"Free AI website builder" is doing a lot of work as a phrase. At one vendor it means a permanent site with ads on it. At another it means 30 AI messages a month. At a third it means 14 days.

I went through the pricing pages in September 2026 and wrote down what each one actually gives you. Check before you commit, because these change constantly.

What the free tiers really include

Wix. A real, permanent free plan. You get their AI setup flow and the full editor, and your site publishes with Wix ads on it and a Wix subdomain. Removing both requires Light, around $17.77/mo. Free is genuinely usable for testing, unusable for a business you want taken seriously, because of the ads.

Durable. Free plan with a Durable subdomain, five AI images a month, an AI chatbot capped at ten messages, and a CRM that holds ten customers. The caps are the point: it's a demo of the paid product. Launch is $25/mo, Grow $49/mo.

B12. Free plan with a b12sites.com subdomain, 5 AI credits a day capped at 30 a month, and the visual editor with AI chat. 30 credits doesn't go far if you're iterating. Website is $24/mo.

Framer. Free plan publishes to a framer.website subdomain with Framer branding, 1 GB bandwidth, and 500 AI credits a month. No custom domain on free. Basic is $10/mo, Pro $30/mo. Of the free tiers here, this one gives you the most actual design capability.

Hostinger. No permanent free plan. There's a 14-day trial. The $2.99/mo headline requires a 48-month commitment, about $143 up front, and renews at $10.99/mo.

10Web. Free trial, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. Paid starts at $10/mo for AI Starter. No permanent free tier.

Lovable, v0, Bolt. Free tiers metered in credits or tokens that reset daily or monthly. Lovable's free plan runs on 5 build credits a day, capped at 30 a month. Enough to see whether you like it, not enough to finish anything real. These build applications rather than marketing sites, so they're a different category anyway.

Figment. Free tier publishes to a Figment subdomain with a small "Built with Figment.so" badge. Design in Figma, which is free, publish with the plugin, no time limit and no credit meter. Custom domain needs a paid plan: Pro $29/mo ($288/yr), Team $89/mo ($864/yr), 30-day trial.

The three costs every free plan has

Whoever you pick, free costs you the same three things.

Their name on your site, as a badge or a footer line or actual ads. The ads version is the worst of these by a distance, because it puts somebody else's business in front of your customer.

Their domain instead of yours. A yourbusiness.somebuilder.com address quietly tells people you weren't sure this would work out. If you're running a real business, budget for the domain before you budget for anything else.

And a ceiling designed to be hit. AI credit caps exist so that the moment the tool becomes useful to you is the moment you have to pay. That's a fair business model. Just don't plan around a free tier you'll exhaust in week one.

Which free plan I'd actually use

To test an idea and see if anyone bites: Wix free, and accept the ads for a couple of weeks.

To get a real design out of a free tier: Framer, or Figma plus Figment. Both give you a design surface rather than a section library, so what you make is yours.

To see whether AI generation suits you at all: Durable's free plan, in about ten minutes. You'll know quickly.

The free part that nobody meters

You can use AI on your website copy today, for nothing, no matter which builder you're on. Open ChatGPT or Claude, paste in what you do, ask for a headline, three service descriptions and an about paragraph, then tell it to cut everything in half. Paste the result into your site.

No credits, no cap, and it improves more sites than any generator does.

On our AI builder, plainly

Figment's AI website builder is in early access. You cannot sign up and use it self-serve today, free or paid, and I'd rather say that here than have you find out after signing up. What works today is the Figma publishing flow: design frames, run the plugin, get a live site in under a minute. That's been running since 2021, with 35,077 signups and 20,048 published sites behind it.

We're building the AI layer on that foundation for one reason. AI output is only as good as the canvas it can edit. Generate into a closed template system and the AI's mistakes become permanent, because the only tool you have is the prompt. Generate into a design file you own and you can fix anything by hand in seconds.

Start free on a subdomain and see if the workflow suits you. If you want early access to the AI builder, or just want to watch the publishing flow run live, book a demo. Questions are welcome in Discord.