcher Matt Palmer reported that Lovable-generated projects frequently shipped without adequate database row-level security, which meant unauthenticated visitors could read or write tables belonging to those apps. It became CVE-2025-48757, scored 9.3 (critical) by NVD, published 30 May 2025.

The part that matters here is Lovable’s response, recorded in the NVD entry itself: the finding is disputed by the supplier, because each individual customer of the Lovable platform accepts a responsibility over protecting the data of their application.

That is not an unreasonable position. It is exactly the correct position for a tool that writes code you own. But read it as a business owner and it says something specific: the app is yours, and so is its security. Lovable has since built security scanning into the product, with a workspace-wide Security Center on Business and Enterprise plans, and its own documentation states plainly: “You are responsible for ensuring that your app meets the security requirements appropriate for its use case.”

Idun Blue cannot say that sentence to you. It is our database, our patching, our incident, our night. That is not a virtue we invented — it is simply what “platform” means, and it is most of what a platform costs.

What it costs

$25 a month against SEK 1,000 a month is not a comparison, because the two prices are buying different things.

Pro at $25 buys credits to build with, and the software that results is yours to run. Add what a course business needs and the picture changes: a video host, an email platform once you outgrow transactional mail, whatever you pay someone the first time something breaks that you cannot prompt your way out of — and your own hours, which are the largest number on the list and the one nobody puts in the spreadsheet.

Idun Blue is free during the beta and then costs SEK 1,000 a month for the whole platform, one price, no tier above it, 0% of your sales. Video, email, payments, VAT and operations are included, and we are the ones on call.

Lovable works for the thing that is uniquely yours: a prototype, a quiz that generates a personal plan, an internal tool. If it needs to talk to the business, point it at Idun Blue’s public HTTP API or connect it over MCP, so the member it creates is a real member and the sale it makes is a real order. The business itself runs in Idun Blue.

What is included in Idun Blue

• Courses, offers, email and people are always on. Pages, blog, community, automations, coupons, bookings, social media and link in bio are on from the start.
• Live events and webinars, podcast, coaching, invoices, physical products and course certificates are switched on under Settings → Features. Lesson quizzes and attachments are part of the course tools.
• Card payments run through your own Stripe account, which we connect together with you during onboarding.
• Idun Blue is a platform, not a build tool. You do not get source code, and Idun AI works on pages, courses, offers and email instead of writing software you have to maintain.
• Servers in the EU and Studio in Swedish and English. AI and email delivery use external providers, and your provider choices affect where data is processed.
• Free during the beta, then SEK 1,000 a month excl. VAT.

Switch to Idun Blue if

• you sell courses, programmes, memberships or sessions and want video, members, payments, email and pages to be one system that somebody else runs and patches.
• you want to send newsletters and sequences. Lovable’s email feature does not cover marketing email. In Idun Blue it is included.
• you do not want to carry the security responsibility for an app you generated.
• you want EU VAT, reverse charge and OSS handled instead of building it yourself.
• you want AI to do the work inside the business, with Idun AI or your own ChatGPT or Claude, instead of writing code you have to maintain.
• you want Studio in Swedish and your data on servers in the EU.

Idun Blue opens to more creators as the beta grows. Join the waitlist and we will be in touch.