Bolt Free Plan Review: A Working Game, Saved Portal Data and the Token Wall

Bolt turns a written brief into a website or web-app prototype. We tested two different jobs on the free plan: Starfall Courier, a fictional arcade game, and Afterglow Studio, a fictional creative-studio client portal. The point was to see whether the results did useful work, rather than stop at an attractive preview.

Starfall Courier passed the main keyboard-play checks. Movement, pickups, pause and retry worked, and we reached Mission Complete. The best score survived a page refresh. Those are useful signs of a working small game, not just a game-shaped screen. We did not verify touch controls, so this test does not establish that it plays properly on a phone.

The portal gave us a different kind of proof. We saved notes and changed status, then reloaded the page. Both survived the reload against a real Bolt database. That matters: the prototype could keep changes instead of only showing a temporary state in the preview.

Persistence is not the same as permissions. The client and studio views are demo roles; switching between them does not prove that real clients can access only their own records. At phone width, the header clipped the role controls. Before using the portal for real client work, check authentication, database permissions and the phone layout with separate user accounts and realistic data.

The free budget was the practical limit. Bolt currently gives Free accounts 300K tokens a day, capped at 1M a month. We hit the daily wall and showed it in the recording, then continued after the allowance refilled. Do not treat 1M monthly tokens as a balance you can spend in one sitting. Free tokens do not roll over, and Bolt says larger projects can consume more tokens per message because more project files need to be read.

A GitHub connection option for a private repository was available, but we did not complete a sync in this test. The backend options also included connecting services such as Supabase. Our persistence test used a Bolt database, not Supabase; the current FAQ says Supabase requires Pro or Teams. Neither a visible connection option nor a working demo proves that an external integration is finished.

The current free plan includes public and private projects, hosting and Bolt databases. Published free sites carry the Made in Bolt badge, and custom domains require a paid plan. The FAQ lists 10 GB of monthly hosting bandwidth and 333,333 web requests; if you exceed a free hosting allowance, the site goes offline for the rest of the month. These are listed plan limits, not traffic levels we tested.

Pro starts at $25 per month USD, billed monthly, with 10M monthly tokens and no daily token limit. It also removes Bolt branding and adds custom domain support. Teams starts at $30 per member per month USD, billed monthly, and adds team access and admin controls. These are the current monthly-billing prices, checked October 12, 2026 at https://bolt.new/pricing, not annual-plan headline prices.

Our 4.3/5 is an editorial grade for the free plan in these two focused tests. The game reached its completion state and kept its best score, while the portal saved useful changes in a real database. That earns a strong score. The interrupted build, demo permissions, clipped phone controls and unfinished GitHub sync keep it below a result we would call ready for client use. A larger paid allowance gives you more room to build; it does not replace checking the app.

Who should try it: people who can describe one small job clearly and are willing to test the result. Who should skip the free route: anyone who needs uninterrupted heavy iteration, an unbranded custom-domain site at $0, or a client portal they can trust without checking permissions and mobile behavior.

The Try Bolt free button uses our Cello referral link. FreeStack may earn a commission at no extra cost to you; eligible new paying users get 20% off through the referral. The referral does not change our verdict or remove the free-plan limits.