Imagine you’re checking out Tesla’s or BMW’s website. You see their pricing page. You look at the pricing and think, “Wow, I can’t afford that right now.”

You then see a link that says, “For those with budgets of $10,000 and below.”

You get excited. That’s something you can manage to spend.

You click on it and see a message: “Go and buy a used car.”

How offensive is that?

Supercut did the same thing, but for software.

Their pricing page has a Free option. When you click on it, you see this message:

“Looking for a free, basic video messaging tool? Use Loom’s free tier.

Or maybe it’s time you raise the bar?”

I see several problems with this section. Let’s list them one by one.

A fake free plan isn’t cool. It’s insulting.

When you add a “Free” option to your pricing page, you’re giving hope to someone who can’t afford $18 per month. That person might be from India, Africa, Thailand, or South America - people who want a tool like Supercut but can’t afford it because of their currency.

Users who’ve tried software before know that freemium models are limited. But freemium gives them room to explore and see if it meets their needs. If they grow using your product and can’t live without it, they eventually upgrade.

Showing a free option and then telling them to check out Loom’s pricing page is insulting.

Don’t include the free option at all. Apps like Superhuman and Motion don’t have free plan.

They have higher-than-normal prices, but they justify it by telling the users how much money it can save for them.

Supercut and Loom are priced the same

It’s not like Supercut is cheaper than Loom. Loom also costs $15 (billed annually)—the same as Supercut.

There’s a good chance people who go to Loom from Supercut’s fake free plan will end up using Loom’s actual free plan and eventually upgrade to their business plan.

Why not refer tools that are actually free!

If you want to be truly selfless, do your leads a favor and refer them to a useful free tool like Cap.so, which free and open-source. And, it’s on par with apps like ScreenStudio in terms of quality.

Why refer Loom?

Because the monthly pricing of Supercut ($18) is less than Loom ($24)? Because Loom’s free plan offers video export only up to 720p? Hmm…

What they could’ve done instead?

Supercut could have approached this in multiple ways.

Option 1: Remove the fake free tier. They could have removed the three-tier section from the pricing page entirely. We understand that having a Pro plan and an Enterprise plan is standard—nobody would question it. Apps like MyMind makes a case on their website for why their app doesn’t have a free plan. I love it. Follow the same. Don’t create a fake free tier just for UX aesthetics and then scramble to fill it with something that insults your prospects.

Option 2: Offer a real free plan with limits. They could have offered a genuine free plan with limited video generation. Let users create videos with all the features, but cap it at one or two videos. If they want to create a third video, they’d need to upgrade to a paid plan. This approach works because it lets users try the product without entering credit card details, which lowers the barrier to entry.

Option 3: Create a referral program for free users. They could have offered free users a way to earn credits through referrals. For example, give 3 video credits to users for every person who upgrades through their referral link. This creates a win-win situation: free users get to create more videos, and Supercut gains paying customers through word-of-mouth growth.

I understand the concern that free plans can prevent upgrades. Everyone has different beliefs about how to sell their software—whether through a free version, open source, freemium, or paid-only models. That’s fine. But don’t add a fake free tier just for the sake of it.

I recently posted a tweet on X about why it was impossible for me to ship production-ready apps with Replit, and I mentioned that I’m thinking of switching to apps like Base44 or Mocha.

I mentioned all three vibe coding platforms. And the tweet got zero attention from any of the brands.

I wasn’t doing this for engagement farming. I have an annual plan of Replit Core, and I’ve been struggling to get something shipped for the last eighteen months. And I really wanted to switch to a platform that will help me do that.

But no one cared.

If this were five years back, things would’ve been different.

A marketer or a support person from Replit would’ve jumped in and replied about why the feature wasn’t available yet and offered a timeline.

Marketers or founders from Base44 and Mocha would’ve jumped in, explaining why their platform is better.

In some extreme cases, other vibe coding platforms like Bolt and Lovable would’ve jumped in, asking about what I’m building, and would explain why their platform would be the best.

But none of that happened.

I was frustrated with a product, and I publicly announced that I was ready to switch. But no one persuaded me to switch.

This clearly shows how vibe coding platforms approach marketing today. They focus exclusively on customer acquisition through popular channels like hackathons and influencer marketing, ignoring customer touchpoints that drive conversions and retention.

Let’s dive deep into why this is happening and what the long-term consequences of leaving money on the table might be.

The new age marketing playbook of vibe coding platforms

Today, vibe coding platforms and other AI companies are acquiring users through three major channels:

1. Influencer marketing

These days, influencers sell more AI than the AI companies themselves.

They promise us the moon and say things like, “I’ve built a Netflix clone or Twitter clone in 2 hours.” The videos are getting hundreds of thousands of views, and everyone is signing up for a trial.

There’s even a 15-20% discount users get through an affiliate link.

This is a great way to get users. No denying that. The growth numbers for these apps are crazy. Everybody is talking about reaching $50M or $100M ARR. But nobody is talking about the churn.

Nobody talks about how they’ve scaled their support teams to handle the queries of hundreds of thousands of ‘vibe coders.’ I haven’t seen anyone from these companies discussing their customer retention strategies.

User numbers can increase valuation and help the founders raise the next round. But support and customer success will help in building a loyal brand that will go a long way.

2. Hackathons

Vibe coding platforms are going all-in on hackathons as their primary user acquisition strategy, and the numbers are staggering.

Bolt hosted what they called the “World’s Largest Hackathon” in 2025 with over 130,000 participants. They offered more than $1 million in prize money, with a $100,000 grand prize for first place. The event ran for an entire month (May 30 to June 30, 2025) and attracted builders from every continent.

Lovable took a different approach with multiple smaller, high-intensity events throughout the year.

These hackathons are massive user acquisition funnels. Bolt’s 130,000 participants all signed up for accounts, tried the platform, and many continued building beyond the hackathon deadline. Lovable’s strategy of running frequent, themed events keeps bringing users back and creates multiple touchpoints throughout the year.

But here’s the problem: What happens after the hackathon ends?

3. Starter packs

Beyond hackathons, vibe coding platforms also leverage educational partnerships and starter packs to acquire users. They collaborate with programs like the GitHub Student Developer Pack and AI Engineer Pack in partnership with Eleven Labs to offer free pro plans for extended periods—sometimes six months to a year.

The strategy makes sense on paper. Students and professionals get free access to premium features, experiment with the platform, build projects, and ideally become paying customers.

However, the same retention question remains unanswered: How many of these students convert to paying users? What’s the upsell strategy when the free period ends? What ongoing engagement happens between the initial signup and the moment they need to pull out their credit card?

I’ve tried most of the vibe coding apps, and I’ve never gotten an upsell email from 90% of the platforms I tried.

You can’t spend on user acquisition like you have an endless source of funds. A crucial part of your user acquisition should happen automatically. And that is possible only when you focus on other aspects of marketing, support, and customer success.

Why has marketing taken a back seat?

I honestly don’t know.

I recently came across a chart on LinkedIn, made from the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) job report, that spoke about essential skills for 2030.

If you observe closely, essential skills like marketing and media, quality control, and attention to detail are marked as ‘out-of-focus skills’.

And skills like customer service and empathy are moved to steady skills, which are not expected to increase in use.

This shows what’s wrong with the technology landscape today.

You focus on innovation and momentum, but not on marketing, quality control, and attention to detail. And you don’t deploy enough resources to onboard, train, and support your users.

Result? Millions of users will sign up, try the new AI products for a while, and then switch to another service or lose interest and do nothing.

How can vibe coding platforms fix this?

The core of your technology product shouldn’t be the technology—it should be the users.

So, how can we empower and retain them?

• Answer prospect and customer queries on social media: Banks, insurance companies, and airlines are extremely proactive on social media when it comes to user complaints. They know that immediate acknowledgement—even just saying, “We hear you, and we’ll get back to you”—is key to delivering a better customer experience.

• Build a community around use cases: Vibe coding shouldn’t be positioned as a means to build products that make money. It should also be positioned as an alternative for people to build their own personal software that saves them hundreds of dollars in subscription costs. Vibe coding platforms can run a community around this idea on platforms like Flarum or Discourse so people can easily discover a wide range of use cases.

• Weekly use case and feature showcase on YouTube: Vibe coding platforms can use YouTube to communicate to their audience. They can address bug issues, highlight a project of the week or month, and also talk about new features. Google’s Chrome for Developers YouTube channel does an outstanding job here.

• Targeted email marketing campaigns: This is such an underrated strategy. When credits drop below a certain threshold, send an email. If users cancel, ask why and offer a promo code for a small discount. Show a contextual upsell popup when they log in. These might seem old-school, but they work.

The success of vibe coding platforms depends on balancing innovation with fundamentals such as responsive support, active community management, transparent communication, and strategic retention efforts. Companies that recognize this imbalance first and pivot accordingly will likely emerge as the true leaders in this space.

Building loyal customers requires more than just a revolutionary product; it demands meaningful relationships that extend beyond customer acquisition.

My enthusiasm about Emergent faded when the screen showed that I should spend 50 credits/month for deploying my vibe-coded app. That’s half of what I paid for their Standard plan.

Emergent’s $20 standard plan comes with 100 credits, and deploying your app will cost you 50 credits (worth ~$10). And you won’t come to know about it until you click the ‘Deploy’ button.

My app needed a few finishing touches, and I had 50.86 credits in my account.

Emergent gave me an ultimatum.

Use the remaining 50 credits (worth $10) for development and deploy the app next month when the credits renew, or buy more credits to deploy your app.

It was frustrating because the app deployment is currently free on most vibe coding platforms like Base44, Bolt, and Lovable (not sure about Lovable though).

So what does a $10 deployment in Emergent give me? Does it give more compute? Does it have a CDN? Or something more advanced than the other vibe-coded apps?

I don’t know.

And the text on the screen is ambiguous. It says,

“50 credits for the first deployment.”

What does that mean? What if I make a change and push the app to deployment again? Will I be charged another 50 credits?

I have no idea.

But, digging through the support documents had given me the following information about deployment.

You can relace your existing deployments with a new deployments without any additional charges, this will help you iterate on complex applications spanning across jobs.

None of this was mentioned on their landing page or pricing page. Even their $200 and $300 plans don’t talk about deployment. Strange.

They get thousands of users signing up each day. I’m sure a big portion of them would’ve felt the same way I did when they tried to deploy their app.

Asking a user to buy more credits when they’re about to deploy their app is not a great user experience. The user feels cheated (I sure felt), and will never come back again.

I’ll come back to that later.

Let’s look at other transparency and UX issues in Emergent that bothered me.

Their landing page is hidden in plain sight

Yes! If you’re a first-time user curious about the app, good luck finding more information about the platform.

When you go to Emergent’s website, you only see the sign-in page.

You think the only way to know about the platform is to sign in.

But if you accidentally scroll the page, you’ll see the landing page hiding in the second fold, right below the sign-in form.

It is a clever strategy. But it also feels like a trick to increase their new user sign-ups.

Note:

They’ve recently added a carousel and a “Scroll down to see magic” indicator to denote the landing page. It makes me hopeful that they’ll listen and fix the other issues as well.

The pricing page is not designed for non-coders

The pricing page doesn’t mention deployment, and the pricing comparison only talks about credits, context window, GitHub integration, system prompts edit, etc. These are things developer-turned-vibe coders care about.

If their user persona is people with no coding experience, they should talk about things that their persona cares about.

They need to say that their plans come with databases, authentication, and payment gateway integrations. They can talk about Emergent’s native LLM key, etc.

Base44 does an excellent job at communicating this.

Base44 even goes a step further and adds an objection handling section that shows a list of features users get on all the plans.

The problem with Emergent is their marketing copy sounds like it was written for developers and not the actual audience, who I believe are people with minimal or no coding experience. They need to fix that.

Editing files is difficult for non-coders

Let’s say you’ve vibe coded your app. You now want to paste the Google Analytics code on the header. How do you do it?

You need to do it from the code editor.

But, the code editor in Emergent isn’t designed for non-coders. When you click on the ‘code’ button, you click on the code, it shows a pop-up with a link and password to a VS code instance. It opens up VS code inside your browser where you can make the changes.

Actions like this are so easy in platforms like Replit. Everything is built-in and you’ll exactly know what’s going on.

Emergent’s email marketing is way off

After I signed up for a $20 plan, I got an email that said I was among the top 100 users and I have a reward.

I was excited.

I then scrolled down to the body of the email, and I saw this:

Weekend All-In Deal (24 hours only): 20% OFF + 20% bonus credits on top-ups and purchases of $500+ | Use Code: BONUS20

If I had $500, why am I signing up for a $20 plan? This email absolutely makes sense for someone who is using a $200 plan. But why me?

A simple segmentation based on users’ plans would’ve gotten Emergent’s team better results for this email campaign. Or maybe this email campaign got them better results. If it did, I’m the fool then.

‘First-Deployment is on us’ campaign

While I was writing this piece, I got an email that said, “Your first deployment is on us.”

Even though it didn’t solve the problem of paying $10 every month after the first month, I felt heard even though I didn’t raise the deployment issue with the support team.

But then I read the email.

It said that I’ll have to deploy my app and fill out a form mentioning my emergent-registered email, and they’ll add the credits back.

The email also said that this isn’t for everyone, but only for a small group of active builders.

I don’t get the point of this campaign.

The end goal of a vibe-coded app is deployment. Everyone who paid $20 like me would’ve been stuck at the deployment stage. All those people are just one more frustrating user experience away from switching platforms.

Offering one month’s worth of deployment for an app is not going to help.

What’s the solution? Increase your prices and be transparent

I signed up for Base44’s $50 plan after my experience with Emergent. Only because I know I can host any number of apps, and I like the way their pricing page has communicated everything.

The best way for Emergent to fix it is by doing three things:

1. Be transparent in the pricing page: Tell your users how many apps they can deploy, what features or add-ons are available under each plan, etc.

2. Increase their pricing: Increase your pricing by $10 and say it covers the deployment of your first app. Additional deployments can be priced at $7/month or something. This will avoid a lot of confusion. The better way is to have a basic deployment for 10 credits (static sites) and increase it based on the complexity of the app. You can use an agent to monitor the complexity of the app to predict this.

3. Segment your users better and send them relevant emails.

Final thoughts

Emergent is a promising platform. They’ve got all the right ingredients to be at the top. They’re the only platform that has the agent to build and deploy mobile apps. That’s a huge advantage.

But they’ll have to reduce surprises for their users when they’re inside the app. They need to include deployment as part of their plans and educate their user base about what they’re paying for.

They should also be more aware of their user segments before sending marketing campaigns.

I hope the leadership at Emergent sees this. I’d be happy to edit this blog post or post another review once these items are fixed.