AI website builders compared: what each one costs after the promotion ends
Framer at $10/mo is the cheapest credible business site. Webflow at $15/mo billed yearly is the pick if you need a real CMS. Squarespace at $19/mo annual — $25 month-to-month — is the safest all-rounder. Avoid judging Hostinger by its $2.99 promotion: that requires a 48-month prepayment and renews at $10.99.
The options, and the losing case for each
Framer — Design-tool-turned-site-builder with the best price-to-polish ratio on this page. Best for: Marketing sites that need to look expensive and load fast. Basic is $10/mo for 30 pages, 50 GB of bandwidth and 1,000 CMS items; Pro is $30/mo for 150 pages, 100 GB and 2,500 CMS items. The free plan gives 1 GB of bandwidth and 1,000 CMS items, which is enough to build and evaluate the whole thing before paying. Not for: Content-heavy sites. Overages are published and they are not cheap: $20 per additional 100 pages on Pro, $20 per 10,000 CMS items, $40 per 100 GB of bandwidth. A site with a large blog archive or a real product catalogue outgrows the CMS allowances before it outgrows anything else.
Webflow — The most capable site builder for people who understand the box model. Best for: Sites where the CMS is the point. Basic is $15/mo billed yearly with 10 GB of bandwidth and 300 static pages; Premium is $25/mo billed yearly with up to 2.5 TB of bandwidth and 20,000 CMS items. If you are publishing hundreds of programmatic pages off a structured content model, nothing else in this price bracket comes close. Not for: Teams. Webflow's site plans are only half the bill: Workspace Core is $19/mo billed yearly and Growth is $49/mo, full seats are $39/mo per seat billed yearly and limited seats $15/mo. A three-person team on Premium can easily be paying more for seats than for the site. The learning curve is also the steepest here by a distance.
Wix — The broadest feature set, with the least transparent pricing on this page. Best for: Small businesses that need bookings, payments and a store without assembling them. The plan ladder runs Light, Core, Business and Business Elite, adding storage, e-commerce and marketing capability at each step, and it genuinely does more out of the box than anything else here. Not for: Anyone who needs to know the price in advance. Wix's own plans page states that prices and currency vary by location and that USD prices are displayed for reference only. The figures rendered to us were $17.77, $29.77, $39.77 and $159.77 per month on yearly billing, each labelled 'price includes GST' — so the number you see depends on where you are and what tax applies. We have published exactly what the page showed us and flagged that it is locale-dependent.
Squarespace — The safe all-rounder, and the only one here that publishes clean US dollar prices. Best for: Businesses that want a good-looking site, a blog, a store and a booking system with no configuration and no surprises. US pricing is Basic $228/year — $19/mo — or $25/mo month-to-month; Core $348/year ($29/mo) or $39 monthly; Plus $588/year ($49/mo) or $65 monthly; Advanced $1,188/year ($99/mo) or $139 monthly. Not for: Anyone paying monthly. The gap between annual and monthly is the largest on this page — $19 against $25 at the entry tier, $99 against $139 at the top — so a monthly Squarespace subscription is a 24-32% premium for flexibility you probably will not use. It is also the least flexible of the five for custom layouts.
Hostinger — The cheapest advertised price on the internet, attached to the longest prepayment. Best for: Buyers who are genuinely willing to prepay four years and who want WordPress rather than a proprietary builder. Premium is advertised at $2.99/mo, Unlimited at $3.99/mo and Cloud Startup at $7.99/mo — each requiring a 48-month term, each including a free domain for the first year at that term. Not for: Anyone comparing on the advertised number. Hostinger publishes its renewal prices next to the promotional ones and they are the real cost of the product: Premium renews at $10.99/mo, Unlimited at $16.99/mo and Cloud Startup at $25.99/mo. That is a 268% increase on Premium. Compare Hostinger at $10.99, not at $2.99, and it stops being the cheapest option on this page.
Durable — AI-first site generation aimed squarely at service businesses and sole traders. Best for: A trades business or solo operator who wants a site, a lead inbox and a booking link in an hour and will never open a design tool again. Launch is $25/mo, or $22/mo billed annually, and includes advanced SEO, automatic lead capture and reply, unlimited booking and 50 images a month. Grow is $49/mo, or $41 annually, adding expert onboarding, unlimited team members, daily blog posts and 500 images. Not for: Anyone who wants control over the output. Durable's value proposition is that it makes the decisions; if you have opinions about layout, typography or information architecture, you will spend the subscription fighting them. The free plan is limited to a durable.site subdomain, 5 images a month and 10 AI chat messages, so it is a demo rather than a usable tier.
10Web — AI site generation on top of managed WordPress, priced per site. Best for: People who want AI generation but need to end up on WordPress — because of a plugin, an existing team, or a client requirement. AI Starter is listed at $10/mo with an annual price of $120/year, AI Premium at $15/mo ($180/year) and AI Ultimate at $22.50/mo ($270/year), covering 1, 2 and 4 websites and 10K, 20K and 50K monthly visitors respectively. Not for: Anyone allergic to WordPress maintenance. Managed hosting removes most of it, not all of it, and plugin conflicts remain your problem. The visitor caps are also the tightest constraint here — 10,000 monthly visitors on the entry plan is a real ceiling for a business doing any content marketing.
Published entry pricing, read off each vendor's own pricing page on 23 August 2026. Annual and monthly billing are separated because the gap is large.
Framer — Entry paid plan: Basic $10/mo — 30 pages, 50 GB, 1,000 CMS items; Month-to-month: $10/mo; Next tier: Pro $30/mo — 150 pages, 100 GB, 2,500 CMS; The thing to check: Overages: $20/100 pages, $20/10,000 CMS, $40/100 GB
Webflow — Entry paid plan: Basic $15/mo billed yearly — 10 GB, 300 static pages; Month-to-month: Higher; the page quotes yearly; Next tier: Premium $25/mo billed yearly — 20,000 CMS, up to 2.5 TB; The thing to check: Seats are separate: $39/mo full, $15/mo limited, billed yearly
Wix — Entry paid plan: Light $17.77/mo yearly, price includes GST; Month-to-month: Not published to us; Next tier: Core $29.77 · Business $39.77 · Elite $159.77; The thing to check: Wix states prices and currency vary by location; USD is reference only
Squarespace — Entry paid plan: Basic $228/year — $19/mo; Month-to-month: $25/mo; Next tier: Core $348/year ($29/mo) · Plus $588 ($49) · Advanced $1,188 ($99); The thing to check: Monthly billing is a 24–32% premium
Hostinger — Entry paid plan: Premium $2.99/mo on a 48-month term; Month-to-month: Not offered at the promo rate; Next tier: Unlimited $3.99/mo promo · Cloud Startup $7.99/mo promo; The thing to check: Renewals: $10.99 · $16.99 · $25.99 per month
Durable — Entry paid plan: Launch $22/mo billed annually; Month-to-month: $25/mo; Next tier: Grow $41/mo annually, $49 monthly; The thing to check: Free plan is a demo: durable.site subdomain, 5 images/mo
10Web — Entry paid plan: AI Starter $10/mo, $120/year; Month-to-month: See vendor page; Next tier: AI Premium $15/mo · AI Ultimate $22.50/mo; The thing to check: Visitor caps: 10K, 20K, 50K per month
Footnotes on that table
Wix's figures are exactly what its plans page rendered to us, including the 'price includes GST' label. Wix's own page states that prices and currency vary by location and that USD prices are displayed for reference only, so we cannot present these as definitive US-exclusive prices — and neither can anyone else without saying which locale they were served.
Hostinger's promotional prices require a 48-month term. The renewal prices published alongside them are the honest long-run cost of the product.
10Web's page shows a 50%-off annual promotion, so the annual figures quoted are promotional rather than list.
Why is the advertised price almost never the price?
Because this category has converged on four separate ways of making the headline number smaller than the real one, and most comparison articles reprint the headline. The first is term length. Hostinger advertises Premium at $2.99/mo, and that price requires a 48-month commitment paid up front. The renewal price, published on the same page, is $10.99/mo. Over five years the advertised price is true for four of them and wrong for the fifth, and most buyers renew at least once. Compare it at $10.99 and the ranking on this page changes. The second is annual-versus-monthly framing. Squarespace's Basic plan is $228 a year, which is $19/mo, and $25/mo if you pay monthly. Webflow quotes $15/mo for Basic 'billed yearly'. Almost every builder in this category leads with the annual effective rate. That is not dishonest, but it does mean a monthly buyer pays 20-35% more than the number in the comparison table. The third is locale. Wix's plans page states plainly that prices and currency vary by location and that USD prices are displayed for reference only. The figures rendered to us were $17.77, $29.77, $39.77 and $159.77, each labelled as including GST. There is no single Wix price to publish, which is a finding rather than a failure of research. The fourth is what the plan does not include. Webflow's site plan is not the whole bill — Workspace seats are $39/mo for a full seat and $15/mo for a limited seat, billed yearly, and Workspace Core is $19/mo. A three-person team is paying for three things, not one.
Which builder should a small business actually buy?
Squarespace, for most of them, and the reason is boring: it publishes clean US dollar prices, does everything a small business site needs without configuration, and has the smallest gap between what you expect and what you get. Basic at $19/mo on annual billing is the entry point, and Core at $29/mo is where the store and the scheduling live. Framer, if the site's job is to be persuasive. At $10/mo for Basic and $30/mo for Pro it is the cheapest way to have a site that looks like it cost five figures, and the free plan lets you build the entire thing before paying. Watch the CMS item allowance if you blog. Webflow, if the site's job is to hold structured content — a large blog, a directory, a programmatic set of location or service pages. Premium at $25/mo billed yearly with 20,000 CMS items is exceptional value for that specific job, and nothing else on this page can do it. Budget for seats. Durable, if the business is a solo trade and the alternative is no website at all. Launch at $22/mo billed annually with automatic lead capture and reply and unlimited booking is a genuinely complete answer for a plumber or a mobile groomer who will never log into a design tool.
Where does the AI in 'AI website builder' actually help?
In the first thirty minutes, and rarely after that. Every product on this page will generate a plausible site from a description of your business. That is real value: it eliminates the blank page, produces reasonable structure and copy, and gets a solo operator from nothing to something in an afternoon. Durable and 10Web are built around this moment and do it best. What the AI does not do is the thing that determines whether the site works: deciding what the page is for, what the visitor is supposed to do, and what evidence would make them do it. A generated site is structurally identical to every other generated site in the same category, and structurally identical sites do not differentiate. The second place AI genuinely helps is content maintenance — Durable's Grow tier at $41/mo billed annually publishes daily blog posts and handles unlimited lead replies. Whether you want a daily AI-written blog post is a separate question, and the honest answer for most businesses is that four good pages beat three hundred generated ones.
What about the visitor and bandwidth caps nobody reads?
They are the constraint that actually bites, and they are all published. 10Web caps by visitors: 10,000 a month on AI Starter, 20,000 on AI Premium, 50,000 on AI Ultimate. A business running any real content marketing will pass 10,000 within a year of trying. Framer caps by bandwidth and pages: 50 GB and 30 pages on Basic, 100 GB and 150 pages on Pro, with overages at $40 per 100 GB and $20 per 100 pages. A media-heavy site burns bandwidth faster than page count. Webflow caps by bandwidth and CMS items: 10 GB and 300 static pages on Basic, up to 2.5 TB and 20,000 CMS items on Premium. The static-page limit is the one people hit, usually while building location pages. Squarespace and Wix publish storage rather than bandwidth at the entry tiers, which is a different and usually less binding constraint. The practical advice is to estimate your twelve-month numbers rather than your current ones, because the cost of moving a site between these platforms is a week of your life and every internal link you have ever built.
What about the visitor and bandwidth caps nobody reads? — specifics
Estimate pages, CMS items, monthly visitors and bandwidth twelve months out, not today.
Check the overage price, not just the allowance — Framer publishes them, several others do not.
Migration between builders is a full rebuild. Nothing exports usefully.
When is none of these the right answer?
When the site is an application. If visitors log in, have accounts, see different data, or transact in a way a store checkout does not cover, you need an app builder or a developer, not a site builder. Our AI app builder comparison covers that decision. When you need programmatic pages at real scale. Webflow's CMS handles thousands; a genuine programmatic SEO play with tens of thousands of pages needs a static site generator and a build pipeline, and every builder on this page will fight you. When the site is the product. Anything where page speed, structured data and rendering behaviour are competitive advantages should be built on a framework you control. That is a developer project with developer costs, and pretending otherwise wastes six months. When you have no content. The most common failure in this category is a beautifully generated site with nothing to say. All seven of these products will happily produce that for you, and none of them will tell you it is the problem.
Figures we deliberately did not publish
A definitive US-exclusive Wix price. Wix's plans page states that prices and currency vary by location and that USD prices are for reference only; the figures rendered to us were tax-inclusive. We published what we were shown and labelled it rather than asserting a US price we could not confirm.
Webflow's month-to-month site plan prices. The pricing page quotes yearly billing; the monthly figures were not published in a form we could read.
10Web's list (non-promotional) prices. The page displays a 50%-off annual promotion without stating the underlying list price.
Squarespace's commerce transaction fees per tier, which are not on the pricing page we read.
Webflow: Starter free (1 GB, 50 CMS, 2 static pages) · Basic $15/mo billed yearly (10 GB, 300 static pages) · Premium $25/mo billed yearly (20,000 CMS, up to 2.5 TB); Workspace Core $19/mo yearly, Growth $49/mo yearly; full seat $39/mo, limited seat $15/mo, billed yearly; Team $2,500/mo annual contract — read from https://webflow.com/pricing on 2026-08-23. $15 entry confirmed as a billed-yearly figure.
Wix: Light $17.77/mo · Core $29.77 · Business $39.77 · Business Elite $159.77, all yearly billing, each labelled 'price includes GST' — read from https://www.wix.com/upgrade/website on 2026-08-23. LOCALE-DEPENDENT. Wix's page states prices and currency vary by location and USD prices are displayed for reference only. The commonly quoted '$17 Light' is close to but not identical with what the page rendered to us.
Squarespace: US: Basic $228/yr ($19/mo) or $25/mo monthly · Core $348/yr ($29/mo) or $39 · Plus $588/yr ($49/mo) or $65 · Advanced $1,188/yr ($99/mo) or $139 — read from https://www.squarespace.com/pricing on 2026-08-23. Read from the first-party structured pricing data embedded in Squarespace's own pricing page. The commonly quoted '$19' is the annual effective rate; month-to-month is $25.
Hostinger: Premium $2.99/mo promo on a 48-month term, renews $10.99/mo · Unlimited $3.99 promo, renews $16.99 · Cloud Startup $7.99 promo, renews $25.99; free domain for the first year at the 48-month term — read from https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting on 2026-08-23. PRICED IN USD, NOT EUR. Renewal is $10.99, a 268% increase on the promotional rate.
Durable: Free $0 (durable.site subdomain, 5 images/mo, 10 AI chat messages) · Launch $25/mo, $22/mo annually · Grow $49/mo, $41/mo annually — read from https://durable.com/pricing on 2026-08-23. $25 confirmed as the month-to-month price. durable.co redirects to durable.com.
10Web: AI Starter $10/mo, $120/yr, 1 site, 10K visitors, 100 AI credits · AI Premium $15/mo, $180/yr, 2 sites, 20K visitors · AI Ultimate $22.50/mo, $270/yr, 4 sites, 50K visitors; annual prices shown at 50% off — read from https://10web.io/pricing/ on 2026-08-23. $10 / $15 / $22.50 confirmed.
What is the cheapest AI website builder?
Hostinger's Premium plan is advertised at $2.99/mo but requires a 48-month term and renews at $10.99/mo. Judged on the price you will actually keep paying, Framer Basic at $10/mo and 10Web AI Starter at $10/mo are the cheapest credible options, with Squarespace Basic at $19/mo on annual billing close behind.
How much does Squarespace cost?
In the US: Basic is $228 a year, which is $19/mo, or $25/mo month-to-month. Core is $348/year ($29/mo) or $39 monthly. Plus is $588/year ($49/mo) or $65 monthly. Advanced is $1,188/year ($99/mo) or $139 monthly. Monthly billing is a 24-32% premium depending on tier.
Why can't you tell me Wix's exact price?
Because Wix does not publish one. Its plans page states that prices and currency vary by location and that USD prices are displayed for reference only, and the figures rendered to us — $17.77, $29.77, $39.77 and $159.77 on yearly billing — carried a 'price includes GST' label. Any article quoting a single definitive Wix price is not saying which locale it was served.
Is Hostinger really $2.99 a month?
For 48 months, prepaid, on the Premium plan. Then it renews at $10.99/mo, which Hostinger publishes on the same page. Unlimited goes from $3.99 to $16.99 and Cloud Startup from $7.99 to $25.99. Compare it at the renewal price, because that is what you will pay for most of the time you own the site.