On June 1, Lovable announced that new projects on its platform will be built on TanStack Start. That’s roughly 100,000 new apps a day standing up on top of Tanner Linsley’s open-source work. The post adds that Lovable has been “working with the TanStack team, using the skill they maintain for AI tooling as a starting point.”
What it doesn’t say is that Lovable is sponsoring TanStack. I checked. As of today, tanstack.com/partners shows 13 named partners across three tiers. Lovable is not one of them.
That should change.
The size of the company doing the depending
A quick recap of Lovable, because the numbers are the argument:
- $400M ARR as of February 2026, up from $300M in January, $250M at end of 2025, $200M in November, $100M in July (founded.com).
- Anton Osika has said publicly they reached $100M ARR “faster than OpenAI, Cursor, Wiz, and every other software company in history.”
- $330M Series B in December 2025 at a $6.6B valuation, led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology fund (TechCrunch).
- About 8 million users, 200+ employees (per Anton Osika on LinkedIn), 100,000+ new projects a day.
This is a company at the scale where “we picked your framework” is no longer a compliment. It’s a dependency. Every new app on Lovable’s platform is now a production user of TanStack Start, TanStack Router, and TanStack Query. Plus whatever else gets pulled in by the AI tooling skill Lovable is “working with the TanStack team” on.
The size of the project being depended on
TanStack is funded transparently. In “The State of TanStack, Two Years of Full-Time OSS” (Nov 24, 2025), Tanner laid out the model in detail: 16 partners then (13 today), funding “a reasonable salary for me, a growing rainy-day fund for the organization, monthly sponsorships for around 12 core contributors, and short-term contracts for another 3 to 5 people.” In March 2026 he pulled third-party ads off the site entirely, because partnership revenue was carrying the load on its own.
The current Gold tier is Cloudflare, Railway, and CodeRabbit. Silver is AG Grid, Clerk, Netlify, OpenRouter, SerpAPI, WorkOS. Bronze is Electric, Sentry, Prisma, Unkey. Every prior major adopter got a co-published partnership post. Netlify got one in March 2025: “Netlify is now the Official Deployment Partner for TanStack Start.” OpenRouter got one in March 2026: “OpenRouter is now an official TanStack sponsor.” Both were authored by Tanner. Both named the tier.
Lovable’s announcement didn’t get one. There’s no co-published post on the TanStack blog. There’s no tier. There’s no quote from anyone on the TanStack side.
The disproportion
Here’s what makes the absence conspicuous. At $400M ARR, Lovable is roughly the same order of magnitude as several of the named Gold-tier partners. And it’s using TanStack more directly than any of them. Cloudflare provides infrastructure TanStack can run on. Railway provides deploys. CodeRabbit provides PR review. Lovable provides the framework choice itself, to 8 million users, 100,000 times a day. The framework being chosen is TanStack’s.
When the largest single channel through which new TanStack apps get created isn’t on the sponsor list, the sponsor list stops describing the actual economic reality of the project.
What “working with the team” should look like
I’m not assuming bad faith. Lovable is two and a half years old. Most of its growth happened in the last twelve months. Internal motion at that speed tends to outrun internal process. “We should formalise this” is a sentence that gets pushed to next quarter for entirely human reasons. The migration itself is genuinely interesting work and reads like an engineering team that respects what they’re building on.
But the framework they built on is one person’s full-time job, plus 12 contributors funded by an open sponsor program with a published rate card. The right way to “work with the TanStack team” at $400M ARR is to be on the page that lists who funds them. At Gold. With a co-published post that names the tier.
That’s the version of this announcement that fits the size of the bet.
Built in Europe should mean funding the commons
There’s one more reason this announcement should have come with a sponsorship. On June 1, the same day as the Lovable announcement, Balderton Capital launched the “Built in Europe” campaign. Billboards went up in London, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin and Munich. Anton Osika is one of the faces. His quote on the page: “There has never been a better time to build from Europe than now. The talent is here, the capital is here, the ecosystem is here. And we have the ambition to match.”
I agree with that. I wrote last week about the EU’s Open Source First procurement push, and the supply-side gap underneath it. The point: preferring open source in procurement does nothing for the maintainers if the funding doesn’t flow into the commons. The same argument scales down. If “Built in Europe” is going to mean something other than a billboard, the companies wearing it have to fund the open-source infrastructure their businesses sit on. Visibly. On the maintainer’s terms. On a public list.
Funding the commons should be one of the things we Europeans just do. The American framework choice isn’t the point. The practice is the point: if your $400M ARR business runs on open source, you sponsor the open source it runs on, and you do it where everyone can see.
TanStack has the rare distinction of having actually built the list. Lovable, of all the companies in a position to demonstrate the model in practice, is the one that should be on it.