[Review] Base44 Pricing: Free Tier's 25 Credits Hide a 5-a-Day Cap

Base44 lets you build a working web app by typing instructions into a chat window — Wix bought the company earlier this year. Its free tier advertises 25 “message credits” a month, which sounds like a reasonable amount of tinkering room. It isn’t, once you read the fine print: Base44 also caps you at 5 credits a day, no matter how many of the 25 you have left for the month. This review checks what that free tier pricing actually gets you, what the paid plans add, and whether upgrading is worth it.

What message credits and integration credits actually cover

Base44 runs on two separate credit pools, and mixing them up is the easiest way to misread your bill.

Message credits get spent every time you type a chat instruction that changes your app — “add a login page,” “make the button blue,” that kind of thing. The free tier gives you 25 of these a month.

Integration credits are different: they get spent after your app is live, whenever it calls a built-in service — sending an email, generating an image, making a call to an AI model (a “large language model,” or LLM, the kind of system that answers in text). The free tier gives you 100 of these a month.

Run out of message credits, and Base44’s own documentation says “features that require credits are unavailable until your daily balance resets.” Run out of integration credits, and it’s worse for anyone using the app you built: “any action you perform that requires integration credits fails and shows an error” — a generic error, with no indication that a credit limit caused it. Someone using your app has no way to tell the difference between a credit shortage and a broken feature.

Figure: base44.com official pricing page, captured 2026-10-05.

The daily cap that makes 25 look smaller than it is

Here’s the part the monthly headline number doesn’t convey. Base44’s documentation states it directly: “You can use up to 5 credits a day, up to a total of 25 credits each month.” That means even though you’re allotted 25 message credits a month, you can never spend more than 5 of them on any given day. In practice, that’s roughly 3 to 5 editing commands before you hit a wall for the day — refine a layout, fix a typo, adjust some text, and you’re done until the daily reset.

Illustration: A locked dispenser full of tokens yields only a tiny handful, abruptly halting work until the next sunrise.

Worse, unused credits don’t carry over. Base44’s docs are explicit: “Unused monthly credits expire at the end of your credit cycle and do not carry over to the next month.” Skip a few days and that saved-up allowance is simply gone, not banked for a bigger session later.

The free tier does let you build an unlimited number of apps — there’s no cap there. But every app you publish keeps Base44’s default branding, and you can’t attach a custom domain unless you pay.

Paid tiers: what more money buys

Base44 has five paid tiers, and all of them bump up both credit pools together:

• Starter — US$20/month billed monthly (or an annual plan averaging US$16/month): 100 message credits and 2,000 integration credits a month. No custom domain.
• Builder — US$50/month billed monthly (US$40/month annual average): 250 message credits and 10,000 integration credits a month, plus a custom domain.
• Pro — US$100/month billed monthly (US$80/month annual average): 500 message credits and 20,000 integration credits a month.
• Elite — US$200/month billed monthly (US$160/month annual average): 1,200 message credits and 50,000 integration credits a month.
• Enterprise — custom pricing, not published on the site.

There are no promo codes or discount coupons. The only way to pay less is to commit to annual billing, which brings each tier down by roughly 20%.

Worth noting: none of the paid tiers mention a daily cap in the plan breakdown the way the free tier’s documentation does. The restriction that matters most on the free plan is the daily 5-credit ceiling, not the monthly 25 — so if you’re deciding whether to pay, that’s the number to weigh.

Figure: compiled by AMPM from its verified data (last verified 2026-10-03).

🔍 AMPM exclusive check

Base44’s marketing framing leads with “25 credits a month,” which is the number most people will remember. Digging into the actual account-and-billing documentation turns up the daily 5-credit ceiling that the headline figure glosses over — it’s there in the docs, but it’s not the number most readers will walk away with after skimming the pricing page. We also confirmed two details that don’t show up on the pricing page at all: integration-credit failures surface as generic errors to your app’s end users (not a billing-specific message), and unused credits — daily or monthly — expire with no rollover. Everything else matches the official documentation at docs.base44.com, checked most recently on 2026-10-03, with no discrepancies found.

☀️ AMO, the budget-minded cat

Twenty-five credits a month for free sounds like a fair trial, until you realize you can only touch 5 of them per day. That’s not a monthly allowance, it’s a daily ration with a monthly ceiling bolted on — and if you don’t use your daily 5, they’re gone, not saved for tomorrow. For someone just poking around to see if conversational app-building works at all, that’s survivable: make a few changes, come back tomorrow, make a few more. But it rules out any serious weekend project where you want to iterate fast.

The jump to paid is steep for what you get. Starter at US$20/month (or US$16/month paid annually) gives you 100 message credits and 2,000 integration credits a month — four times the message allowance of free, but there’s no mention of Starter having a daily cap, which is the real upgrade: unrestricted daily access instead of a 5-a-day throttle. Builder at US$50/month adds a custom domain, which matters the moment you want to show someone a real URL instead of a Base44-branded placeholder. Jumping all the way to Pro (US$100/month) or Elite (US$200/month) only makes sense if you’re running integration-heavy apps — sending a lot of email, generating a lot of images, calling an LLM repeatedly — since integration credits scale much faster than message credits across the tiers. For a single small app with light use, Starter is the realistic floor; free is for testing the waters, not building anything you depend on daily.

🌙 PIMI, the performance-minded cat

The actual app-building mechanism isn’t the problem here — the credit economy around it is. A 5-credit daily cap means your iteration loop is artificially slow: you can’t sit down and hammer out a feature in one sustained session once you’re on free, because the system cuts you off mid-work and makes you wait for a reset. For anyone used to iterating quickly — try something, see it fail, try again, five or six times in a row — that’s a real workflow tax, not just a minor inconvenience.

The bigger functional risk is on the integration side. Once your app is live and integration credits run dry, your app’s own users hit a generic error with zero indication that it’s a credit issue. If you’re running a real app for other people — not just a personal project — that’s an unacceptable failure mode on the free tier: you won’t know your app is “down” for your users until someone complains, because there’s no credit-specific warning surfaced to them.

Paid tiers scale integration credits aggressively — Builder jumps to 10,000 a month, Pro to 20,000, Elite to 50,000 — which suggests Base44 expects integration-heavy apps to need real headroom, and the free tier’s 100 a month is a rounding error by comparison. If the app is for anything beyond a demo, the free tier’s integration ceiling will be the first thing to break, not the message-credit side. Functionally, the platform seems built for people who pay; free is a taste test with training wheels bolted tight.

Verdict: who should use it, who should skip it

Base44’s free tier works for exploring whether conversational app-building suits you — expect roughly 3 to 5 edits a day, not 25 in one sitting, and plan around credits that don’t roll over. It’s a poor fit for anyone trying to build and ship something quickly, or for running a live app that real users depend on, since both the daily message cap and the 100-a-month integration ceiling bite fast. If you’re committing to the platform, Starter at US$20/month (or US$16/month annual) removes the daily throttle and is the real entry point; Builder’s custom domain at US$50/month is the next meaningful upgrade once you’re ready to share a real link. Heavy integration users — anything sending email or calling an LLM at volume — should budget for Pro or Elite rather than trying to make the free tier’s 100 integration credits stretch.

Written: 2026-10-05 Price last verified: 2026-10-03 Tool last health-checked: 2026-10-05

🔗 Related on AMPM

• Base44 pricing & free tier

📎 Sources

All prices and quotas in this article come from AMPM’s verified dataset for Base44 (last verified 2026-10-03); primary sources:

• https://base44.com/pricing
• https://base44.com/

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