# Migrate Your Base44 App to a Full-Stack Build You Own DreamLabs is an AI-powered app development agency in California — a fractional product team for mobile and web apps, from strategy to launch. Base44 hands you an app with its database, auth, and hosting already wired together. We rebuild it as a codebase and infrastructure you own outright — same product, no platform underneath it. ## Frequently asked questions ### Can we export our app from Base44? Your data, yes — that is the part that matters most and it exports in a workable form. The application itself is a different story: because the platform supplies the database, permissions, and hosted logic, what you can take out is far less complete than what you would get from a code-first builder. The audit establishes exactly what is exportable for your specific app, and nothing that has to be reproduced is lost — your running product is the specification we rebuild from. ### Is this a migration or a rewrite? The implementation is rebuilt, but the project is not a rewrite in the way that word usually means. Every product decision, screen, workflow, and permission rule already exists and is visible in the running app, which removes the discovery, design, and specification phases that consume most of a greenfield budget. That is why a migration of an app you already have costs a fraction of building the same product from a blank page. ### Will our app go down during the migration? No. Your Base44 app keeps running, completely untouched, while we build and test the replacement in parallel. Data migration is rehearsed with dry runs first, and cutover is a final sync plus a DNS change — a switchover measured in minutes. Your users' worst case is noticing the app got faster. ### Can we keep our users, our data, and our SEO rankings? Yes to all three. Data is exported and mapped into the new schema with verification at each step. Accounts and roles carry over, with a one-time re-authentication flow where credentials cannot be exported. For anything public-facing we preserve your URL structure or 301-redirect it deliberately, so the rankings you have earned come with you. ### How much does it cost and how long does it take? Prototypes start at $6,000 and full MVPs at $15,000. About 6 weeks and around $20,000 all-in for most apps, against roughly $200,000 and 6 months for a traditional agency rebuild. For products paying meaningful per-user or usage-based platform fees, the migration often pays for itself in avoided cost within the first year or two. The audit produces a fixed quote before any code is written. ## Where Base44 stops Base44 is the most all-in-one of the AI builders. You describe an app and get back a working product with a database, user accounts, integrations, and hosting already connected — no external services to sign up for, no keys to paste, nothing to configure. That integration is the whole point, and for getting a real internal tool or a first customer-facing product live in days, it works. It is also the trade. Because the platform supplies the backend, less of your application leaves with you than it would from a code-first builder like Lovable or Bolt. Your data model, your permissions, your integrations, and your hosted logic live in the platform's system rather than in a repository you can hand to any engineer. That makes this closer to a classic no-code migration than to a refactor — which is fine, and something we do constantly. The pressure usually shows up as one of three things: pricing that scales with users or usage in a way that stops being comfortable, a feature your customers keep asking for that the platform cannot express, or an ownership question from a customer, an auditor, or an investor that you cannot answer the way you would like. None of those are reasons to regret the choice. They are the signal that the product outgrew the stage the platform is built for. ## What we keep — and what gets rebuilt for scale A migration is not starting over. Everything the platform phase proved carries forward; what gets rebuilt is the implementation underneath it. - **Your data migrates.** We export your records, clean and map them into a properly designed schema with real constraints and relationships, and rehearse the whole migration before anything switches. - **Your screens and flows migrate.** The interface is re-implemented faithfully as real React components, usually improved along the way, never discarded. - **Your logic migrates as the specification.** Every workflow, automation, and permission rule you configured encodes hard-won product knowledge. We document it from the running app and rebuild it as tested code. - **Your users migrate.** Accounts and roles come across; where credentials cannot be exported, a one-time re-authentication flow covers it and most users barely notice. - **Your integrations migrate.** Payments, email, analytics, and third-party APIs reconnect directly to your new backend, with no platform connector in between. - **Your permission model gets made explicit.** Platform-configured roles become rules enforced on your own server and covered by tests that try to break them. - **The platform layer gets replaced.** Hosting, storage, and the generated structure become code in your repository, deployed through a pipeline you control, with URLs preserved or deliberately redirected. ## A codebase that survives a security review Most Base44 apps are web products, so they land on **React or Next.js with TypeScript** over a real backend — Postgres through Supabase or Neon, or Firebase, chosen for how your product actually needs to scale — hosted on Vercel, Cloudflare, or your own cloud with CI/CD, environments, and monitoring. If the roadmap includes the app stores, the same product moves to **React Native** or **Flutter** with the web app as its specification. What every version has in common is that the ceiling is gone. Costs scale with infrastructure instead of per-user platform pricing, any feature an engineer can build is a feature you can have, and the code sits in your repository: yours to host, extend, audit, or hand to any future team. ## The migration, step by step ### Audit & Migration Map We inventory everything the platform is doing for you — screens, data model, roles and permissions, automations, integrations, hosted logic — and confirm exactly what can be exported and what has to be reproduced from the running app. Because the app makes its own behavior visible, your product is the specification. You get a migration map, an honest export assessment, and a fixed scope. ### Rebuild, AI-Accelerated Senior engineers rebuild the product on the stack chosen together, with AI accelerating scaffolding, boilerplate, and test coverage. Migrations move faster than greenfield builds because the hard product questions are already answered. We work in short, visible cycles, so you are comparing real screens against your live app from the first week. ### Parallel Run & Data Cutover Your existing app stays live and untouched while the new build runs alongside it. We migrate data with rehearsed dry runs, verify feature parity against production, and bring real users into staging before anything switches. Cutover is a final sync and a DNS change: minutes of switchover, not days of downtime. ### Launch & Ownership Handoff We launch, watch the app under real traffic, then hand over the repository, the infrastructure accounts, and documentation any competent engineer can pick up. URLs are preserved or 301-redirected so search equity follows you. From that point the platform bill ends and the product is simply yours. ## Links - Full page: https://www.dreamlabs.pro/services/migrate-from-base44 - Offerings & pricing: https://www.dreamlabs.pro/offerings - Contact: https://www.dreamlabs.pro/contact