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Built without permission
The program is Founder University, a pre-accelerator that runs in countries including Saudi Arabia and Japan. Its founder would never have approved building the software, because it would have cost $500,000, and that money was better spent getting more founders into the program. She built it in Lovable without asking permission, and the software now drives the program.
The program exists because of its economic impact, so the founder asked for a report on the economic impact of the 50 companies in it. She gave Lovable some human prompting, and it factored in how many people work at each company, what they pay in taxes, how much they rent their homes for, and what their average salary is. It produced something the founder could never have afforded to build.
The cost and the risk
Counting the employee's time at $50 to $70 an hour plus the Lovable subscription, the whole thing was made for less than $2,000 over a year.
The first worry was security and keeping data from leaking. The program's team went through it with Lovable's team, and the program is comfortable with the result.
Why can building custom software cost so much?
Custom software needs product managers, designers, engineers, and testers working for months, and each of those salaries adds up before any feature ships. The software must also be maintained after launch, which means ongoing fixes and updates. Frederick Brooks argued in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month that adding people to a late project often delays it further. Costs of a few hundred thousand dollars are common for a small internal platform.
How do reports estimate a company's economic impact?
Economists estimate impact by counting direct effects, such as wages and taxes, and then the spending those wages cause elsewhere. Wassily Leontief, who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in economics, developed the input-output method behind many such models. A multiplier summarizes how many additional dollars each original dollar produces in the wider economy. The inputs, such as headcount, salary, and rent, are exactly the figures the founder asked Lovable to use.
How does data leak from an app built with AI?
Most leaks come from access rules that are missing or too loose, so a user can read records that belong to someone else. The OWASP Foundation ranked broken access control as the most common web application security risk in its 2021 list. A database that holds many customers' data needs a rule for every table saying who may see which rows. A review of those rules is what a security check on a new app looks for.
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