Who Fixes Broken Lovable and Bolt Apps? Your Real Options Compared
Broken Lovable and Bolt apps get fixed by four kinds of help: you, with a handful of targeted checks; a freelancer from a marketplace like Upwork or Fiverr; a specialized vibe-code rescue service; or a development agency. The right choice comes down to cost, speed, and risk, and since most breaks trace back to the same five failure patterns, run the checks below before paying anyone. The one-sentence honest version of each option: Fix it yourself. Free, and often done in an hour when your app ma
Broken Lovable and Bolt apps get fixed by four kinds of help: you, with a handful of targeted checks; a freelancer from a marketplace like Upwork or Fiverr; a specialized vibe-code rescue service; or a development agency. The right choice comes down to cost, speed, and risk, and since most breaks trace back to the same five failure patterns, run the checks below before paying anyone.
The one-sentence honest version of each option:
- Fix it yourself. Free, and often done in an hour when your app matches one of the five patterns below.
- Hire a marketplace freelancer. Typically $30 to $150, with quality ranging from excellent to worse than the original bug.
- Use a specialized rescue service. Flat-rate shops that only fix broken AI-built apps and have usually seen your exact error before.
- Hire an agency. $1,000 and up, the right call for ongoing development, oversized for one broken deploy.
That answer also covers "my Lovable app broke after export, who can fix it" and "an AI coding assistant built my app and now it is broken, who do I hire". Apps from Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, and Cursor break in the same places.
Try these five checks first
These five patterns cover most of the broken AI-built apps we diagnose. Before changing anything, save the exact error text; it is the most useful thing to hand whoever fixes this.
1. "new row violates row-level security policy" (Supabase error 42501)
The symptom: signup, save, or post actions fail, and the browser console or network tab shows code 42501.
What it usually means: the table has Row Level Security enabled (correct) but no INSERT policy, or the policy is missing its WITH CHECK clause. Builders switch RLS on but never generate the policy that lets authenticated users write rows.
The check: open the Supabase SQL editor and run the failing query while impersonating the authenticated role, not anon. If it fails there too, the policy is the problem, not your app code. The fix is writing the INSERT policy, never turning RLS off.
2. The server thinks you are logged in, the client disagrees
The symptom: a Next.js App Router app using @supabase/ssr where server code can read the user, but the page renders as signed out, or login bounces you back to the login screen.
What it usually means: the session cookie does not survive the redirect after the auth callback, or the client reads a different cookie name than the server wrote.
The check: log the cookie names on the callback response, then compare with what the client receives. A missing cookie or two different names is your answer.
3. Magic-link login fails with "otp_expired" or "email link is invalid"
The symptom: users click the emailed login link and are told it expired, even when they click within seconds.
What it usually means: an email security scanner opened the link before the human did and consumed the one-time token. Corporate and university inboxes do this constantly.
The fix shape: switch to verifyOtp with a typed code; a code the user types cannot be consumed by a scanner following links.
4. Deploys fine, white screen in production
The symptom: the Vercel build passes, the deployment is green, and the live URL is a blank page. Locally everything works.
What it usually means: a missing or empty environment variable in the Vercel project settings. It works locally because .env.local exists there; that file never deploys. An empty variable is just as fatal as a missing one and harder to spot.
The check: look for undefined configuration values in the browser console on the live URL, then compare the Vercel environment variable list against .env.local line by line.
5. Worked in the builder preview, broke after export
The symptom: everything worked on the builder preview URL; after export and deploy to your own domain, redirects land somewhere wrong or requests fail.
What it usually means: hardcoded preview URLs or auth redirect URLs still point at the builder's domain instead of yours.
The check: search the codebase for the builder's domain string, then confirm your auth site URL and redirect allow-list include the production domain.
If one of these matched, you may not need to hire anyone. If none did, or you do not want to touch the fix yourself, here is what hiring looks like.
The four options, honestly compared
| Option | Typical cost | Speed | The real risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yourself | $0 | An evening | Silencing errors by disabling security |
| Marketplace freelancer | $30 to $150 | Hours to days, plus vetting time | Quality variance |
| Specialized rescue service | Flat rate | Usually 1 to 2 days | Wrong fit for full rebuilds |
| Agency | $1,000 and up | Days to weeks | Paying for structure you do not need |
Yourself. Free and genuinely viable when the failure matches a known pattern. One warning: never make a security error disappear by turning security off. Disabling RLS or putting a service role key in browser code leaves your database open to anyone on the internet.
Marketplace freelancers. Often the cheapest competent option, and there are excellent people there. The problem is variance: the same $80 can buy a clean fix or a mess that costs more to undo. A useful filter: does the reply name your specific error and a plausible cause, or just quote hours to "investigate"?
Specialized rescue services. A category that exists because these failures repeat; a specialist has usually fixed your exact error many times, which is what makes flat pricing possible. Two questions before you pay anyone here: is the diagnosis free, and do you pay before or after the fix is proven working?
Agencies. The right answer when the app needs sustained development or a partial rebuild, the wrong answer for a single broken deploy, where the minimum engagement dwarfs the work. A good agency will tell you this themselves.
Where we fit, stated plainly
We run one of the specialized services: Vibe-Code Rescue, at rescue.ticassociation.com. The diagnosis is free. You paste the error, we explain what broke and what fixing it involves, and the diagnosis is yours to take anywhere, including to a freelancer. If you want us to do the fix, it is a flat $90 founding rate, and you pay only after the fix is verified working on your live app. That is one option among the four above, not the only sensible one.
No matter who fixes your app, you can check the security of the result for free. Our Supabase RLS auditor at ticassociation.com/supabase-rls-audit is one read-only SQL file you run in the Supabase SQL editor. It writes nothing and changes nothing; it lists the tables with RLS disabled or policies missing, which is where AI-built apps tend to be quietly exposed.
The short version
Run the five checks first; they cover most broken Lovable and Bolt apps. If you need a human: a freelancer is the cheapest gamble, a rescue service trades a flat rate for predictability, and an agency only makes sense when one fix is not what you are buying. Whatever you choose, keep the exact error text, ask how the fix will be verified, and never accept "we turned the security rules off" as a solution.
A TIC Association creation.
