The feature Emergent.sh needs the most is transparency

Emergent is a promising vibe-coding platform. But their pricing plans are messed up, and their cost to deploy apps can give users a bad experience.

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.