Visual editor
Change what you see, by clicking it
The first version an AI builder gives you is a starting point, and the tenth small change is where most of them become expensive. Builddu gives you three ways to make one: click it, describe it, or write it. This page is what each one does, what it cannot do, and what each one costs.
Click an element, change it, apply
The editor runs over your real preview, not a mock-up of it.
- Turn the editor on over the live preview and click the thing you want to change. What you picked is what the inspector works on.
- The inspector sits beside the preview on desktop and under it on a phone — never on top of the thing you are editing.
- Change its text, its styling, or its image or video. Those are the three kinds of change the editor writes.
- Nothing is written while you work. Every change is preview-only until you press Apply, each one has its own undo, and you can discard the whole batch.
- When you apply, the same bar tells you what landed and what did not — per change, with a reason — rather than a toast that disappears.
What you can change by clicking
The controls that exist, rather than a promise about everything.
- Text: the words in the element you picked.
- Colour: text and background.
- Type: size, weight, and alignment.
- Layout: spacing, how children are distributed, and corner radius.
- Visibility: hide an element without deleting it.
- Media: swap an image or video, including one you upload — an upload is copied into your project rather than linked to our storage.
Three ways to make the same change
Different changes want different tools, and the three are priced differently.
Click it
A change you can point at: a word, a colour, a size, an image. No prompt, no waiting on a model.
What it costs: The editor needs 2 credits available before it will make a change. What you are charged is the writes that landed plus a rebuild only if one was needed — at most those 2 credits, and on many projects nothing at all, with the hold released.
Describe it
A change that touches more than the element you clicked: a new section, different behaviour, something across several files.
What it costs: An AI run sets aside 60 credits before it starts, because what a run costs is not known until it finishes. You are charged what the run actually spent and the rest is released. It is not a cap: a run above it is charged from what is left in your balance and no further.
Write it
A change you would rather make yourself, in the file where it lives.
What it costs: Saving a file spends no credits — it is not an AI run and is not charged like one. Making the running app serve the new file takes a rebuild, which is a small fixed charge of one or two credits; on projects that build on write, no rebuild is asked for.
Some typed changes skip the AI run
A colour or a single phrase can often be done without starting a run at all.
- Ask in chat for a colour change, or for one quoted phrase to be replaced, and Builddu may do it without an AI run at all.
- It only takes that path when the match is certain — exactly one occurrence, in a file it can place.
- When it is not certain, nothing is reserved and nothing is written: your prompt goes to the agent exactly as you typed it, and is priced as an AI run.
The preview is the app
Every change shows up in something that is really running.
- The preview is your app actually running, served through Builddu rather than a picture of it.
- Looking at it costs nothing. Reads are never billable.
- A project that went to sleep is woken when you open it, and waking it is not charged to you — two of the three callers of that endpoint are ours, and we do not bill customers for our own retries.
What the visual editor will not do
The honest list, because finding these out later is worse than reading them now.
- Not every change can be placed. The editor matches each one to your source, and reports the ones it could not find or could not tell apart — those write nothing.
- One change at a time per project. A second apply while one is still being applied is refused with a message rather than queued behind it.
- It needs 2 credits available even when the change itself ends up costing nothing, because the hold is taken before anyone knows what the edit will cost.
- It edits what the build produced. Restructuring a page, adding a screen, or changing what the app does is an AI edit or a code edit, not a click.
- It is not a design tool. There is no canvas, no component library and no dragging of elements around a page — the controls are the ones listed above.
Common questions
Do I need to know CSS?
No. The controls are buttons and pickers — bigger, bolder, this colour, hide this — and Builddu writes the change into your project's files.
Can I undo a visual change?
Before you apply, each change has its own undo and the batch can be discarded. After you apply, every build is kept as a version you can restore.
Will the editor break my code?
It writes into the file the element came from, and only where it is sure which one that is. A change it cannot place exactly is reported back to you instead of guessed at — nothing is written for it.
Can I still use it once my free build is used up?
Yes, while you have at least 2 credits. There is no plan gate on the visual editor — the only thing standing between you and a styling change is that balance.
Is a visual edit faster than asking the AI?
For something you can point at, yes: there is no model to wait on. For something that touches several files, the AI run is the shorter route even though it costs more.
The three prices above in context, beside everything else that costs credits, are on the pricing page. Where editing sits in the whole flow — prompt, build, preview, publish — is how Builddu works. The code panel, the version history and the download are covered in what happens to your code. How other builders handle small changes is in our comparisons and guides.
Build something and change it