Is Tempo still an AI app builder?
Not in the sense people mean when they search for one. Tempo's documentation describes five surfaces — Docs, Canvas, Issues, Chat and Agents — sharing the same codebase context, and the output it advertises is a pull request a human approves, not a running app at a URL. Canvas is a genuine visual editor: the docs call it “A Figma-style design surface where every frame is a live iframe of a real route or React component in your codebase”, and its edits are not throwaway, because “Edit a style, drag a component, change a prop; Tempo writes the change back to your source files”. Agents fire from issue events, a cron schedule, Slack messages or GitHub events such as merged PRs. Getting started means installing an app — drag Tempo into Applications on macOS, run an installer on Windows — and bringing your own model: the quick start has you connect Claude through Anthropic's API or a paid Claude plan, or OpenAI's Codex, or Tempo's own inference. None of that is a prompt box that produces an app for someone who has no repository yet.
Which is better if you already have a codebase: Buildra or Tempo?
Tempo, and it is not a close call. It was built for exactly that situation: an existing repository, issues arriving from real users, and a review step before anything merges. Its team organizations expect a remote — the docs say projects there “must be a remote URL (GitHub, GitLab)” — and its agents are wired to the events a working team already generates. Buildra starts a project from a repository you already have on GitHub too, but it is not a review tool and does not pretend to be: an agent builds the app in a live project you watch, and every commit it makes is mirrored out to a GitHub repository you own. That 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. If your work is reviewing and shipping changes to software that exists, those are the wrong shapes and Tempo is the better buy.
What happens to hosting, the live URL and the app stores?
This is the difference that does not narrow with a plan upgrade. Tempo's documentation covers installing the app, opening a workspace, running your dev server locally, designing on Canvas and letting agents open pull requests. It does not document a deploy step, a published URL, a custom domain or anything about app stores; run scripts are local commands for “starting a dev server, running tests, or building your project”, and the pricing page signs off with “Download Tempo and open your codebase.” Where the software runs is your problem — a reasonable answer for a team that already has a deployment pipeline, an unhelpful one for a person who does not. Buildra publishes the app to a buildra.page address from the same screen, and builds phone apps and uploads them to App Store Connect and Google Play for you on a paid plan, from your own developer accounts. The source is downloadable as a .tar.gz on the free tier, so the code is yours either way; the difference is whether anything is running at the end of it.
How does pricing compare between Buildra and Tempo?
The two bills are not shaped alike. Tempo publishes four monthly tiers in US dollars with no annual rate, and meters issues, docs, test runs and how far back your history goes rather than prompts; extra users are a separate monthly line on top of the plan, so a plan price is not a team price. You also pay your model provider separately unless you use Tempo's own inference. Buildra bills the account and includes the model: Free is 5 credits a day, up to 25 a month, across up to 3 projects, with publishing, the source download and the GitHub mirror included from the start; 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. The comparison flips with what you are buying: for one person turning an idea into something live, Buildra costs less and needs no other subscription, and for a team that wants agents wired into its issues and pull requests, Tempo's bill buys something Buildra does not sell.