Dear Boltdotnew, Fuck You

I was trying out some no-code website builders to understand how they work. One of the most well-known and frequently mentioned ones is @boltdotnew . I asked it to create a simple website. It built it using React. When I requested an iteration focused on SEO, it didn’t include the package.json file this time. Only package-lock.json was there, and apparently, I needed a token to fix the error.

Another frustrating part was during onboarding. It asked a few questions, and even though I selected that I’m a pro user, it still asked for payment because of such a simple issue. If it had been more realistic, for example by saying on my second prompt that I reached the limit, I would have paid without hesitation.

Bolt is my platform of choice to quickly prototype. In my experience, it generates coherent, beautiful frontends. That said, they've recently halved the daily free tokens. A token in Bolt's case is the literal LLM input/output token. Used to be 300K per day/3M per month. Now, it is 150K per day/1.5M per month. Once you are out of tokens, Bolt won't generate anything for you until more tokens(free or paid) become available. It is great tbh, but I can understand if it seems a bit too measly, but tokens especially from the frontier closed source models are pretty expensive though.