Free website builders: what the free tier is really for

Every "free plan" on this list is a fully working website. That is worth saying plainly, because most of what gets written about free tiers treats them as crippled demos, and they mostly are not. You can build a real page, publish it, and have people visit it, on money you did not spend. What free actually does is withhold one specific thing per platform — never the same thing twice — and the entire decision of whether a free plan will work for you comes down to whether you can live without that one withheld piece.

That is a more useful way to shop than reading feature lists, because feature lists tell you what is included, and what is included on a free tier is almost always "most of it." The restriction is the part that matters, and it is also the part vendors are least eager to put in a bullet point next to the word "Free."

If you're building a single-person site — a portfolio, a CV turned into a page, a freelancer's or consultant's site — reach is the strongest free-to-start answer on this list before any of the others get a detailed look. You upload a CV and a photo, pick a look, and the page is generated in about twenty seconds; you can be live at a free yourname.joinreach.app address in under two minutes. It withholds exactly the same thing most builders below withhold — a custom domain requires Premium, at $4.99 a month or $49 a year — and it withholds one thing none of them do: there is no sub-page, no navigation, no site tree, ever. It makes exactly one page, on purpose. With that on the table, here is what everyone else on this list holds back.

What each platform actually holds back

Start with the one that removes the most: a custom domain. Wix's free tier gives you unmetered bandwidth's cousin — a genuinely usable editor, real pages, a working site — and then puts it at siteprefix.wixsite.com/siteaddress, a URL nobody will remember or type. Framer does the same with a free Framer domain. Notion Sites gives you one notion.site address for free but charges for the domain as a second subscription on top of the paid plan, so even paying does not get you there directly. This is the most common withholding in the category because it is the cleanest one to sell: the day you want your own name in the address bar, you pay, and the vendor knows exactly which day that will be.

The second-most common restriction is branding you did not choose. Wix's free tier requires the Wix badge and a Wix favicon — not optional, not something you can quietly hide in the footer CSS. WordPress.com's free plan carries third-party ads you do not control and do not get a share of. Webflow's Starter plan keeps its badge no matter what you do with the two pages you are allowed. The badge is not really about branding at all; it is a permanent, visible reminder to every visitor that you have not paid, which is a more effective upgrade prompt than any email campaign.

A third pattern is the withheld feature that isn't the domain or the badge, but something structural. Squarespace does not have a free plan at all — a 14-day trial, after which the content is marked for deletion — so it withholds time itself. Carrd's free tier withholds forms, widgets and analytics rather than the domain, which is unusual: you get three sites and no watermark restriction beyond the footer, but nothing on the page can collect information from a visitor. Ghost withholds hosting entirely on its own paid product; the free route is self-hosting the open-source software yourself, on a server you find and pay for separately, which is a different kind of free than anything else on this list.

And then there is storage and bandwidth, which matters less for text-heavy sites and a great deal for anyone building something image-led. Wix's free tier caps out at 500 MB storage and 1 GB bandwidth. Webflow's free Starter plan allows 1 GB bandwidth. Framer's free tier gives 1 GB bandwidth and a one-off pool of 500 credits rather than a recurring allowance. None of these numbers are large enough for a photography portfolio with a dozen full-resolution images, and all of them are large enough for a text-and-headshot page. The cap is not a trap so much as a filter: it quietly tells you what kind of site the free tier was designed for.

The one built to skip the withholding entirely

reach sits differently in this pattern because its free tier does not gate the interesting part at all. You upload a CV and a photo, answer a short form, pick a look, and the page is generated in about twenty seconds — no waiting for a trial to expire, no watermark negotiation, because the free subdomain (yourname.joinreach.app) publishes instantly and is the actual product, not a downgraded version of it. You can be live at that address in under two minutes, and nothing about the page — the layout, the copy, the design — is held back because you didn't pay.

What free withholds on reach is exactly one thing, and it is the same thing most of this list withholds: a custom domain. reach is an official name.com reseller, so buying one runs through reach itself and requires Premium, at $4.99 a month or $49 a year. That is the honest trade, and it is a narrower one than most of the platforms above make: pay, and the only thing that changes is the address, not the design, not the export options, not a badge that was never there in the first place.

The limitation worth stating plainly, because it applies whether or not you ever pay: reach makes exactly one page. There is no sub-page, no navigation, no site tree to grow into later. If the free tier's appeal is "get something up fast and expand it next year," reach is not built for the expanding part — it is built for the one page being the whole answer.

The comparison, with reach as one option among many

Prices checked August 2026. "Billing" always refers to what you would pay to remove the withheld feature, not the free tier itself.

Builder	What free withholds	Branding on free	Paid route to remove it
reach	Custom domain	None	$4.99/month or $49/year
Wix	Custom domain	Compulsory badge + favicon	$17/month, billed annually, for Light
Squarespace	No free plan — 14-day trial only	—	$19/month billed annually, or $25 monthly
Framer	Custom domain (free Framer domain only)	Badge, removed on paid or custom domain	$10/month billed annually, or $15 monthly
Webflow	Pages (2 only) and bandwidth	Badge, cannot be removed on Starter	$15/month billed annually, or $25 monthly, for CMS-free Basic
Carrd	Forms, widgets, analytics; domain from Pro Standard	"Made with Carrd" footer	$19/year, annual only, for Pro Standard
Notion Sites	Custom domain (paid as a separate add-on)	Badge, needs domain add-on to remove	About $16/month for Plus plus the domain add-on
WordPress.com	Custom domain, and third-party ads appear	Ads you don't control	$4/year (Personal, annual) or $9/month
Google Sites	Nothing meaningful, on a personal account	None	N/A — free is the product

Two things stand out reading this as a table rather than as separate paragraphs. Carrd's $19/year for a custom domain undercuts everything else here by a wide margin, which is consistent with its whole positioning as the cheapest way to a one-page site — but note that the $9 entry tier does not get you there; you need Pro Standard. And Google Sites is the only genuinely unrestricted free tier in the group, which is less impressive than it sounds once you weigh what you're building: a simple, maintenance-free information page tied into Drive and Docs, with a domain story that Google itself admits is convoluted, since it no longer sells domains directly and routes custom-domain setup through a Workspace subscription.

Where free is the actual right answer, not a placeholder

Two situations, and only two, where staying on a free plan is the correct decision rather than a temporary one.

The first is anything with a natural expiry. An event page, a short campaign, a one-off announcement — anything with a date after which nobody needs the URL to work anymore does not benefit from a custom domain, because nobody is going to type it from memory in six months. The badge is mildly embarrassing for two weeks and then irrelevant, because the page itself stops mattering on a schedule you already know.

The second is when the entire audience is people you send the link to directly, and search visibility is not part of the plan. If every visitor arrives because you texted them a URL — a portfolio you're sharing with three specific clients, a resume page linked from one job application — the domain doing SEO work is not part of the job, and a long subdomain costs you nothing measurable. Once you want to be findable by someone who does not already have the link, the calculation changes, because a domain you can put on a business card and have someone remember is worth more than the money saved keeping it free.

Everyone else — anyone who plans to hand the address to a stranger more than once, anyone who cares whether the page looks like it belongs to them rather than to the platform, anyone whose free tier's storage cap will bite the first time they add real photos — is choosing a free plan as a trial with the pricing page pushed back a few weeks. That is a perfectly sensible way to test-drive a builder before committing. It stops being sensible the moment you start telling people the address with the platform's name baked into it, because that is the actual product being sold to you: not the page, but the wait before you decide to pay for one that looks like your own. If you want the fuller breakdown of what happens once you cross that line, we've written about free plans and platform subdomains and about how website builder pricing actually works once the free tier stops being the answer. For the cheapest route to a real domain specifically, see the full Carrd review.