Exporting your code
Base44 code export: what you actually get
Open the folder and you'll find your screens waiting. Keep looking for the rest.
You can export code from Base44, and the export is real — a codebase a developer can open, read and host. But it's an export of the frontend only. This page is the inventory: what's in it, what's missing, how to get it, and when doing the rest yourself genuinely makes sense.
See what's insideWhat's actually inside the export?
The frontend. In practice that means the code for every screen your users see: the pages, the buttons, the forms, the styling, the way one screen leads to the next. It arrives as an ordinary codebase, the kind any web developer works with daily.
That's worth having. It means the visible half of your app is portable: it can be hosted on any ordinary web host, edited by any developer you hire, and kept in a repository you control. If Base44 disappeared tomorrow, the screens would survive.
But open the folder looking for your data and you'll come up empty. Which brings us to the other half.
What the export leaves behind
Everything below stays on Base44's servers. The export doesn't touch it.
Every record the app has ever saved: customers, orders, content. The exported screens expect this data to exist, but the export doesn't contain it.
The accounts and passwords that let users in. This is a running service on Base44's side, not a file that can sit in a folder.
Photos, documents, attachments. Uploaded to Base44, stored by Base44, absent from the export.
The invisible work — saving a record, sending an email, checking a permission — happens on Base44's servers when the screens ask for it. The screens come with you; the answers to their requests don't.
This isn't a criticism of Base44 — running the backend for you is the product. It just means "I exported my code" and "I own my app" are different sentences.
How to get the export
From inside Base44 itself. The platform can hand you the frontend code, including pushing it to GitHub — a site where code repositories live. Menus and plan details shift over time, so treat Base44's own documentation as the current word on where the button sits and which plans include it.
Whatever route you use, do one thing the same day: put the code in a repository you own, under your own account. It costs nothing and takes minutes. From that point the visible half of your app has an insurance copy that no platform decision can touch.
When exporting it yourself is genuinely enough
Often, honestly. If you're exporting as insurance, you need nobody: the copy of the screens sits in your own hands while the app happily keeps running on Base44. Do it this week.
It's also enough if you're leaving and you have an engineer who has built and run a backend before. The export plus their skills is a complete kit. The database, logins, files and logic have to be rebuilt on infrastructure you own, and a capable engineer can do every bit of that.
Where it stops being enough is the gap between those two: you want out, and nobody on your side wants to own a backend rebuild, a data move and a login migration with real users on the line. That's a project, and pretending it's a download leads to the worst version of it.
If that gap is where you are, rebuilding the missing half is the work I do — the process, pricing and guarantees are on the Base44 migration page. Or if you'd rather just ask whether your app is a DIY job, book a call and I'll tell you straight.
Questions people ask about the export
No. The export is the frontend code, meaning the screens. Your records, your users' logins and their uploaded files all stay on Base44's servers. Getting those out is a separate job.
It's generated code, so quality tracks how the app was built. Have a developer open it and skim for an hour. That tells you more than any general answer. Real, readable code either way beats no code.
Generally no. App builders don't read each other's apps. You'd be exporting a codebase, and other builders want their own format. The export's value is as code, hosted the way any code is hosted.
No. Exporting is a copy, not a move. Your app keeps running on Base44 exactly as before, and you can export again later as the app changes.
Put the code in a git repository you own — git is version control, a system that keeps every change on record. That repository is your insurance copy of the screens, whatever you decide next.