Bolt-style AI app builders meter tokens, and the intuition "one app ≈ one budget" is wrong by an order of magnitude. The expensive thing is the iteration loop: every "make the button blue" round-trip re-sends context and regenerates files, so a session of small tweaks costs multiples of the initial scaffold.
Practical consequences on a free allowance:
Batch your changes — one message with five edits costs far less than five messages. Do cosmetic edits in the code panel yourself instead of prompting for them. And when a generation goes sideways, revert and re-prompt rather than asking the model to fix its own mess step by step — corrective dialogue is the most token-expensive activity there is.
The scaffold is the cheap part. Budget for the conversation.
What the free tier covers and where it runs out in practice: https://toolfreebie.com/bolt-new-free-app-builder/
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