Who owns Base44?
Wix.com Ltd. owns Base44. Wix announced on 18 June 2025 that it had acquired the company from founder Maor Shlomo for initial consideration of about $80 million plus earn-out payments through 2029, and that Base44 "will continue to operate as a distinct product and business." Base44's Terms of Service now name Wix.com Ltd. as the company that operates the Base44-branded services.
Base44 after Wix acquisition: what changed in 2026
Base44 after the Wix acquisition is a Wix-owned product that still ships under its own brand. Wix announced on 18 June 2025 that it had acquired Base44 for initial consideration of about $80 million plus earn-out payments through 2029. Since then the contracting party in Base44's Terms has changed from Base44, Inc. to Wix.com Ltd., with disputes going to JAMS arbitration under New York law. List prices and credit allowances have held, while credit charges now vary by action and model and more features sit behind Enterprise. Wix reported Base44 at about $150 million of ARR as of May 2026. For enterprise buyers, Wix ownership lowers solvency risk and raises integration risk.
The deal terms matter more than the headline number. Wix's release puts about $25 million of the roughly $80 million initial consideration into retention bonus payments to Base44 employees, and ties the earn-out to "certain performance metrics" through 2029. The cash bought the company; the retention money and the earn-out keep the team building it.
The acquisition belongs on the risk register of any team running production apps on Base44 — not because the acquisition is uniformly bad news, but because its second-order effects on pricing, contracts, and roadmap are easy to leave unmodeled.
This piece walks through the pre-acquisition state, what Wix paid and what its filings report since, the contractual changes that took effect, the product and pricing shifts, the team retention picture, three illustrative scenarios, and the structural question of whether Wix ownership is a net positive or negative for Base44 users in 2026. For one specific app, that question is what a Base44 platform-risk consult answers.
Pre-acquisition state: Base44 in June 2025
Base44 in the months before the Wix deal was a bootstrapped company, not a venture-backed one. TechCrunch reported that founder Maor Shlomo sold a six-month-old, bootstrapped company that had eight employees and had reportedly grown to 250,000 users.
The product surface in June 2025 was narrower than it is today. The platform offered AI-generated React applications with a managed database, authentication primitives, a Deno-based backend function runtime, and basic deployment. The credit-based billing model was already in place: the pricing page archived on 24 April 2025 listed Free, Starter ($20 a month), Builder ($50), Pro ($100) and Elite ($200) plans, plus an Enterprise plan with custom pricing, a dedicated architect and premium support. The Terms of Service in force at the time, last updated 23 March 2025, were an agreement with Base44, Inc., a Delaware corporation, governed by New York law, and they contained no uptime SLA.
The competitive landscape at that moment was crowded but unsettled. Lovable, Bolt.new, Replit Agent, and Cursor were all in active iteration, and our Base44 vs comparisons cover how each of them stacks up today. Bubble had been around for a decade and was incumbent in the no-code space but did not have an AI-first generation flow. Webflow had announced AI features but had not shipped a competing primary surface. Wix itself had launched its AI website builder (Wix Studio with AI) but had no equivalent to Base44's full-application generation capability.
The strategic reading at the time of the announcement was that Wix bought Base44 to plug a specific gap: full-application generation, not just websites. Wix's release put "vibe coding" in its headline ("Wix Further Expands into Vibe Coding with Acquisition of Base44"), a term that became normalized in the AI development space over the following year. Wix did not have an in-house team that could ship to that surface on the timeline competition required.
What Wix paid, and when
Primary sources answer the two questions people search for: how much Wix paid, and what Base44 has turned into since. The table dates each event to the document that records it.
| Date | Event | Primary source |
|---|---|---|
| 18 June 2025 | Wix announces it acquired Base44 for initial consideration of about $80 million plus earn-out payments paid through 2029; about $25 million of the initial consideration is retention bonuses for Base44 employees | Wix release (GlobeNewswire) |
| 18 June 2025 | TechCrunch reports the deal was cash, and that Base44 was six months old, bootstrapped and had eight employees | TechCrunch |
| 21 September 2025 | A new version of Base44's Terms adds mandatory JAMS arbitration; the contracting party is still Base44, Inc. | Terms archived 1 October 2025 |
| 13 November to 5 December 2025 | The contracting party in the Terms changes to Wix.com Ltd. | 13 November archive, 5 December archive |
| 13 May 2026 | Wix's first-quarter results say Base44 "Achieved ~$150 million of ARR as of May as momentum continues to ramp" | SEC Exhibit 99.1 |
| 22 June 2026 | Current version of the Terms of Service (last updated) | base44.com/terms-of-service |
| 29 June 2026 | Base 1, Base44's first in-house model, is added to the AI chat | Base44 product changelog |
| 4 August 2026 | Wix's second-quarter results expect Base44 to reach about 60% non-GAAP gross margin in the second half of 2026 | Wix Q2 2026 results |
Two points in that table correct common readings of the deal. The $25 million of retention money is part of the $80 million, not on top of it: the release says the bonuses are paid "as part of the above initial consideration." And the earn-out runs through 2029, not two years; it is paid "predicated upon certain performance metrics." The release gives no separate closing date. It says Wix "acquired" Base44 in the past tense on the day of the announcement.
What Wix's own filings say about Base44 in 2026
Wix counts Base44 inside its Creative Subscriptions numbers, but its quarterly releases now name it directly. The first-quarter 2026 release, filed with the SEC as Exhibit 99.1 on 13 May 2026, credits the quarter's bookings and revenue growth to "new cohort momentum powered by Base44 strength" and reports that Base44 "Achieved ~$150 million of ARR as of May as momentum continues to ramp." The same release lists "Superagents, a native AI assistant, and new Figma to Base44 integration" as the quarter's Base44 features.
The second-quarter release on 4 August 2026 quotes Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami: "We are continuing to invest in Wix Harmony as well as Base44." It also says Wix expects "Base44 to achieve ~60% non-GAAP gross margin in 2H, a significant improvement from near-zero non-GAAP gross margin entering the year", after launching Base 1, which the release calls "Base44's proprietary LLM". For builders, the read-through is plain. Wix is investing in Base44, not winding it down, and it is working on the cost of every AI call, the cost that credit pricing is set against.
What changed in the contract
Three contract items matter to Base44 customers: two that changed and one that did not. Archived copies of Base44's own pages date each one, and the changes did not arrive as a single re-issue.
Contracting party and disputes. The Terms in force when the deal was announced, last updated 23 March 2025, were an agreement with Base44, Inc., a Delaware corporation, governed by New York law, with disputes going to the courts of New York County. A version dated 21 September 2025 added mandatory arbitration administered by JAMS for customers in the US and anywhere else the law allows it, while still naming Base44, Inc. Between the 13 November and 5 December 2025 archives, the contracting party changed to Wix.com Ltd., "which operates the Base44-branded services", with no new date on the document. The current Terms, last updated 22 June 2026, keep Wix.com Ltd., New York law and JAMS arbitration. For enterprise customers with vendor management processes, the change of counterparty is the item that triggers a contract re-review.
Data Processing Addendum and sub-processors. Base44's DPA is part of the Terms and still names Base44, Inc. as the company providing the services. Its Exhibit C sub-processor page opens by naming Wix.com Ltd. and lists Wix.com Ltd. (Israel) as a sub-processor for "Providing and improving the services", alongside hosting, email, analytics, logging and LLM providers such as Mongo, SendGrid, Render, Google Cloud, OpenAI and Anthropic. Wix was already on that list in the earliest archived copy, from 13 October 2025. The sub-processor directory on Base44's security page does not match Exhibit C exactly, so ask for the current list in writing. The DPA also lets you subscribe to change notices, sent seven days before a sub-processor is added or replaced, by emailing compliance@base44.com. For GDPR Article 28, the two things to reconcile are the entity names and the list itself. Until both are reconciled, a changed sub-processor list can hold up vendor approval on the customer side.
The Terms also bar protected health information and payment card data from the platform unless the company has expressly agreed in writing in advance and the appropriate agreement is in place. Any HIPAA or PCI review will find that clause before it finds anything else.
No SLA below Enterprise, before or after. Neither the March 2025 Terms nor the current ones contain an uptime SLA or service credits. Base44's security page says "Detailed commitments are available to Enterprise customers as part of their Service Level Agreement", so an SLA is something you negotiate on an Enterprise contract, not something a paid plan includes. We cover the operational reality in no SLA outage risk.
Product roadmap shifts since the acquisition
The roadmap signal since the deal closed has been two-tracked. New growth-aligned features ship at a faster cadence than they did pre-acquisition. Platform-stability fixes for non-critical bugs ship at a slower cadence. Both are consistent with the post-acquisition resource re-allocation that earn-out structures incentivize.
On the growth-feature side, Base44's product changelog shows where the effort goes. Superagents arrived on 11 March 2026, and Base 1, Base44's first in-house model, joined the AI chat on 29 June 2026. The Wix ties are specific and recent. From 5 August 2026, workspaces billed through Wix could buy the Elite 10 and Elite 11 plans; on 25 August, the products of a connected Wix store became manageable inside the app editor; and on 7 September, the Wix font catalog joined the font pickers. Enterprise governance, from publish permissions to a workspace-wide security center, ships steadily. Most of these have upsell motions attached.
On the platform-stability side, the timeline for non-critical bug fixes has lengthened: in our reading of the feedback board, lower-voted, non-critical bugs wait longer for a shipped fix than they did before the deal. Critical issues (security, payments, auth) still ship in days, but the long tail has lengthened.
Server-side rendering for the apps people publish is the roadmap item that has not shipped. The only server-side rendering in the product changelog is for builders' public Base44 profiles (20 July 2026). What Base44 shipped for apps works around the crawler instead. An SEO & GEO tab that scores an app and can enable llms.txt arrived on 26 April 2026. The HTML snapshot Base44 generates for search engines and AI crawlers gained labelled page sections and per-page descriptions on 10 June 2026, so crawlers see more "without running JavaScript." A snapshot helps discovery, but it is not the same as server-rendering the page a user loads. We cover the SEO-specific implications in Base44 app not showing in Google.
The Wix integration items that did ship are interesting in what they reveal about the parent's intent. Wix store management inside the app editor positions Base44 as an application layer on top of Wix commerce, and the Wix font catalog and Wix billing point the same way for design and account plumbing. Neither is a hostile signal — both are consistent with Base44 staying a distinct product — but both suggest the long-term arc points toward tighter coupling with Wix's broader stack.
Pricing changes: the most-felt impact
Pricing is where customers have felt the acquisition most directly, but not through the price list, which is the first thing most people check.
List prices and allowances: unchanged. The April 2025 pricing page listed Starter at $20 a month with 100 message credits and 2,000 integration credits, Builder at $50 (250 and 10,000), Pro at $100 (500 and 20,000) and Elite at $200 (1,200 and 50,000). The live pricing page shows the same allowances per tier on 23 September 2026, at $16, $40, $80 and $160 a month billed annually ("Annual billing saves 20%"). The Free plan is the exception: its daily message cap fell from 7 to 5 by the September 2025 archive, and its integration credits, 500 in April 2025, are 100 on the live page.
How credits are consumed: changed. The pricing-page FAQ, in every archived copy from July 2025 to 15 May 2026, said "Each integration request costs 1 credit, regardless of which integration you're using." Base44's credits documentation now prices integrations by action and model. An email costs about 1 credit (about 2 from a custom domain), generated video about 5 credits per second, and an invokeLLM call about 1, 5 or 15 credits depending on the model. The docs add that the exact number of message credits "is worked out after each message runs." A team that budgeted on the older flat rate can see its monthly Base44 line item drift upward without a corresponding usage increase. To put a number on your own mix at today's rates, run the Base44 monthly cost calculator.
Enterprise: always custom, now carrying more. Enterprise predates the deal. The April 2025 page listed an Enterprise plan with "Custom pricing for organizations needing unlimited capacity", and Base44's enterprise page as archived on 4 July 2025 already offered Enterprise SSO over SAML and OAuth. What has grown is the list of features that exist only there. Base44's security page today marks SSO enforcement, SCIM provisioning, IP allowlists, audit logs, per-member credit limits and the workspace security center as Enterprise features, while apps on Elite plans and up can offer sign-in through any OIDC identity provider. Base44 publishes no Enterprise price. Its enterprise page says "Custom volume pricing scales with workspace size. Talk to sales for a quote."
Like-for-like spend moves by different amounts for different apps. Apps that make many integration calls on larger models feel the per-action pricing most, and a team that needs one of the Enterprise-only features above moves onto custom pricing.
We cover the operational implications of the credit model — independently of the acquisition — in Base44 credit system explained and the pricing reality in Base44 pricing real costs analysis.
Team retention and roadmap velocity
Founder Maor Shlomo is still in place: Base44's own blog named him "Founder and CEO of Base44" in a post published on 1 September 2026. That is consistent with the earn-out structure. The visible engineering output — released features, GitHub-equivalent issue closures on the feedback board, conference presence — has been from the original Base44 team operating under Wix governance, not from Wix engineers absorbing the product.
What is harder to track from outside is attrition at the IC engineering layer. The headcount base is hard to pin down: TechCrunch put the team at eight employees at the sale, and Base44 has hired since. New hiring is visible on Wix's careers site, which lists Base44 roles such as "Director, Enterprise Sales - Base44" and "Solutions Engineer - Base44" as Wix positions. Mixed into Wix's listings, they obscure the headcount picture.
The roadmap velocity signal has two patterns we noted in the previous section. Growth features ship faster; platform stability fixes ship slower. A third pattern cuts the other way: documentation has not stalled. The product changelog on docs.base44.com carries dated entries from 4 January 2026 through 22 September 2026, and a separate developer changelog covers the SDK and CLI. For a team maintaining a production app, the practical issue is volume. Behavior you rely on can change in any given week, so the changelog belongs on someone's weekly reading list.
Customer impact: three illustrative scenarios
The three scenarios below are hypothetical. They show how the changes above can land on different kinds of customer; they are not accounts of specific clients.
Scenario one: the marketplace startup. Suppose a two-founder marketplace startup built its MVP on Base44 before the deal and runs on the Pro tier. After the acquisition, its monthly spend can drift upward with no usage increase as its integration calls move to per-action pricing. Then an enterprise pilot asks for SSO, and the SSO it needs is not on its plan: sign-in through an OIDC identity provider starts at Elite, and SSO enforcement is an Enterprise feature with custom pricing. One way through is to move the sign-in surface to a separate Next.js authentication layer on its existing domain and keep the rest of the app on Base44. Net effect: the startup stays on Base44 for the application layer, keeps paying Pro tier pricing, and satisfies the enterprise auth requirements off-platform.
Scenario two: the agency builder. Suppose an agency runs a portfolio of client apps on Base44. Per-action credit pricing complicates its per-client billing, because each client's integration mix now changes what that app costs to run. A couple of clients then need SSO, and the agency has to choose between moving them onto a higher tier or a custom-priced Enterprise plan, passing that cost through, or migrating them to an alternative such as a Next.js + Supabase stack. A likely outcome is a partial migration: the most enterprise-adjacent apps leave, and the rest stay on Base44 because the cost change is absorbable. We cover the agency-specific dynamics in Base44 for agencies.
Scenario three: the regulated industry pilot. Suppose a health-tech company is piloting Base44 for an internal tool when its HIPAA review reaches the DPA's sub-processor list. The review requires documentation of every sub-processor handling PHI, and the Exhibit C list, with Wix.com Ltd. and the LLM providers on it, triggers a full vendor re-review. The internal tool launch waits while the compliance team works through the new chain, and Base44 goes into the next vendor review cycle marked as high friction for regulated use cases. Net effect: Base44 keeps the pilot but can lose the company's next app deployments to a stack on its existing cloud provider, where the sub-processor surface is already approved.
The pattern across all three scenarios is that the acquisition does not cause an immediate customer-facing crisis. The friction accumulates quietly through pricing, contracts, and feature gating. A customer who notices and models the second-order effects early can adjust its architecture before the friction becomes expensive. A customer who does not notice keeps paying the higher cost without an explicit decision to do so.
Is Wix ownership a positive or negative for Base44 users?
The honest answer is that it depends on the customer's threat model.
For customers whose primary vendor risk was Base44-as-a-startup going under, Wix ownership is a clear net positive. The legal entity behind the platform is now Nasdaq-listed (WIX), founded in 2006, with $541.2 million of revenue in the first quarter of 2026 alone and a cash position that does not depend on the next venture round. The probability that the platform simply disappears in a 24-month window dropped substantially after the deal, though contingency planning if the platform disappears remains worth doing on the longer horizon.
For customers whose primary vendor risk was integration risk — a forced migration, a forced pricing model change, a forced product direction that did not match their use case — Wix ownership is a clear net negative. The probability of those events is higher under Wix than under an independent Base44, because acquiring companies do eventually rationalize overlapping products. The five-year horizon for this risk is real, even if the 24-month horizon is calm.
For customers in the middle — modest scale, no exotic compliance requirements, no extreme price sensitivity — the acquisition is closer to neutral with a mild positive bias. Credit consumption went up, but service-level stability also went up. Roadmap shifted, but the core product surface is still functional. The friction is real but absorbable. Our 2026 Base44 review sets out where that friction bites and when staying is still the right call.
The structural recommendation we make in a Base44 production audit has not changed because of the acquisition. Decouple from the SDK so that migration remains an option. Maintain an export path so that data ownership is portable. Track the credit model so that pricing changes do not surprise the finance team. Watch the roadmap signal so that strategic platform shifts do not catch the engineering team flat-footed. The acquisition raised the stakes on all four of these disciplines but did not change the disciplines themselves.
How to track the acquisition impact going forward
The signals worth tracking are public, lightweight, and cumulatively informative.
// A minimal monitoring sketch for tracking acquisition signals
const signals = {
pricing: "https://base44.com/pricing", // diff monthly
termsOfService: "https://base44.com/terms-of-service", // diff quarterly
dpa: "https://base44.com/dpa", // diff quarterly
subProcessors: "https://base44.com/dpa/exhibitc", // or subscribe via compliance@base44.com
productChangelog: "https://docs.base44.com/changelog/product", // read weekly
developerChangelog: "https://docs.base44.com/changelog/developers",
feedbackBoard: "https://feedback.base44.com", // top 10 issues monthly
wixResults: "https://www.wix.com/press-room/home", // Base44 lines each quarter
};
The diff of the pricing page month over month is the single highest-signal data point, and the credits documentation belongs in the same diff, because that is where consumption changes show up. The cadence of release notes and the depth of changelog entries is a close second. The feedback board's top issues — and how long they stay at the top — is the third. Together these three are enough to maintain a defensible view of platform direction without subscribing to expensive analyst services.
The contract-level signals — Terms of Service, Data Processing Addendum, sub-processor list — are worth diffing once per quarter and routing through whoever owns vendor management. The Wayback Machine keeps dated copies of all of them, which is how the dates in this article were established. Without a process like this, the late-2025 change of contracting party in the Terms and the Exhibit C sub-processor list are easy to miss until an audit surfaces both.
The strategic question for 2026 and beyond
The structural question that customers should be asking in 2026 is not whether the Wix acquisition was good or bad — that question is too coarse to be useful. The structural question is whether the customer's three-year roadmap is compatible with the most likely Wix-Base44 trajectory.
The most likely trajectory, based on the visible roadmap and Wix's own releases, is that Base44 stays a distinct product at least through the earn-out period, which Wix's release says runs through 2029. Along the way it converges on Wix's design, billing and commerce stack, and the Wix store, font and billing integrations above are the early instances. After that, it either becomes part of Wix's broader platform or is wound down in favor of a Wix-native equivalent. Wix's 2026 releases, which single Base44 out for growth and margin, argue against the wind-down branch in the near term. This is not certain — many acquisitions resolve differently — but it is the modal outcome for the structure Wix bought.
Customers whose three-year roadmap fits inside that trajectory — modest scale, no exotic requirements, comfortable with the convergence direction — should plan to stay. Customers whose three-year roadmap pushes against the trajectory — large scale, regulated industries, strong SEO requirements, deep platform customization needs — should be planning their Base44 migration path now, even if they do not execute on it for 12 to 18 months, and the migration payback model shows when leaving pays back against what staying costs. See When to leave Base44 for the decision framework we use with audit clients, and Base44 vendor lock-in deep dive for the technical decoupling work that precedes any migration.
The acquisition is not a crisis. It is a re-pricing of the platform's risk profile that customers should be modeling explicitly. The customers who model it explicitly will be in better shape, regardless of which way the platform ultimately goes.
Frequently asked questions
The FAQ below answers eight common questions about the acquisition. If your specific question is not covered there, the audit engagement walks through the customer-specific implications in detail.
Sources checked on 23 September 2026
- Wix.com Ltd., "Wix Further Expands into Vibe Coding with Acquisition of Base44", 18 June 2025, via GlobeNewswire.
- Julie Bort, "6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash", TechCrunch, 18 June 2025.
- Wix first-quarter 2026 results, SEC Exhibit 99.1, 13 May 2026, and second-quarter 2026 results, 4 August 2026.
- Base44 Terms of Service (last updated 22 June 2026), with Wayback Machine copies from 3 July 2025, 1 October 2025, 13 November 2025 and 5 December 2025.
- Base44 Data Processing Addendum, Exhibit C (and its 13 October 2025 copy) and security page.
- Base44 pricing and enterprise pages, with Wayback Machine copies of the pricing page from 24 April 2025 and 15 May 2026.
- Base44 credits documentation and product changelog.
- Base44 blog, How to build an app for free, 1 September 2026, and Wix's open positions page.
Related reading
- Base44 user sentiment and security disclosures after the Wix acquisition — companion piece on the user-visible side: G2/Trustpilot review drift, the Wiz SSO bypass and Imperva XSS disclosures, the Feb 3 2026 outage, and the November 2025 record-limit change.
- When to leave Base44 — the migration decision framework we use across audit engagements.
- Base44 vendor lock-in deep dive — the technical decoupling work that gives any customer optionality regardless of platform direction.
- Base44 pricing real costs analysis — current pricing structure, hidden cost drivers, and how the acquisition has reshaped the cost model.