Leaving Base44

The marketing and the contract

You own the Generated Output. You are contractually required to destroy any copy of the Platform. The Platform is the half that runs it.

Magic Cloud vs Base44, honestly

Nineteen rows: seventeen to Magic, two to Base44. The two they take are real, they are listed first, and they are the only two.

Speed is not on their side of that table. A Magic cloudlet goes from nothing to a deployed, working application in 2 minutes and 10 seconds, and a complete role-secured CRM backend has been generated in sixty seconds for six cents of tokens.

Nor are integrations. Base44 ships a fixed catalogue of roughly seven services. Magic ships a generator: describe an API in a sentence and it writes, verifies and deploys the integration in seconds, imports any OpenAPI specification, and drives a headless browser for systems that have no API at all. They enumerate; Magic generates — and the reachable surface that produces is not a number you can write down in the ordinary way.

The argument is narrow and it is this: the moment the application is the business, the question stops being how fast you can build it and becomes what happens when the vendor changes its pricing, its terms, or its mind.

Two credit types, and both expire

Message credits are spent when you build. Integration credits are spent by your users, in production — emails, API calls, AI runs, file uploads, automations, backend tasks.

Both credit types expire monthly and do not roll over. There are no top-ups, so running out in week three means upgrading the whole plan rather than buying a little more. And single sign-on is not on that list at any price — it requires an Enterprise contract. The structural problem is the second meter: your application’s success costs you money in a way that has nothing to do with compute. On Magic your app’s traffic is your app’s traffic, and self-hosting on a $12 droplet costs you nothing at all.

Their pricing page, captured 22 September 2026

This is not a paraphrase and it is not an old cache. It is the live answer to “Do I own my app, and can I export the code?” on base44.com, on the day this page was written.

Now set it beside the clause their own Terms of Service require you to accept before you can pay them:

“Company makes no warranties or guarantees regarding the functionality, compatibility, or usability of any such exported Customer Data, including whether such exported data will operate properly in any other environment or system.”

One sentence is on the page that takes your money. The other is in the document that governs what you actually bought. They are published by the same company, on the same day, about the same product.

You have somewhere to take this

Misleading marketing is prohibited in every developed jurisdiction on earth, and the test is close to identical everywhere: was a material claim made that is not true, and did it affect someone’s decision to buy? Base44’s claim sits on one global, English-language pricing page, which means it is published into all of these at once. Reporting costs nothing.

Norway

Misleading commercial practices are prohibited by markedsføringsloven § 7, and a trader must be able to document the factual claims it makes. Separately — and this is the more useful route — digitalytelsesloven, implementing EU Directive 2019/770, provides that statements made in marketing form part of what a consumer has reason to expect from a digital service. If the service does not match, there is a mangel, and the remedies include price reduction and cancellation with a refund. The burden of proof sits on the trader — both to show there is no defect, and to show any defect is insignificant. Fines under mfl. § 42 reach 4% of annual turnover or NOK 25 million, whichever is higher.

Report to Forbrukertilsynet — postmottak@forbrukertilsynet.no, +47 23 40 06 00.

Germany

Misleading commercial acts are prohibited by UWG § 5, with injunctive relief available under § 8. Germany is the jurisdiction that matters most here, because competitors and trade associations have direct standing — no regulator has to be persuaded to act first. A single Abmahnung can require a company to stop making a claim across its entire site.

Report to the Wettbewerbszentrale Beschwerdestelle — mail@wettbewerbszentrale.de, or the Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband — beschwerdestelle@vzbv.de.

United States

Deceptive acts and practices are prohibited by Section 5 of the FTC Act, carrying civil penalties of $53,088 per violation, and by the unfair-and-deceptive-practices statute of all fifty states, enforced by state attorneys general. Businesses harmed by a competitor’s false advertising have a private right of action under Lanham Act § 43(a).

Report to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and to your state attorney general.

Elsewhere in the EEA

The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC applies across all thirty EEA states, with fines of at least 4% of turnover for widespread infringements under the Omnibus Directive. Your national consumer authority takes the complaint; cross-border cases go through the European Consumer Centres Network.

Read this part too. None of the above is legal advice, and no court or regulator has ruled on any of it. What this page gives you is the text Base44 publishes, the text of the Terms they ask you to accept, the statutes that govern claims of this kind, and the public channels that exist for raising them. Whether any of it applies to your situation is a question for a lawyer or a regulator — not for a competitor’s website, which is exactly what this is. Read both documents yourself and reach your own conclusion.

Describe it. Deploy it. Own it.

You do not click through a builder. You say what you want, and the generator writes verified Hyperlambda into the runtime — real files, on disk, that you can read, diff and commit.

No message credits. No integration credits metering your users. No seat count. No plan that unlocks single sign-on. And no clause anywhere saying we make no warranty that your data works somewhere else — because somewhere else is just another machine running the same MIT-licensed code you already have.