A real-world test of AI coding tools for business owners and marketers
Here's a frustration I'm guessing you'll recognize: you have an idea for a simple tool that would save you hours every week. A form, a calculator, an internal dashboard—nothing fancy. But you can't build it yourself, so it goes on the "someday" list. Or you pay a developer $2,000 for something that should have taken an afternoon.
I hit that wall last month. I needed a lead intake form for my wedding venue—something that would ask couples about their date, guest count, and budget, then route qualified leads to our sales process automatically. Basic stuff.
Here's the irony: I run a marketing agency that builds landing pages and web apps for clients every week. I own that wedding venue with custom booking systems. I consult with businesses on AI implementation. But when I needed a quick internal tool for my own operations? I was stuck waiting for developer availability like everyone else.
That frustration is what pushed me to actually test these "vibe coding" tools I'd been hearing about. The promise: describe what you want in plain English, and AI builds it for you. Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder, coined the term in February 2025, describing it as "fully giving in to the vibes" and accepting whatever code the AI generates.
I spent several weeks testing six different tools across real projects for my businesses. What I found: some of these tools genuinely deliver. Others will burn through your budget, fixing the same bug in circles. And one category is solving a completely different problem than what most business owners actually need.
Here's the breakdown—what works, what doesn't, and how to avoid the expensive mistakes I made figuring this out.
The Context: This Market Is Exploding
The AI code assistant market hit $5-12 billion in 2024, with projections reaching $18-47 billion by 2030. Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch included 25% of startups with codebases that were 95% AI-generated. Microsoft reports 30% of its code is now AI-written.
But here's what gave me pause: Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey found that while 84% of developers now use AI tools, trust dropped from over 70% to just 60% in one year. And 72% of professional developers explicitly say they're NOT vibe coding for production work.
That doesn't mean these tools aren't useful. It means you need to understand what they're actually good for—and where they'll waste your time and money.Replit: Why This Became My Go-To
I'll just say it upfront—Replit became my go-to.
Remember that lead intake form I mentioned? I built it in Replit in about 45 minutes. Described what I needed in plain English: a form that captures wedding date, guest count, venue preference, and budget range, stores submissions in a database, and sends me an email notification when someone qualifies based on our criteria.
Replit's Agent built the whole thing—frontend form, backend logic, database, and email integration. I made a few tweaks through conversation ("make the budget field a dropdown instead of open text"), and it was live. That form has been running at Modern Moments for three weeks now, handling real inquiries.
What hooked me was how fast I could go from idea to working prototype. Their September 2025 Agent 3 update made it even better—10x more autonomy, 200-minute autonomous sessions, and the ability to build full systems without constant hand-holding.
Pricing:
Starter: Free (includes $3 credits to test Agent)
Core: $20-25/month (full Agent access, $25 credits)
Teams: $35-40/user/month ($40 credits per user)
What works: Speed to prototype. Full-stack capability—frontend, backend, database, and hosting all handled. Genuinely accessible to non-developers. One-click deployment.
What doesn't: The effort-based pricing model can surprise you. After Agent 3 launched, some users reported spending $350 in a single day. The agent sometimes gets stuck in loops, trying the same failed fixes repeatedly. And in July 2025, there was a widely-reported incident where Replit's AI deleted a production database—then generated fake log entries to cover it up.
I haven't hit those extremes, but I've definitely burned more credits than expected when the AI went down the wrong path. Budget for 2-3x what you expect during development.
Lovable: Gorgeous Results, But Read the Fine Print
Lovable (formerly GPT Engineer) produces the most visually polished applications I've seen from any of these tools.
I tested it for a client landing page concept at Rocket Media—wanted to see if I could prototype something presentable before involving our dev team. The result looked professional enough to put in front of the client as a starting point. Clean React components, modern styling, responsive layout. What would normally take our team a day to mock up took me about an hour.
Their growth reflects real value—$200M annual revenue by November 2025, $1.8 billion valuation, 4.8/5 Trustpilot rating.
Pricing:
Free: 5 daily credits (max 30/month)
Pro: $25/month (100 monthly credits + 5 daily)
Business: $50/month (100 monthly + SSO)
What works: Visual quality is genuinely impressive. Speed for landing pages and marketing sites. The Figma-like editor lets you make direct modifications while keeping code control.
What you need to know: In March-May 2025, a security researcher discovered that 170 out of 1,645 analyzed Lovable-created apps had exploitable vulnerabilities. Exposed data included user databases, financial transactions, API tokens, and personal information. The root cause: missing security policies in the database layer that Lovable's scanner failed to catch.
A broader study found 2,000+ vulnerabilities across 5,600 vibe-coded applications.
This doesn't mean Lovable is uniquely bad—it means none of these tools should deploy to production without a security review. The code looks good. That doesn't mean it's safe.
N8N: Where I Hit the Wall
N8N is different from the others. It's not an app builder—it's a workflow automation platform, competing with Zapier and Make. I included it because automation is half the battle when you're trying to build business efficiencies.
The killer feature: per-execution pricing instead of per-task. A workflow with 50 steps counts as one execution, whereas Zapier would charge for all 50 tasks. For complex automations, N8N can be 10-20x cheaper. And the AI capabilities are genuinely impressive—native AI Agent nodes, integrations with Claude, GPT, and Gemini.
Pricing:
Self-hosted: Free (unlimited)
Starter Cloud: €20/month (2,500 executions)
Pro Cloud: €50/month (10,000 executions)
Where I hit the wall: I wanted to build a workflow that would take new inquiries from our venue contact form, enrich them with data from our CRM, score them based on fit criteria, and route them to different follow-up sequences.
The first two steps were easy. The visual interface made sense—drag nodes, connect them, configure settings. I had the form-to-CRM connection up and running in under an hour.
Then I tried to add conditional logic for the scoring. And branching paths for different lead types. And error handling for when the CRM lookup fails.
That's when I realized I was staring at something that looked like a flowchart designed by an engineer. Which is exactly what it is. I spent three hours trying to get the conditional branching to work correctly, became increasingly frustrated, and eventually realized I would need to either invest serious learning time or bring in someone technical.
The learning curve is 1-2 weeks minimum for anything beyond basic automations. One frustrated user I found online wrote: "I've been playing with N8N for 3 days. Result: I have not created one working automation." That matched my experience more than I'd like to admit.
The honest take: If you're willing to invest the time in learning, N8N's power is unmatched. The cost savings are real. However, if you require immediate results without a technical background, this probably isn't the right tool for you.
The Others: What Research Tells Us About Cursor, Bolt, and v0
I didn't test these three directly, so I'll keep this brief. Here's what the research and user reports say:
Cursor
Cursor is the power user's choice—valued at $29.3 billion, adopted by over 50% of Fortune 500 companies. It's a VS Code fork with sophisticated AI assistance.
Pricing: Free trial, $20/month Pro, up to $200/month Ultra
The catch for non-developers: Cursor assumes you understand code. File structures, terminals, and debugging—if you don't know these, you'll struggle. As one user warned: "If you don't understand the AI-generated code, you can't debug it when AI fails."
For developers, it is apparently excellent. For non-developers, probably not your starting point.
Bolt.new
Bolt.new is the speed champion—$4M to $40M annual revenue in under three months. Users report functional landing pages in under two hours.
Pricing: Free tier with 2.5M tokens, $20-200/month for more
The catch: Token consumption is brutal. Users report burning 20 million tokens trying to fix single issues. Trustpilot rating: 1.5 stars. Common complaint: "AI frequently loops, asking the same questions, depleting tokens with no progress."
v0 by Vercel
Here's where I want to save you frustration: v0 is NOT what most people think it is.
It's a UI component generator for Next.js developers. Not a complete app builder. No backend functionality whatsoever. Database integration, authentication, and business logic all require separate implementation.
Pricing: Free tier with $5 credits, $20/month Premium
If you're a business owner expecting complete applications from natural language descriptions, v0 will disappoint you. It's solving a different problem.
The Quick Reference Guide
How to Avoid the Expensive Mistakes
After several weeks of testing, here's the pattern I wish I'd known upfront:
The trap: These tools make the first 80% feel magical. You describe what you want, working code appears, and you feel like a genius. Then you hit an edge case, the AI loops on the same fix, and you burn hours (and credits) going nowhere.
The escape: Know what each tool is actually good for, and stop before you hit diminishing returns.
For rapid prototypes and internal tools: Start with Replit. Describe your project, let the agent build it, and deploy it. Budget 2-3x your expected costs. If it works, great. If you hit walls, you have a working prototype to hand off to a developer.
For client-facing marketing sites: Use Lovable for the visual prototype, then have someone technical review before deployment. The security issues are real.
For workflow automation: If your automation is simple (5-10 steps), use Zapier or Make. If it's complex and you're willing to learn, N8N's cost savings are substantial. If you need it working this week and it's complex, hire someone.
For production applications: None of these tools should handle customer data or payments without professional review. Full stop.
What Actually Worked
Three weeks after starting this experiment, here's where I landed:
The lead intake form I built in Replit is still running. It's handled dozens of real inquiries for Modern Moments. Not perfect—I've tweaked the qualification logic twice—but it works. Something that would have cost me $1,500-2,000 from a contractor cost me about $50 in Replit credits and an afternoon.
The landing page concept I prototyped in Lovable impressed our client enough to greenlight the project. Our dev team rebuilt it properly, but the prototype saved a week of back-and-forth on design direction.
N8N is still sitting there, half-finished workflow mocking me. I'll either invest the time to learn it properly or hand it off to someone technical. Haven't decided yet.
The vibe coding revolution is real. These tools genuinely enable non-developers to build things that were previously impossible. But they're not magic. The gap between "working prototype" and "production-ready" is still significant—and understanding where that gap lives is the difference between saving thousands and wasting weeks.
If you're experimenting with any of these tools, I'd genuinely like to hear what's working for you—and what isn't.
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