Base44, the AI-powered app-creation platform that Wix snapped up last year, has rolled out its own proprietary large language model called Base 1. The move makes it the first vibe coding platform to deploy a homegrown model in production, a bet that building in-house will eventually outperform the frontier models everyone else is renting.
For a platform that went from zero to $100 million in annual recurring revenue within roughly a year of launching, the ambition tracks. But the real play here isn’t just about better code generation. It’s about controlling the economics of AI inference, the single biggest cost eating into margins across the entire AI application layer.
From bootstrapped side project to Wix’s AI crown jewel
Base44’s trajectory reads like a Silicon Valley fever dream compressed into fast-forward. Founded in late 2024 by Maor Shlomo, the platform was bootstrapped with a skeleton crew before attracting hundreds of thousands of users who wanted to build functional applications using plain English prompts.
The pitch is straightforward: describe what you want your app to do, and Base44 handles the backend, frontend, data models, and logic automatically. No technical expertise required.
