The most expensive question in an AI-built app is how people will pay for it, and many founders ask it at the very end.
Tools like Base44 and Lovable have changed who gets to build software. A founder with no developer can now describe an app, refine it over a few weeks and ship it to the App Store. That’s a real shift, and plenty of good products are starting this way.
What the tools don’t do is warn you about the one rule that decides whether the app makes money. On Base44’s public feedback board, the posts read like a support group. “Definitely got all the way to the finish line with my app just for this to be a roadblock,” wrote one builder in July. Another, whose app was already live: “I want to start earning from it and just came to know that we cannot do that natively on the App Store.”
The rule most founders meet at the finish line
Apple’s App Review Guideline 3.1.1 says that if your app sells access to features or content inside it (a subscription, premium tools, credits, a course), the sale has to go through Apple’s own in-app purchase system. Physical goods and real-world services are the other way round: those must use something else, such as a card payment.
So a booking app for a gym can take card payments through Stripe. A wellness app that sells a monthly membership to its own content can’t, not inside the iPhone app.
For Base44 builders that’s a hard stop today. Base44’s mobile apps are the web app in a wrapper, and the wrapper can’t connect to Apple’s purchase system. Base44’s own documentation is candid about the workaround founders reach for first: “If your app uses Stripe for digital content, your app is rejected.” It says a proper integration is being worked on, with no date.
Sending people to your website isn’t a clean escape in the UK
The obvious fallback is to sell on your website and let people log in on the app. In the US, Apple now lets apps include a button to your own checkout. In the UK it doesn’t, yet. Outside the US and a handful of regions with special arrangements, an app can’t contain buttons, links or calls to action that send people to pay elsewhere. The Competition and Markets Authority consulted this summer on rules that would let UK developers steer users out of the app, but until Apple changes its guidelines, a UK paywall that says “pay on our website” is what the guideline prohibits. Commercially that hurts, because the app can’t tell people where to pay at the point they decide to.
Payment code is where AI-built apps quietly break
The second problem is harder to see. When we reviewed the exported code of a Base44 app for a wellness founder in September, the App Store question turned out to be the smaller issue. The code that runs after a Stripe payment succeeds would have recorded new subscribers as free users. The demo worked; nobody had followed a real payment all the way through.
We’ve seen that pattern before. The checkout screen looks finished, because it’s the part an AI tool can show you. The logic that runs once money moves is where it goes wrong, and it’s the part that decides whether the business has any revenue at all.
Decide how you’ll get paid before you build
You can still build with AI tools. Just settle three questions on day one. What exactly are people paying for, and is it digital or physical? Which countries’ App Stores will they buy from? And does your chosen platform support the payment route that answer implies?
If the answers point to Apple’s in-app purchase, a Base44 founder today has three routes: sell only on the web within Apple’s rules, put a native paywall in a wrapper you control, or rebuild the mobile app natively with the Base44 version as the blueprint. All three are legitimate, but they differ a lot in cost, and choosing late is what makes them expensive.
We’ve set out the rules, the US exception and the three routes in full here: Your Base44 App Is Finished. So Why Can’t You Charge for It?. If you’re already at the finish line, our Base44 to production service starts with a free check and a £95 review of what you’ve built.
Foresight Mobile is a Manchester-based mobile app development and maintenance company. We take AI-built and no-code apps through the last mile to the App Store and Google Play, and how the app gets paid is usually the first thing we check. If you’re stuck at the finish line, get in touch.
