As AI coding services face a reckoning, Bolt tries to go beyond building

Business Insider

16 hours ago

AI coding startups are facing a reckoning, with questions about pricing models and customer churn. Eric Simons, CEO of startup StackBlitz, has been working on potential solutions.
StackBlitz runs a popular AI coding service called Bolt.new, and on Thursday the startup rolled out new features and an updated subscription aimed at keeping customers engaged on its platform for longer, Business Insider learned exclusively.
In the crowded AI coding market, many startups rely on reselling AI inference. They pay for access to AI models from frontier labs and Big Tech providers, then charge customers for their bespoke coding services — hoping to make a profit on the difference.
However, once users finish building a project, there's less reason to stick around. That increases the chance that some customers cancel their subscriptions.
Simons is seeing churn rates across the AI coding market running at 20% to 40%. He declined to say what Bolt's churn rate is; however, he noted that Wix, a more traditional website-building service, has much lower churn rates. That's because Wix generates the bulk of its recurring revenue from hosting and similar stickier offerings, rather than one-off project creation.
"This is the problem across all these companies right now. The churn rate for everyone is really high," Simons said. "You have to build a retentive business."
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Adding more valuable, stickier services on top of these models is the goal now, and Simons is repositioning Bolt with a new mantra, "Build Without Boundaries."
"The challenge here is that if your business is purely AI, reselling AI inference, your business is very fragile and vulnerable, because the winds can shift violently," Simons added.
One solution is to offer a broader array of tools that bring more users into your ecosystem.
This is why Bolt launched a subscription overhaul on Thursday aimed at making the service more of an end-to-end platform, not just a building tool.
Pricing will remain the same for most tiers, with only the entry-level plan rising from $20 to $25 a month. Every plan will now include hosting, domains, databases, serverless functions, authentication, SEO optimization, Stripe-powered payments, and analytics for an unlimited number of projects.
Bolt is partnering with companies such as infrastructure leader Netlify and database provider Supabase to provide the same scale and reliability used by major tech companies, but wrapped into one subscription.
The idea is to keep users in the Bolt ecosystem well past the initial creation phase. Instead of exporting their projects to another host or backend service, users can launch, run, and scale them without leaving the Bolt platform. Pay-as-you-go pricing will kick in only for unusually high traffic, with user-set caps to avoid surprise bills, Simons told Business Insider.
Simons sees this approach resonating with two main audiences: "prosumers," solo builders and entrepreneurs launching new products; and B2B product teams that use Bolt for rapid prototyping and internal tools. For the latter, staying in Bolt isn't just convenient; it embeds the platform into their ongoing workflow, making it harder to leave.
By going "beyond building" and integrating the entire product lifecycle into one subscription, Simons hopes to shift Bolt from being a one-off AI tool to an essential part of its customers' day-to-day operations.
Indeed, other AI coding services, Replit and Lovable, offering extra features now too, such as hosting.
In an industry where the winds can change fast, the bet is that offering a complete, durable ecosystem is the only way to scale sustainably.