Introduction
We started Lovable with a simple belief: those closest to a problem should have the power to solve it.
For most of software's history, that wasn't possible. The distance between an idea and a working product was too wide. Crossing it required code, capital, credentials, and connections.
So most people stayed on the other side. Their ideas lived in conversations, notebooks, and their imagination, but rarely made it into the world as working software.
Over the last 18 months, that's started to change.
This report is a first look into what the change looks like at scale, offering the first real view into the signs of economic activity beginning to emerge. It draws directly from Lovable's product usage data between January 2025 and May 2026 alongside user survey data from May 2026.
Together, these signals begin to point at a real societal shift. It's not only how software gets built that's changing, but also who gets to participate in the next wave of economic creation.
Who is building?
Srdjan Stakic
Founder, Alvis · United States
After entering remission from stage four cancer and taking on a greater role caring for his aging parents, Srdjan Stakic began exploring how technology could help families monitor the health and safety of loved ones at home. Despite having no prior coding experience, he used Lovable to build Alvis, a care platform that can detect falls, summarize medical information, and notify caregivers or emergency responders when help is needed. Alvis is built around safety, dignity, and long-term wellbeing, helping families respond to urgent incidents while also noticing subtle changes in health over time. What began as a personal solution has since grown into a startup focused on making intelligent care monitoring more accessible to others.
FoundersDesignersSales Professionals
55%
Many people bring more than a decade of professional experience and are applying years of industry knowledge, operational expertise, and customer understanding to the products they create.
2 in 3
Technology is the largest self-reported industry among survey respondents, but nearly two thirds come from outside it, spanning education, retail, media, finance, healthcare, real estate, and beyond. Software creation is no longer concentrated in a single sector.
What are people building?
Sabrine Matos
Founder, Plinq · Brazil
Sabrine built Plinq after a widely publicized case of gender-based violence in Brazil revealed how difficult it was for women to access public criminal history information before entering relationships. Using Lovable, she launched a platform that lets women run instant background checks using public criminal and legal records. In its first months, Plinq helped women identify hundreds of potentially dangerous situations before they escalated.
People build what they know
The strongest predictor of what someone builds is often what they already do. Across professions, people consistently gravitate toward building products that reflect their existing knowledge, workflows, and customer needs.
When are people building?
30%
weekdays vs weekends
Activity follows a classic workweek rhythm, a pattern that has remained remarkably stable over time. The data suggests that software creation is increasingly becoming part of people's professional routines rather than something reserved for nights and weekends.
Where do people build from?
Frankie and Pelumi
FOUNDERS, ARA · NIGERIA
Frankie and Pelumi are a couple based in Nigeria who built ARA after noticing how digital systems are designed to capture attention with little awareness of how the person using them actually feels. They built an emotional intelligence layer on Lovable and were accepted into the NVIDIA Inception Program. Their consumer app, named ARA, works in a simple way where users check in with color instead of text. Every nine minutes, it asks you to pick a color that represents how you feel in that moment. It is a quick emotional check-in, almost like a pause button for your mind.
United States
Building from anywhere
Lovable has at least one active user in every recognized country in the world except for ten uninhabited or near-uninhabited dependent territories. This includes a handful of people distributed in places like Antarctica, Vatican City, and on remote Pacific Islands.
Building happens not only in major economies and dense urban markets, but also in places with very small populations and limited local technology infrastructure. The data suggests that the barriers to participating in software creation are becoming increasingly lightweight and internet-native.
Why do people build?
Isabel, Andreas, and Eric
Founders, Klar · Sweden
Isabel Storgårds, Andreas Melander, and Eric Götborg built Klar after experiencing firsthand how fragmented learning still is. Using Lovable, they created Klar, the first agent for learning, designed to help people transform information into understanding, practice, and measurable progress. Klar surpassed $130K ARR within its first month, reached thousands of users, and is already expanding into enterprise and research partnerships to reimagine how humans learn globally.
3 in 5
The data shows that monetization is the norm rather than the exception. The broader pattern is consistent: software creation is increasingly connected to entrepreneurship, income generation, and economic opportunity.
50Mprojects built to date1Mnew projects built every week720Mvisits to Lovable-built projects every month
4 in 5
Four in five Lovable users identify with non-technical roles. It’s clear that software creation is increasingly expanding beyond traditional technical functions and into the broader teams responsible for starting, growing, and operating businesses.
1 in 5
The share of teams building on Lovable has nearly doubled. Most Lovable users are individuals, but team and workplace usage is growing rapidly.
Building by gender
Before platforms like Lovable existed, software creation was almost exclusively the domain of professional developers, a community that has also historically been dominated by men. Initiatives like Lovable's SheBuilds programs aim to further diversify who creates software, but there is more work to be done.
What people are building
People are building practical software: the first thing they build is a digital presence for their business, and the second is the software that runs it. Together those two themes account for nearly half of all classified projects in 2026.
New year boom
The first week of January showed a period of elevated activity, as users returned from the holidays ready to build.
The trend could suggest that building software is starting to enter the same annual goal-setting cycle as entrepreneurship, fitness, and career change.
The US
Five continents are represented among Lovable’s largest communities, highlighting the increasingly global reach of software creation. This distribution suggests that while large technology markets still dominate overall activity, participation is becoming less tied to geography than in previous generations of software creation.
The world
1 in 2
More than half of builders are working on a business, and another quarter are turning side projects into something they hope to monetize. Most of what's being built is intended to make money — not just experiments or hobbies.
How do people define success?
People are building toward something tangible: a launched product, a paying customer, a tool the team relies on everyday. Lovable-built apps now receive 720M monthly visits, roughly 27x the number of active builders, suggesting that what people build is reaching audiences far beyond the builders themselves.
Conclusion
The story of this emerging economy is not only about software, but also about the downstream impacts of what happens when more people can act on their ideas. Across professions, industries, and geographies, people are building products that would not have existed just a few years ago. Some are solving problems in the professional industries they know best, while others are creating businesses, new sources of income, or tools for their local communities.
Together, they offer an early glimpse of a world where people closest to a problem have the power to solve it themselves.
Methodology
Insights for this report were derived from anonymized platform activity data from Lovable between January 2025 and May 2026 alongside survey responses collected from 14,300+ users between May 22 and May 29, 2026. The analysis draws from millions of product interactions, project creation events, usage patterns, and aggregated geographic indicators, alongside self-reported survey data on professional background, motivations, project goals, and monetization intent.
The report captures emerging patterns within Lovable’s user base to provide an early lens into a broader societal shift, particularly in how people worldwide are adopting software creation as part of their lives.
All reporting was conducted on anonymized and aggregated datasets to protect user privacy.
The build economya first look
Who's making software, what they're building, and what it signals now that the barrier to creating has all but disappeared.