Built with AI, sold to a person
Selling an app built with Lovable, Replit or Cursor
A buyer looking at an app built with Lovable or Replit asks the usual questions about revenue and retention. Two more follow: whether anyone besides the founder can maintain the code, and how the app leaves the founder's accounts.
What a buyer asks about AI-written code
Acquire.com tells buyers that AI-assisted development is not a red flag by itself. The risk starts where speed took the place of review and testing. It suggests asking who wrote the code and how much of it came from an AI.
The question that moves the price is whether anyone besides the founder understands the code. If the answer is no, Acquire's advice to buyers is to price in the cost of a rebuild.
An app written in Cursor or Claude Code lives in an ordinary repository and moves like any other codebase. The maintenance question applies to it all the same.
Who owns what the tool wrote
Lovable Terms of Service, effective 15 August 2026; Replit Terms of Service, updated 3 August 2026.
The same Lovable terms warn that the output may be similar or identical to what other users get from similar prompts. Acquire puts problems with IP ownership among the ones much harder to fix than messy financials.
Moving it to the buyer
Four things change hands when an app built in Lovable is sold, each by its own route. The catch on each tag comes from Lovable's own docs and terms.
Code
syncs both ways, then deploys outside Lovable
Project
you join theirs first; changing the owner alone leaves you with full access
Address
Lovable owns lovable.app and every subdomain under it
Data
no one-click path: export, then rebuild the schema
Changing the project's owner inside your own workspace is not enough, because Lovable gives a workspace owner full access to every project in it. The project moves to the buyer's workspace once the buyer adds you as a member there, and it keeps its history.
If the data already sits in a separate Supabase project, the route is shorter. Supabase transfers a project to another organization if you own the source one, the buyer adds you to theirs and the GitHub integration is switched off. Neither Lovable Cloud nor Supabase changes a project's region on the way.
Deals Tonic works with apps and SaaS from $20K a month. When a business runs on Lovable Cloud, Replit or a Supabase project in someone's personal account, the move to the buyer's accounts is part of what we plan with the founder, along with a plain answer to who can maintain the code.
Sources: Acquire.com, "9 Red Flags to Watch for When Doing SaaS Due Diligence in 2026", updated 19 July 2026. Lovable Terms of Service, effective 15 August 2026, and Lovable Documentation: "Sync your Lovable project with GitHub", "Projects in Lovable", "Project settings" and "Lovable Cloud". Replit Terms of Service, updated 3 August 2026. Supabase Docs, "Project Transfers". Checked 23 and 24 September 2026.
Tell us what it runs on
Free, and off the record until NDA
Deal. We’ll be back
before the ice melts.
Andrew Levenko
I run off-market M&A for online businesses: fintech, martech and consumer apps. Operator before that, scaled payments to $50M GMV. Based in the UAE.