I hit the "Credit Limit" wall with Vibe Coding. Here is how I fixed it.
I have been in AI and ML for 25+ years. I’m a 3x entrepreneur and I’ve built large-scale enterprise systems. I know how to code, and I actually enjoy it, but I love solving problems more.
When the "Vibe Coding" wave hit (Lovable, Bolt, Replit, etc.), I was ecstatic. Finally, I could raid my idea graveyard and build the things I never had time for.
I signed up for the $25/mo accounts. I wrote my first prompt. I saw the beautiful preview.
Honest truth? I was stunned. Even with my background, the speed felt like magic.
But the mirage didn't last.
The "First-Gen" Problem
It didn’t take long to realize that these tools are WYSI(n)WYG (What You See Is NOT What You Get).
- The UI looked great, but the backend wires were dangling unplugged.
- The data were dummy.
- Basic functionality was broken.
I’m patient. I know AI makes mistakes. So, I did what we all do: I asked the agent to fix it. It spun. It wrote code. It fixed old mistakes but made new ones. I asked it to fix that.
And then I hit the wall. "You have run out of credits."
That’s when the $25/mo. facade came crashing down. I ended up spending ~6X my budget, and my app code was becoming a spaghetti mess. That's when it hit me that the platform was incentivized to keep moving the finish line, burning tokens, and buying top-ups.
The realization: First-gen vibe coding platforms are optimized for the dopamine rush of the prototype. They are not optimized for the finish line.
Fixing the Business Model
I decided that if I wanted a production-ready app, I had to change the rules. It is NOT FAIR for the vibe coding platforms to charge me for the coding mistakes of its AI Agent.
So, I built Avery.dev.
Avery is the "Second-Gen" evolution of AI Coding. It is an AI Virtual Engineer designed for Viable Coding, converting ideas into viable businesses, not just pretty screenshots.
How we are different:
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No Credit Limits: We charge a flat monthly fee. We don't profit when the AI messes up; we only win when you stay subscribed because your app works.
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Unlimited Iterations: The cost of "getting it right" is on us, not you.
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Import Your Code: If you started on Lovable, Replit, or Bolt and hit a wall, you can import your code to Avery. We pick up where they left off.
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Dogfooding: We built Avery using Avery. We wouldn't want you to run your business on Avery if we couldn't trust it to run ours. How many vibe-coding platforms today can say that!
The Results
From Vibe: Recently, I tried to build a trading dashboard in one of the popular vibe coding platforms. Twenty Five minutes in, I had a beautiful preview: live charts, news feed, stock screener, the works. Then I tried to actually use it.
- The charts rendered weird.
- The modules couldn't be dragged or resized.
- The news section was hallucinating stories.
- The screener returned wrong results.
What looked like a working app was still a pretty mockup with half the wires unplugged.
To Viable: Then, Avery built the version at zeta.avery.domains, working charts, real-time data, functional UI.
Same prompt. Different philosophy.
For the Indie Hackers
If you are currently stuck in the "Vibe Coding Hangover": great prototype, broken production, blown wallet, give Avery.dev a spin.
We have a 7-day free trial. But if you need more time to evaluate, DM me, and I’ll extend your trial.
Happy Building.
Why can't your target customers always find your product? - Experience sharing
The exact prompt that creates a clear, convincing sales deck
The hardest part of building in public isn’t shipping.
What made me stop building sooner than I used to
The misalignment between pricing models and actual value delivered is something I've noticed across AI tools generally. You burn credits on the AI's learning curve, not yours.
Your "we don't profit when the AI messes up" positioning is smart because it realigns incentives. The question is whether the economics work out for you at scale - flat fee means heavy users subsidised by lighter ones, and vibe coders tend to be heavy users by definition.
Curious whether you've found the sweet spot on pricing that makes the unlimited model sustainable. The per-seat enterprise model seems like the obvious fallback but loses the indie-friendly vibe.
Thanks for your thoughtful message. Your question is right.
The key insight is that "heavy use" looks different when the platform is optimized for completion.
On token-margin platforms, heavy use means endless iteration loops i.e. fixing AI mistakes, refactoring spaghetti, chasing a receding finish line. That's expensive for the user and profitable for the platform.
On Avery, heavy use means shipping one project, expanding on features/functionality and/or starting the next. We're architected to get you to production faster with cleaner code, so the iteration cost per project is structurally lower. A "heavy user" on Avery is someone building a growing SaaS business which is exactly who we want to keep.
The economics work because we are not reselling AI tokens at a margin. We are building product infrastructure where efficiency benefits us too. Every improvement we make to code generation quality reduces our compute costs and gets users to the finish line faster.
As for pricing tiers, we're still learning from early users. Right now we're optimizing for builders who want to ship, not tinker indefinitely. That self-selects somewhat. But you're right that there's tuning ahead as we learn from users' feedback.
Insightful! Its a great reminder that vibe coding helps us build fast prototypes, but real sustainability comes from refining the process and managing costs as we move towards a real product
I’m curious what LLMs you’re actually running under the hood here, since the behavior sounds very opinionated. Is it a single model or some kind of routing setup depending on task, or does that part even matter to users imo.