Escape the Third-Party API Trap

What I really like about Lovable’s new moves is that they’re pivoting toward a model where they no longer fully depend on third-party APIs.

I’ve seen this dependency problem destroy value before. At memmo.me, our entire business depended on celebrities creating content. One celebrity deciding to stop could hurt our platform. At Spotify, I watched Taylor Swift pull her entire catalog to go exclusive elsewhere. Not business-ending, but a clear reminder of who held the real power at the time.

Both situations taught me the same lesson: when your business model depends on someone else’s decisions, you’re never fully in control.

Most third-party AI platforms face this exact squeeze today. Every improvement costs more tokens. Every feature burns more cash. When you’re optimizing for token efficiency instead of user experience, you’ve already lost the game.

Lovable just escaped that trap.

They raised $200M and launched infrastructure features like hosting, security, and team collaboration. Where their previous improvements often depended on more intricate ways of prompting and cost more and more tokens, now they’re creating revenue streams that don’t burn API tokens.

This isn’t just about adding features. It’s about changing what business they’re in.

They’re not competing with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google on pure generation anymore. They’re becoming the place where AI-generated apps live. That’s the infrastructure move that changes everything.

Now when you build something with Lovable that uses their new offerings, moving it elsewhere means migrating your database, your custom domain, your team workspace. Possible, but painful.

The pattern repeats across industries. Record stores couldn’t compete when big box retailers sold CDs as loss leaders. Travel agencies disappeared when airlines cut commissions. Cable companies survived by becoming ISPs instead of fighting Netflix for content.

Stop being the middleman. Start owning the infrastructure.

Every successful platform eventually faces this choice. You either own something irreplaceable or you become a feature that someone else can build cheaper.

When costs rise and margins shrink, you either control something customers can’t easily leave, or you watch your business model collapse one price increase at a time.

Lovable chose ownership.

Other AI platforms will need to make similar moves soon. Own the deployment pipeline. Control the data layer. Become infrastructure that’s harder to replace than the generation itself.

The intermediary becomes the infrastructure, or the intermediary dies.

That’s the choice.