The honest guide
A plain-English walkthrough of the tools that actually work in 2026; The free AI website builders, the free hosting, and the bits where it all falls down. Written by a web designer, which is either the worst or the best person to write it.
Three reasons I wrote it anyway. One, if your budget is next to £0, you should know how to spend next to £0 properly, and we'd rather you knew the real options than spend time on a worse one. Two, the people for whom AI sites work well aren't the people we'd build for anyway, so there's no real conflict. Three, when AI sites stop being enough, you'll come back with a much clearer picture of what you actually need. That's a better conversation than the one that starts with "how much for a website?"
Skip to where free AI sites fall down if you want the short version.
Route 1
Type a sentence, get a website. These are the ones that have a genuinely free tier
you can stay on forever (well, for as long as they keep it free, I guess).
Pricing and limits are accurate as of 2026 - always double-check on their site.
Best for: Small businesses who want every feature under one roof - bookings, shop, blog, contact forms.
Free tier: Forever-free plan. You get a Wix-branded subdomain (yourbiz.wixsite.com) and a small Wix advert on the page.
The catch: Hard to move away from later - exporting your site to another host isn't really a thing.
Best for: Designers and people who want a beautiful, modern-looking site without writing code. Strongest aesthetic of the AI builders.
Free tier: One site, hosted on yoursite.framer.website, with a small Framer badge in the corner.
The catch: If your traffic grows, you'll need the paid plan (~£8/mo) for a custom domain and to remove the badge.
Best for: People who want full design control later. The free tier is more limited than Framer's, but you can grow into a serious site.
Free tier: Two pages plus a CMS-style homepage, hosted on yoursite.webflow.io. No custom domain.
The catch: Steeper learning curve than the others - it rewards you for treating it like a real design tool.
Best for: Small business owners who already plan to pay for hosting. Cheapest start - often around £2/mo on a long term plan.
Free tier: No forever-free tier, but a 30-day money-back guarantee on cheap plans makes it close to free to try.
The catch: Not actually free - the entry-level plan looks free in the AI promo but you do need to pay for a domain and hosting.
Best for: Trade businesses who want a one-page site that looks professional in 30 seconds.
Free tier: Free trial only. Real plans start around $15/month - the AI-generates-it-instantly part is the headline feature.
The catch: Same template family as every other Durable site. Fine if you just need a digital business card; bad if you want to stand out.
Best for: A single-page "here I am" site - a link tree, a portfolio, a launch page. Not really AI-led, but cheap and clean.
Free tier: Three sites on the free plan, on yoursite.carrd.co. £14/yr for a custom domain.
The catch: Not built for multi-page sites - if you need more than one page of content, pick something else.
Prompt tip: the AI in these builders is only as good as what you tell it. Don't just say "build me a website for a plumber" - tell it your town, the three services you most want to sell, your one or two competitors, and the tone you want ("plain, no jargon, no marketing speak"). The output will be 10× more useful.
Route 2
If you've used AI to generate HTML / a static site (Claude, ChatGPT, v0, Lovable, Bolt - any of them will do it), you need somewhere to put it. These four are genuinely free, no ads, no subdomain shame.
The one we'd recommend by default. Free custom domain, unlimited bandwidth, fast CDN baked in. You connect a GitHub repo (or drag-and-drop a folder) and it deploys in seconds.
Good for: Almost any static site. Best balance of generous and easy.
Free-tier limit: 500 builds per month on the free plan - way more than you'll use.
The classic drag-and-drop-a-folder host. Free custom domains, free SSL, deploys from a zip file or GitHub.
Good for: Beginners - the drag-a-folder-onto-the-page flow is the gentlest in the business.
Free-tier limit: 100 GB bandwidth/month. Plenty unless your site goes viral.
Made by the same team that built Next.js. Free for hobby use, fast deploys, generous free CDN. Slightly aimed at developers but works for plain HTML too.
Good for: If your AI tool spits out a React or Next.js project (v0.dev, Bolt, Lovable all do).
Free-tier limit: Free tier is "non-commercial" in their terms - they don't enforce it strictly, but for a real business site Cloudflare Pages is the cleaner pick.
The OG free host. Push HTML to a GitHub repo, it appears at yourname.github.io. Free custom domains supported.
Good for: If you're already using Git or have GitHub Copilot helping you write the site.
Free-tier limit: Static only - no server-side forms or databases. Soft 100 GB/month bandwidth.
Free "domain" usually means a subdomain like yourbiz.pages.dev.
It works, but it doesn't look like a real business. A proper .com
, .co.uk or in our case a .scot (because having a Scottish domain is pretty cool) from a registrar
is £8-12/year and it points at any of the hosts above in two clicks.
It's the single best £10 you'll spend on the project.
The catches
Not a sales pitch, just the bits we see go wrong when people try to do this for a real business. A lot of these are fine if your business is small or new.
The look is generic.
AI builders pull from the same handful of layout templates. Anyone in your trade who's also used the tool will have a site that looks unsettlingly similar.
The copy reads like AI.
Most people don't edit the AI-written copy hard enough. Customers can clock it. A site that sounds like every other site is a site you can't tell apart from your competitors.
Local SEO is invisible.
AI builders don't know that Ayr punters search differently from Glasgow punters. "Plumber near me", Google Business setup, local schema, photos of real Ayrshire jobs - none of that is automatic.
Free-tier ads and subdomains.
A wixsite.com URL and a Wix advert at the bottom of your homepage tells a prospect you didn't want to spend £10 on your business. They will draw conclusions.
You're the support team now.
Forms break. Images stop loading. Google flags your site for a missing thing. There's no "call David" - you're the helpdesk for your own site, forever.
Migration is brutal.
Once you've built on Wix, you can't really export and move to WordPress or anywhere else. The longer you stay, the more locked-in you get.
The last 20% takes 80% of the time.
AI gets you to a 'looks like a website' state in an hour. Getting it to convert visitors into customers - the bit that actually pays for itself - is where most DIY sites stall and quietly get forgotten.
The honest verdict
If the DIY route stalled - or you just don't want the headache - we'll build you a proper site from £684, with the copy written for you and the designer's mobile number on the contract.