Your code is yours: no lock-in by design

Buildy generates plain React Native and Expo source you can export anytime. No proprietary runtime, no Buildy-only APIs, no hostage situation.

Most AI app builders quietly bet on the same thing: that you'll never leave. The generated code is tangled into a proprietary runtime, the export is incomplete or absent, and the project only really works inside their editor. Cancel the subscription and you're left with screenshots.

Buildy is built on the opposite bet. The code is yours, and we make leaving easy on purpose.

What "yours" actually means

Three concrete guarantees, not a slogan:

Plain, standard source. Buildy generates React Native and Expo — the same stack a human team would write by hand. There's no Buildy SDK you have to import, no Buildy-only component library, no custom runtime your app depends on. Open any file and it's idiomatic Expo. A React Native developer can read it on day one without learning anything Buildy-specific.

One-click export. At any point you can download a .zip of your entire project: components, assets, config, the lot. It's not a partial dump or a teaser — it's the real, buildable source tree. Take it to your own machine, run npx expo, and it works.

Build on your own terms. Because the output is standard Expo, you build it with EAS like any other Expo project and ship a signed binary to the App Store or Play Store. You don't need Buildy in the loop to ship, and you never need our permission to take the code elsewhere.

Why the preview is separate from the app

The export is clean because of a decision we made about how previews work. Buildy's live preview runs on our servers — we compile your code and render it in a sandboxed iframe — and that preview engine never gets bundled into your project. So when you export, there's nothing of ours to strip out. The .zip is your app, and only your app.

This is the same architecture that keeps Buildy clear of Apple's Guideline 2.5.2: the build tool and the shipped app are two different things. No-lock-in and safe-by-design aren't two features. They're the same design decision seen from two angles.

What we host, and why that's fine

To be straight about it: some things do live on our side while you're working. The editor, the preview compiler, your chat history, and — if you opt in — the AI Gateway, which lets a generated app call Claude through a per-project token so your own API key never ships inside a client binary. Those are conveniences you use while building. None of them are load-bearing in the code you export. Pull the export and your app has no runtime dependency on Buildy at all.

The business case for not trapping you

Lock-in is a way to keep customers who want to leave. We'd rather keep customers who don't. If the only thing holding you here is that your code is hostage, that's not a product — it's a hostage situation, and it ends the moment someone ships a cleaner exit.

So we compete on the editor, the generation quality, the preview, and the price — Free to start, Pro at €25, Max at €50. Not on whether you can leave. You always can. We're betting you won't want to.

Your code is yours. Start building free, and export it the moment you want to see for yourself.