The domain press picked this up on 27 August and stopped after one sentence. There is more to it, including a second half nobody has reported: as of 28 August 2026, lovable.com is not Lovable's website. It is a redirect, and a careless one. What follows was checked rather than repeated.
A two-year-old company worth $13.3 billion
Lovable began as GPT Engineer, an open-source side project by Anton Osika. He and Fabian Hedin turned it into a product and renamed it Lovable in December 2024. Twenty months later it is one of the fastest-growing software companies anyone has measured.
The funding ladder is the quickest way to see the shape of it.
| Date | Round | Raised | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2025 | Series A | $200m | $1.8bn |
| December 2025 | Series B | $330m | $6.6bn |
| 12 August 2026 | Series C | $400m | $13.3bn |
Lovable's own Series C post claims more than 60 million projects built since launch in November 2024, over 900 million visits a month to apps made on the platform, and users inside nearly two thirds of the Fortune 500. TechCrunch put the annualised run rate at $500m as of June 2026. Headcount is going to roughly 450 this year.
Every bit of that was built on a .dev. The company crossed unicorn valuation on it, then crossed $10bn on it, which is the single best piece of evidence anyone has that you do not need the .com to start.
There is a detail that makes the timing funnier. On 4 August 2026, Name.com switched on domain registration inside Lovable, so users could buy a name without leaving the builder. They bought thousands in the first week. Six days after Lovable started selling domains to other people, it quietly bought its own.
Who owned lovable.com before
The domain was registered on 31 December 1997. That is eight months before Google was incorporated, which makes lovable.com older than nearly every company that has ever wanted it.
It has been in the underwear business the whole time. The Lovable Company was founded in Atlanta in 1926 by Frank and Gussie Garson and grew into one of the largest brassiere makers anywhere; it closed in 1998 after its contract with Walmart, its biggest customer, was renegotiated. The .com was registered during that final year. The brand carried on as regional licences, and the European one now sits with Lovable Italy Srl, a Shopify merchant in Grassobbio, near Bergamo.
That is who sold it. The Internet Archive has lovable.com serving the Italian lingerie store at HTTP 200 as late as 16 July 2026, complete with a working cart. The shop now trades on lovable.it.
The handover, from the registry record
Verisign's registry record for lovable.com carries one date nobody reported. Read on 28 August 2026, it says:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Registered | 31 December 1997 |
| Last changed | 10 August 2026, 13:52 UTC |
| Expires | 30 December 2027 |
| Registrar | Cloudflare, Inc. |
| Nameservers | ivan.ns.cloudflare.com, rafe.ns.cloudflare.com |
| Status | clientTransferProhibited |
Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost and only to existing Cloudflare customers, so a domain parked there is one somebody operates rather than one somebody is flipping. Bracket that 10 August timestamp against the archive and the window closes hard: the lingerie store was still live on 16 July, the registry record changed on 10 August, and by 17:23 UTC on 12 August the domain was already redirecting to lovable.dev.
12 August is the day the $400m round was announced. Whether the deal was timed to the raise or the raise simply gave it permission, the two happened inside the same 48 hours, a fortnight before anyone in the domain trade noticed.
So what did Lovable pay for lovable.com?
Nobody has said. The sale is not on DNJournal's charts and it is not in NameBio, which is normal: most private seven-figure deals never get reported. What follows is an estimate built from sales that were, not a number anyone confirmed.
| Domain | Reported price | When | Why it is a useful comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| Durable.co to Durable.com | $125,000 | 2026 | The floor for a funded startup buying out of a shortened extension |
| Cursor.com | $399,995 | 2024 | An AI tool company buying from an investor who paid $60,000 |
| NAS.io to NAS.com | $1,250,000 | April 2026 | The closest structural match: a brand upgrading beside a funding round |
| Green.com | $7,500,000 | 2026 | What a plain dictionary word costs when many industries want it |
| Chat.com | $15,500,000 | 2023 | What Dharmesh Shah paid before passing it to OpenAI |
Three things push lovable.com toward the top of that range. The seller was not an investor sitting on inventory; it was a trading business whose storefront, email and search rankings all lived on the domain, so the price had to cover an entire relocation, not just an asset. The buyer had $400m in the bank and a reason to move quickly. And the domain is a clean, common, one-word English adjective with no hyphen and no number, which is the category that holds its value best.
Two things pull it back down. "Lovable" is an adjective almost nobody else can build a business on, so there was no competing bidder to squeeze the price, unlike "green" or "chat". And the seller had somewhere sensible to go: lovable.it was already theirs, already in their home market, and already receiving the .com's traffic through a redirect.
Our estimate is $1m to $5m, most likely $2m to $3m. Under $500,000 would be surprising given what the seller had to move. Over $10m would almost certainly have leaked by now.
Put that beside the round it sat next to. Even at the top of the range, lovable.com cost about 1.25% of the money Lovable raised that week, and roughly four hundredths of one percent of what investors say the company is worth. The interesting thing is not the price. It is that a company reached $13.3bn before the question came up at all.
lovable.com is not Lovable's website yet
This is the part the coverage got wrong. "Lovable.dev is now Lovable.com" was the line everywhere on 27 August. It is not what is happening. Here is what the domain actually returned when we asked it on 28 August 2026.
| Request | Response |
|---|---|
| https://lovable.com/ | 301 to https://lovable.dev/ |
| https://lovable.com/pricing | 301 to https://lovable.dev/ |
| https://lovable.com/blog/series-c | 301 to https://lovable.dev/ |
| lovable.dev canonical tag | https://lovable.dev |
Two problems, in order of severity. The redirect does not preserve the path: every URL on the .com, whatever it asks for, is dumped on the .dev homepage. Google treats a redirect to an unrelated page as a soft 404 and drops it, so any link anyone builds to a lovable.com URL passes on nothing. Doing this to a whole domain is the most common way a migration loses its rankings, and we have written the correct pattern up in full: map old path to matching new path, one hop, or do not redirect at all.
The second is that the canonical has not moved, and neither have the twelve hreflang alternates or the Open Graph image, all of which still name lovable.dev. That is consistent, and for now it is the right call. Lovable said in its own engineering post on 18 August that lovable.dev carries 42 million monthly visitors across 400 routes. Nobody moves that overnight, and a domain change costs real traffic even when it is done properly.
So the honest description of where things stand is this: Lovable owns the .com and has parked it politely against the .dev while it decides. The migration has not started. When it does, the direction of the redirect flips, and that is the moment the money starts earning anything.
Where else "lovable" is already gone
We ran the label through our own availability check across all 1,400 extensions we scan, on 28 August 2026. It is registered in 233 of them and free in 1,167.
| Extension | Status for "lovable" |
|---|---|
| .com .net .org .co .io .ai .app .dev | Registered |
| .love .build .studio .design .software .tech | Registered |
| .chat .bot .blog .team .tools .page .new | Registered |
| .sh .to .so .gg | Still unregistered |
Availability does not tell you who holds a name, so none of this says Lovable owns those. That is the point. A name that feels available almost never is, and the 233 registrations were mostly made by other people, for other reasons, long before any of this. If you are choosing a name today, the number that matters is not whether the .com is free. It is how many of the extensions your customers might type are already spoken for, which is the same reason so many startups landed on .io and .ai in the first place.
If you are the one waiting on your .com
- Do not wait to launch. Lovable reached $13.3bn on a .dev. The .com is an upgrade, not a prerequisite.
- Find out who holds it before you want it. An operating business will sell for relocation costs plus a premium. An investor will sell for whatever the last comparable fetched. Those are different negotiations and different budgets.
- Buy it when you have leverage, not when you are desperate. Lovable bought at the top of a funding cycle, which is the moment the cheque is easiest to sign and the seller has not yet read about your valuation.
- Budget for the migration, not the domain. Redirect maps, email, SSO callbacks, app store links, OAuth redirect URIs and every hardcoded URL in your docs. The domain is often the cheaper half. Our breakdown of the five-year cost of owning a domain covers the recurring side.
- Check the trademark position first. Two companies can hold the same word in different classes, which is exactly how a lingerie brand and an AI company both got to be Lovable. That coexistence is fine until one of you tries to expand. Here is how to check before you buy.
Frequently asked questions
Is lovable.com the official Lovable website? Lovable owns it, but as of 28 August 2026 the site still lives on lovable.dev. Typing lovable.com sends you there with a 301. Both are the real company.
How much did Lovable pay for lovable.com? No price was disclosed and the sale has not appeared on any public sales chart. Based on comparable one-word .com sales, $1m to $5m is the defensible range. Treat any exact figure you see quoted as a guess unless the buyer or seller says otherwise.
Who owned lovable.com before Lovable? Lovable Italy Srl, a lingerie brand based in Grassobbio near Bergamo, which ran its Shopify store on the domain until at least 16 July 2026. The name traces back to the Lovable Company of Atlanta, founded in 1926 and closed in 1998. The Italian business now trades on lovable.it.
Does a .dev domain hurt a startup? Not on this evidence. Lovable raised $930m across three rounds and reached a $13.3bn valuation without the .com. What a .dev costs you is typing errors, people saying the name aloud and landing somewhere else, and the risk that the .com holder is a competitor rather than an underwear company.
What to do next
If you are picking a name, check every extension before you fall in love with one, not after. Our domain search checks a name across 1,400 extensions at once, so you find out in a few seconds what Lovable found out over two years.
Image credits
Anton Osika at Web Summit 2025 by Web Summit, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The cover image, the timeline and the price chart were made for this article.
