Which is better for full-stack apps: Buildra or Bolt?
For a web app with a database behind it, Bolt is a complete answer in one place. Bolt Cloud gives you a database with authentication and user management, file storage, server functions that run on edge servers, analytics on the published site and a Stripe path for payments — and the free plan already lists unlimited databases and website hosting. The one hard edge is the language. Bolt's supported-technologies page says it supports Node.js for the backend and that languages such as PHP or Python are not compatible, so a project that needs a runtime outside JavaScript is not a Bolt project. Buildra also generates the whole application and publishes it, but the repository is the artefact rather than the hosting account: the code lands in a repository you own, so the app can be picked up and run elsewhere without an export step. Neither of those is free of trade-offs. Bolt's is less to assemble; Buildra's leaves less behind if you move.
How does pricing compare between Buildra and Bolt?
Bolt meters tokens rather than messages, and the free plan is capped twice over: 300K tokens a day, inside a separate 1M a month, and free-plan tokens do not roll over. Pro is $25 a month billed monthly, removes the daily cap, starts at 10M tokens a month with rollover, and is what unlocks custom domains, private sites, the larger upload limit and the bigger hosting allowance. Teams is $30 per member a month with centralised billing, and Enterprise is quoted, adding SSO, audit logs and compliance support. Bolt's own pages currently disagree about how much annual billing saves, so this page does not quote an annual figure. Buildra bills the account rather than the seat: Free is 5 credits a day, up to 25 a month, across up to 3 projects, with the source download and the GitHub mirror included from the start, and the paid plans run from Starter at $25 a month for 100 credits to Pro from $100 for 400, with a year costing ten months.
What happens to the code you build?
This is closer than the older comparisons claim. Bolt's GitHub integration connects a repository, commits as you build, lets you work across branches, and checks GitHub for changes made outside Bolt and pulls them in — it runs in both directions, with the caveats that only the project owner can manage the connection and that branches have to be merged on GitHub rather than in Bolt. You can also export the project and run it locally with Node.js installed, and no plan gate is documented for that. Buildra's difference is one of default rather than of possibility: every commit the agent makes is mirrored out to a repository you own, and the source is a .tar.gz on the free tier. Two limits belong in the same breath, because they cut the other way — Buildra's mirror runs one direction only, so a push you make on GitHub does not come back into Buildra, and Buildra does not open branches or pull requests or run CI for you. Bolt's sync does come back. If a two-way loop between the builder and your editor is what you are after, Bolt has it and Buildra does not.
Which one gets a phone app into the stores?
Both build one; only one of them files it. Ask Bolt for a mobile app and it uses Expo, and its documentation describes the aim as a path from idea to app store that handles the technical setup for you. What it hands over is a build: the Apple side is yours to finish — the listing, the privacy answers, submitting for review — and the Google Play side is the same, creating a release, uploading the build and submitting for review. Buildra builds phone apps and uploads them to App Store Connect and Google Play for you on a paid plan, from your own developer accounts. For one app you were going to nurse through review anyway, that is a detail; for someone who has never opened App Store Connect, it is the difference between a build and a listing.