CatDoes in context: product setup, workflows, and operations

CatDoes is an AI app builder with an unusual centre of gravity: it started with mobile and added web later, which is the opposite of nearly every tool on this site. Lovable, Bolt, v0 and Replit all began as web builders and bolted mobile on. That ordering shows up in the product, and mostly in CatDoes’ favour if a phone app is what you actually need.

The core loop is familiar. You describe what you want, an agent called Compose plans and writes it, and you iterate in chat. Two things separate it from the pack.

The agent runs on its own computer

Compose runs in the cloud on its own machine rather than in your browser tab. It installs packages, runs tests, reads its own errors and fixes them, and spins up subagents for parallel work. You can close your laptop and come back to a finished build.

This is the same architectural bet Replit made with Agent 3, and it matters more than it sounds. An agent that stalls the moment you navigate away turns a 40-minute build into 40 minutes of watching a progress log. Being able to walk away is the thing most first-time users notice.

Store submission is actually included

CatDoes outputs Expo React Native for mobile and Vite for web. So “native” here means React Native, not Swift or Kotlin — native UI and gestures, not a web page in a shell, but not hand-written platform code either. For the kind of app a founder validates with, that distinction rarely bites.

What matters more: CatDoes runs the iOS and Android build and submission process for you, with no Mac, no Xcode and no Android Studio. That removes the most common wall non-technical founders hit with mobile. Every project also ships with CatDoes Cloud — database, auth, file storage, edge functions and real-time events, in US or EU regions — on every plan including free. You are not wiring up Supabase on day one.

There’s also a clever trick: paste a URL from Lovable, WordPress or Shopify and an agent studies the site and ships a matching mobile app. If you already built a web product elsewhere, that’s the cheapest path to a store listing you’ll find.

Where the pricing gets slippery

Free gives you 25 credits — one time, not monthly — one public project, and web deployment only. Core is $17/mo for 50 credits and two projects. Starter is $42/mo for 200 credits, five projects, and this is where iOS and Android deploys unlock. Plus, Pro and Max run $84, $168 and $399.

Read that again: the store submission that is the whole reason to pick CatDoes over a web builder sits two tiers up, at $42/mo. The $17 plan builds mobile apps you cannot publish.

Worth knowing before you compare quotes: CatDoes’ own FAQ contradicts its own pricing table — “Starter and above ($50/mo)”, “Core ($20/mo)”, “Plus ($100/mo)”. The FAQ is stale, which is why third-party reviews disagree about what CatDoes costs. Check the table.

The credit model has the usual failure mode: fifty credits a month disappears fast if you iterate by trial and error rather than by prompting carefully. Project caps are tight too — two on Core, five on Starter.

Two other gaps. No published compliance certifications: no SOC 2, no ISO 27001, no HIPAA. If you sell to anyone with a procurement process, that’s a hard stop. And full code export plus two-way GitHub sync only arrive on Plus at $84/mo, so your exit ramp is a paid feature.

The bottom line

If your product is a mobile app and you are not an engineer, CatDoes is one of the few tools where the whole path — build, backend, store submission — is covered without you assembling it. Budget for Starter at $42/mo, not the $17 headline, because that’s where the mobile promise actually turns on. Skip it if you need compliance paperwork, and read our mobile vibe coding guide before you commit, because Rork and a0.dev are aiming at the same founder.

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