Vibe Coding Platform Base44 Launches Its Own AI Model
Base44, the vibe coding platform that was barely six months old with a team of eight just one year ago, has started rolling out its own AI model to support users in creating apps with natural language. The move comes as the discussion in AI circles has intensified over whether frontier models are best suited for all use cases and whether businesses built on top of someone else’s models are truly defensible long-term. Base44, based in the Bay Area, speaks to both concerns.
Custom LLM: Base1
While its custom LLM is only just rolling out, Base44 hopes it will eventually outperform frontier models. According to founder Maor Shlomo, “training and owning the model as part of [our] entire stack allows us a lot more optimizations on latency, cost, and efficiency.” The first iteration, named Base1, was developed and trained on a dataset generated from “tens of millions of real user interactions on the platform.”
Cost and Efficiency Benefits
Enterprise customers are starting to demand lower costs. Jonathan Userovici, a general partner at VC firm Headline, notes that inference costs have become a meaningful part of the equation. “They don’t necessarily see a return on investment when using the latest models for all use cases, so an entire infrastructure is being set up to do orchestration and optimization to select the right models for them so that costs don’t skyrocket while maintaining the same or similar performance across the majority of use cases.” Base44’s decision to develop its own LLM stemmed from multiple factors, but cost reduction is likely among the benefits. Shlomo stated, “We want to get a model that is going to be more aligned to what we think is the right thing, is going to be more optimized to what we see users like in terms of the results we’re getting, and is going to be faster and cheaper for customers eventually than using the frontier models like Opus.” In a press release, the company explained that “ownership of the model gives Base44 direct control over compute and inference spend, expected to result in a structurally stronger margin profile over time.”
Defensibility Strategy
According to Userovici, data is one of three key ingredients of defensibility for AI startups, alongside distribution and tech stack. The upshot is that players with strong brands are now leaning into their data and infrastructure to increase their defensibility, and Base44 fits that pattern. Shlomo expects that others will train their own models — “at least the players that have gotten enough scale and velocity to have enough data.” Base44’s dataset will keep growing, but so will its rivals’. The bigger competition may come from frontier AI labs that are getting closer to Base44’s home turf — Cursor and Grok’s parent company xAI now both build apps, and Claude Code has become a vibe coding player in its own right. This gives Anthropic and other foundational providers access to data and feedback loops, but Shlomo thinks specialization gives Base44 a leg up: “Models are progressing, but they’ll stay very general in what they can do.”
Competition and Outlook
At first glance, this could be a way to stay ahead of competitors such as Lovable, which reached a $1.4B valuation in its Series A round last summer and was later acquired. However, Userovici cautioned against underestimating frontier models, citing the example of legal tech startup Harvey, which abandoned plans to train its own model. He doesn’t expect applied AI companies to become frontier labs en masse but frames Base44’s move in a broader context. Base44’s parent company recently announced it would . In contrast, Base44 has been growing in headcount since the acquisition — and announced it had . a few months ago. That’s still less than Lovable, which said it . But Shlomo is betting that the “huge engineering effort” to develop Base1 will cement Base44’s positioning as the “only vertically integrated vibe-coding application” — meaning, in Userovici’s terms, a player that owns its distribution, data, and infrastructure all at once.