Your website has one job. Somebody searched your town and your trade, landed on your page, and needs to decide in about eight seconds whether to call you. That's it. Everything else is decoration.

Most AI website builder advice skips straight past that and starts comparing feature grids. So before the tools, three things that decide whether the site works:

Your phone number and service area have to be visible without scrolling. Your actual photos beat any stock image or AI-generated one, even if yours are worse. And the page needs to say what you do and where, in plain words, because that's what gets you found.

An AI builder can help with all three. It cannot decide them for you.

What the free plans actually give you

"Free AI website builder" means something different at every vendor, so here's what I found on their own pricing pages in September 2026.

Wix has a real free plan. You get their AI setup flow and the editor, but your site runs with Wix ads on it and a Wix subdomain. To lose both you need Light at about $17.77/mo.

Durable has a free tier too: a subdomain, five AI images a month, an AI chatbot capped at ten messages, and a CRM that holds ten customers. Launch is $25/mo, Grow $49/mo.

B12's free plan gives you a b12sites.com subdomain and 5 AI credits a day, capped at 30 a month. Website is $24/mo.

Hostinger has no permanent free plan, just a 14-day trial. Their $2.99/mo headline requires a 48-month commitment and renews at $10.99/mo.

Figment's free tier publishes to a subdomain with a small "Built with Figment.so" badge. Paid is $29/mo for Pro ($288/yr) or $89/mo for Team ($864/yr), with a 30-day trial.

The pattern is the same everywhere. Free gets you a site on somebody else's subdomain with somebody else's name on it. That's fine for testing. It's bad for a business, because a yourshop.wixsite.com address tells a customer you weren't sure about this.

Which one for which business

If you're a solo service business and you need to be online tonight, Durable. The bundled invoicing and CRM is worth more to you than anything else on the list, and the design ceiling won't bother you.

If you need WordPress because your SEO person or your developer requires it, 10Web, starting at $10/mo.

If you're a professional services firm and the site's job is booking consultations, B12's engagement tier at $78/mo is doing real work beyond the website.

If you want one bill for site, store, bookings and email, Wix.

If the way your business looks actually matters, because you're a studio, a restaurant, a boutique, a firm selling taste, then you want a tool where you control the design. That's where Figment sits.

The design-first version

With Figment you design your site in Figma, which is free to use, and our plugin publishes those frames as a live website in under a minute. Custom domain, SSL. Changing the site means editing the design and republishing.

Two things follow from that. Your design is a file you own, in a tool millions of designers use, so hiring someone to touch it up is easy and leaving is possible. And nothing about your layout is locked, so your site doesn't come out looking like every other site the same generator made.

We're building an AI website builder on that same foundation. It's in early access right now, not self-serve, so don't sign up expecting to type a prompt today. You can request a demo and we'll show you where it stands.

Why build it that way instead of shipping a prompt box faster: AI is only as good as the canvas it can edit. Generate into a closed template system and the AI's last 10 percent of mistakes become your permanent problem, because there's no lever to fix them. Generate into a design file you own and you can always move the thing two pixels yourself.

What you can do with AI today, free

Don't wait on anybody's roadmap for this part. Open ChatGPT or Claude, paste in your services and how you actually talk about them, and ask for a homepage headline, three service blurbs, and an about paragraph. Then tell it to cut every sentence in half. Paste the result into whatever tool you're using.

That single step improves more small business sites than any generator does, and it works today no matter which builder you pick.

If you want to see the Figma publishing flow as it exists now and talk about early access to the AI builder, book a demo. We're also in Discord if you'd rather ask a question first.