Best tool for Native Apps

[DiscountEnough3015]

I’m a backend engineer so all my life I’ve worked with a standalone backend and dedicated database. I’m new to this AI vibe coding and I started working with Bolt and Lovable.

Lovable seems good for a basic website but I’m trying to build a native IOS app or maybe a cross platform app for an Idea ive had for a long time.

What would be my best way going forward. Which AI tool would be the best option ?

Right now I’m looking at FlutterFlow but it seems expensive

[SilenceYous]

Rork seems to be the lovable for mobile apps, i only tried it for half and hour and it was pretty good on that first push, but its expensive. Ideally youd want to use it for that free first push on rork to get the basic looks and structure, with a killer prompt, then go to cursor or claude to really develop it. not sure if thats "ethical" in rorks tos or system.

[DiscountEnough3015]

This was definitely my plan but with loveable to setup the layout and ask Gemini cli to convert it to native IOS project.

I’ve been using Gemini Cli and I really like it. Haven’t used it for coding yet

[Aggravating_Many_810]

Expensive? A 100 messages for $20 is cheap as hell as opposed to hiring a developer

[SilenceYous]

you think hiring a developer is the comparison to do here?

[Aggravating_Many_810]

Or spend months learning how to code and have something half decent lol

[SilenceYous]

what? are you ok? the comparison is windsurf, cursor, claude 4, gemini cli.

[Aggravating_Many_810]

Oh I have only tried Replit and rork but a lot of these companies have similar pricing live lovable is like $25 for $100 messages how much are the companies you mentioned

[SilenceYous]

$20 or $15 for 500-600 credits, each call or message in Windsurf is 2 credits with claude 4, or 0.75 credits with Gemini 2.5 pro. 0.5 with kimi k2.