How to choose an AI app builder (the questions that matter)

We are not going to publish a ranked table with other companies' prices in it — those change monthly and half of them would be wrong by the time you read this. What lasts is the set of questions to ask any builder, including this one. Ask them in a trial, before you pay.

If the answer is no, everything you build is a rental. Ask whether export includes the whole project, whether it runs outside the platform, and whether your private keys are excluded from the download. In Buildr, export is a ZIP of the source on paid plans, public configuration included and private keys never.

Per-seat pricing hides the fact that generation costs money, so it usually comes with an invisible ceiling. Ask what a single edit costs, whether unused allowance rolls over, and what happens at zero. Ours: credits, visible per message, plan credits roll over, purchased credits are spent last, and at zero your published apps keep serving while new builds pause.

For phone apps this decides who owns the listing, the reviews and the revenue. Publishing through your own Apple and Google accounts is more setup on day one and far less pain later. Be suspicious of anything that promises to skip store review.

Any builder that lets your app call an outside service is holding a secret for you. Ask where it is stored, whether it is ever sent to the browser, and whether it lands in exported code. If the honest answer is not "encrypted, server-side only, never in the export", assume the key is one screenshot away from being public.

This is the one nobody tests. Turn off the network, submit something impossible, ask for a feature it cannot build. A tool that shows a fake progress bar rather than an error is a tool that will lie to you later, at a worse moment.