u/Resident-Country-188

41F charlotte. freelance copywriter. 8 years freelance, 6 agency before. specialise in B2B SaaS

and women-founded brands. 11 active clients.

i started getting requests for "can you also produce a one-pager or short presentation template"

alongside copy assignments in 2024. for most of 2025 i said yes and produced them in google

slides which i find offensive to work in. then in canva which is fine for one-offs but slow for

repeat work.

q4 2025 i tested 4 approaches.

google slides directly. 90-180 min per one-pager. too slow.

canva pro template gallery. 60-90 min per one-pager. fine but design felt generic.

a "ai pitch deck builder" tool i found through a freelancer newsletter. 30-40 min per output but

the design was templated in a way clients commented on negatively (too "AI-deck"-looking).

Gamma. paste in my copy, generate from a template structure i had built, edit visual hierarchy,

export as PDF for clients who want PDFs. 22-30 minutes per one-pager. design is clean enough

that no client has commented negatively. several have asked if i designed it (i didn't).

added these one-pagers as a $400 line item on relevant copy projects. revenue from this single

line item across 9 clients in 2026: $14,800.

the work i used to refuse (one-pagers, short decks) is now a $14k/year revenue line because

the workflow stopped costing me 3 hours each time.

writers and freelance creatives in this sub: what are you refusing that you could be charging for

if the workflow took 22 minutes instead of 3 hours.

context. small sustainable home goods brand in mumbai. handwoven textiles and ceramics. 2.5

years in. IG is our main marketing and sales channel.

we have started doing limited wholesale to small home decor retailers across india. each retailer

wants a buyer deck. we are 3 people. building 6 retailer decks per quarter from scratch was

eating my weekends.

i build them in Gamma now. 90 minutes per deck instead of 8 hours. that is not what i came

here to share.

the unexpected thing. the deck format we settled on has 9 slides. one slide per category. each

slide has the same structure. one product photo, one weave or material detail, one

price-and-availability summary.

i started repurposing those slides as IG carousels. paste a slide as a carousel slide. swap the

buyer-facing copy for customer-facing copy. publish.

our carousel production has gone from 1 a week to 4 a week without any new design work. the

deck and the IG content now share a production pipeline.

results across 90 days. retailer deck output 6 to 11 per quarter. IG carousel output 4 a week

(was 1). follower growth in 90 days 1,800 (was averaging 600 in prior quarters). wholesale

conversion rate from deck-sent to PO unchanged at about 38 percent.

the same artifact serves both audiences when you design for the smaller of the two formats first.

context first. i am a staff engineer at a fintech in bangalore. 11 years experience. i build for fun

on the weekends. since may 2024 i have shipped 6 small apps on Lovable. 4 of them are still

running on .lovable.app subdomains. 2 of them got real users.

the reason im writing this is because every time someone on this sub posts a "should i build my

mvp on Lovable" question, the answer is some version of "yes its great." it is great. it is also a

very specific tool and i think the community is doing new builders a disservice by not being

honest about what it is great at and what it is not.

what it is great at:

building a working v0 of a non realtime crud app in under 4 hours. you describe the data model,

you describe the screens, you wire up auth and you have something that works. faster than

anything else i have used. seriously. this is the magic.

iterating on the UI when the user has good visual taste. you can move buttons, change colors,

reposition elements faster than you can in figma if you know how to talk to it.

building forms and dashboards. it is genuinely excellent at this.

what it is not great at:

anything realtime or websocket heavy. i tried to build a multiplayer drawing app in december.

spent 4 days. burned roughly 280 credits across two sessions. never got the cursor sync to

work reliably. eventually rebuilt the realtime layer in plain Vite + Supabase realtime channels

and it took me 6 hours.

anything that needs deep state management. once your app crosses about 12 components with

cross cutting state, it starts proposing solutions that work in isolation but conflict with patterns it

set up earlier. the agent doesnt have a full model of the codebase. i had a bug in march where it

added the same form validation logic three different times in three different components and

didnt know they were duplicates.

migrations. this is the big one. once you outgrow Lovable, getting out is not easy. the generated

code is fine but it is generated for the way the platform reads it. i have moved 2 projects off

Lovable to a clean Vite + Supabase + Stripe stack and both of those moves took me longer than building the original would have taken from scratch. mostly because of how it threads its own

utility patterns through the code in ways that are not exactly idiomatic.

the RLS thing. and i think this needs to be said more often. when you ship a Lovable app to

actual users without reviewing the Supabase RLS policies, you are one bad prompt away from a

data leak. i have audited 4 friend projects in the last 3 months. all 4 of them had at least one

table where public.select was wide open and the prompt that built the table never asked. this is

not Lovables fault exactly. but if you are not a developer, you do not know to check this, and the

default vibes of "describe what you want and it builds it" do not flag the security review step.

what i actually use it for now:

scaffolding. i prompt it to build the rough version. i then export, clone the repo locally, and treat it

like generated boilerplate. for solo projects, this saves me probably 60% of the initial setup time.

i would not use it as my primary IDE for a project i was planning to maintain for more than 3

months. i would use it for v0, for client demos, for weekend hackathons, for the half built thing

my non technical cousin asks me to look at.

the people who get hurt by the maximalist "Lovable can build everything" framing are the non

technical builders. they ship to real users without RLS audits. they then get bitten. then they get

cynical about the platform. and the platform is actually really good at the thing it is good at,

which is helping people build software at all.

curious what others who have shipped 5+ projects think.