Free AI site builders: what "free" actually gets you
"Free tier" covers five different arrangements in this category: allowances you can build on indefinitely, drips that ration you into upgrading, seat caps, one-shot demos, and one tool with no free tier at all. Vendor pricing pages blur those distinctions on purpose. Below is each free tier ranked by what it really permits, with the thing that breaks first on each, because that, not the headline, is what decides whether free works for you.
Genuinely buildable free tiers
You can do real work on these indefinitely without paying. The limits shape how you work rather than whether you can.
Bolt.new
300K tokens/day, 1M/month
What breaks first: The daily token budget. 300K tokens/day is generous for iterating, but a heavy refactor session can exhaust it; it resets tomorrow rather than costing money today.
Softr
10 users, 5K records, 5 AI credits
What breaks first: The 5-user cap. The build experience is complete, and it is the only free tier here that allows a custom domain, but the moment a sixth person needs access you are on the $49/mo plan.
Glide
1 editor, 25K rows
What breaks first: Professional appearance. 25K rows is roomy, but a custom domain needs the $199/mo Business plan, so free Glide apps permanently look like Glide apps.
Carrd
3 sites, carrd.co subdomain, Carrd branding
What breaks first: The three-site cap and the branding footer. For $19/year both go away, which is barely a paywall at all.
Usable but tightly rationed
Real free tiers, but the caps are low enough that you are evaluating the tool rather than building on it.
Lovable
5 build credits/day, capped at 30/month
What breaks first: The daily credit drip. 5 build credits/day capped at 30/month, and community reports of single bugs eating 15 credits mean one bad session can spend a week of allowance.
v0
$5 credits, 7 messages/day
What breaks first: Seven messages a day. The tightest cap in the category; a single component iterated on seriously can hit it before lunch.
Base44
25 message credits/month, 5 apps
What breaks first: 25 message credits a month. Enough to scaffold one small app and refine it a little; not enough to keep two projects moving.
Durable
Permanent: subdomain, 5 images/mo, 10 AI chats/mo, 10 CRM contacts
What breaks first: The CRM, at 10 contacts. The site itself stays up free forever on a subdomain, which is rarer than it sounds, but the business tooling is a demo.
A demo, not a tier
Technically free to try. Not free to use.
Hostinger Horizons
5 credits, one-shot
What breaks first: Immediately: 5 one-shot credits total, not renewing. You will see whether you like the generation style and nothing more.
10Web
None, 7-day trial only
What breaks first: On day 8. There is no free tier at all, only a 7-day trial. The upside of paying is real ownership: genuine WordPress with SFTP and full backups.
The one number to check before choosing
If the site needs to live on your own domain, compare that cost first: free on Softr, $19/year on Carrd, $16/mo on Base44, roughly $25/mo on Bolt.new and Lovable, and $199/mo on Glide. It is a 20x spread on the axis that usually decides whether a project ships, and it is the number free-tier marketing most reliably hides. The full comparison table has every figure with its source and verification date.
SearchAll.ai does not sell a site builder. Some outbound links are affiliate links, marked sponsored; several tools ranked highly here pay us nothing. Affiliate status never affects tiering or order.