Directory / Site Builders & Deploy

AI site builders: what the free tier actually gets you (2026)

Every "vs" page in this category is written by someone selling a competing builder. This one is not: SearchAll.ai does not make a site builder. Below is what each tool's free tier actually allows, what a custom domain really costs, and whether you can take your code with you. Each row carries the date we last confirmed it and a link to the vendor page we confirmed it against.

12 tools · last verified 2026-08-18 · 1 with unverified figures, flagged below

The custom domain paywall

This is the axis no competitor page compares, and it varies by more than 100x, from Carrd's $19/year to Glide's $199/mo Business plan. Softr sits in between at $19/mo (Basic plan). If putting a site on your own domain is the actual goal, this column matters more than the headline price.

Why the prices here cannot be compared directly

These tools bill in five mutually incomparable units: tokens (Bolt.new, v0), credits (Lovable, Base44, Hostinger Horizons), seats and records (Softr, Glide), flat monthly (Durable, B12, 10Web), and flat annual (Carrd). Any table claiming to rank them by "credits per dollar" is comparing quantities that do not convert. Lovable alone runs three distinct credit types.

The practical consequence: you cannot see what a prompt will cost before you send it, and failed attempts still bill. That is the single most common complaint across every one of these products.

What we could not confirm

Several vendors block automated checks, geo-lock their pricing, or render it in JavaScript. Rather than guess, those figures are marked. This is what is outstanding:

• Lovable: Dollar figures and credit mechanics are secondary. Lovable runs three distinct credit types and its own docs conflict with third-party descriptions; the model migrated away from message-based billing. Treat as unsettled until re-checked in a browser.
• Bolt.new: Export exists; the tier that unlocks it is not stated on the pricing page.
• v0: The $20 Premium tier is sunsetted and closed to new signups, confirmed in vendor FAQ.
• Framer: Pricing and free-tier limits verified. Code export status could NOT be confirmed on any official page; historically Framer has not offered it. Do not publish a claim either way until checked in a browser.
• 10Web: Advertised annual rates are 50%-off promotional; the non-promotional rate is undisclosed. Elementor dependency is inference, not vendor-stated. The old 7-day trial is gone, replaced by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
• Carrd: Annual billing only. carrd.co/pricing is a 404; the live page is /pro. Carrd has no AI features, verified by absence.
• Softr: Softr restructured pricing around 2026-08-18: Basic/Pro/Business replaced the old $49/$139/$269 tiers at $19/$99/$329 (annual). Custom domain is no longer confirmed on the free plan per current docs, only from Basic up.
• Durable: Tier names Starter/Business are stale; current tiers are Launch and Grow. durable.co now redirects to durable.com. Absence of export is confirmed by omission, not by an affirmative vendor statement.
• Hostinger Horizons: The one-way export limitation is vendor-documented verbatim. Vendor claims plans renew at intro price, which contradicts Hostinger pricing behaviour elsewhere; treat renewal pricing as unverified.

Related

If the question is specifically what you can do without paying, see free AI site builders: what "free" actually gets you, which ranks every free tier by what breaks first.

Head-to-head comparisons

Where a specific pair involves a real decision rather than a marginal preference, we have written it up in detail:

• Lovable vs Bolt.new: Bolt bills in tokens and shows you the meter.
• v0 vs Lovable: v0 is a UI generator that fits an existing repo through bi-directional GitHub sync.
• Bolt.new vs v0: Bolt generates and runs a full-stack app inside the browser.
• Base44 vs Lovable: Base44 puts a custom domain within reach at $16/month and includes a free domain for the first year.
• 10Web vs Durable: This is the clearest ownership contrast in the category.
• Softr vs Glide: Softr's custom domain requires the $19/month Basic plan.
• Framer vs Carrd: Carrd's Pro Standard is $19 per year.
• Claude Code vs Cursor: Cursor is an editor: a VS Code fork with AI woven into every keystroke, and it has a free tier to try that before paying.
• Synthesia vs HeyGen: Synthesia is built around a library of stock and custom presenter avatars for training and explainer content in 140+ languages.
• Midjourney vs Ideogram: Midjourney has no free tier at all and bills a monthly Fast-GPU-hour allotment, but it still sets the ceiling most people compare every other image model against.
• Bolt.new vs Hostinger Horizons: Bolt gives you a real exit: in-product code export plus a usable 300K-tokens/day free tier with two-month rollover.
• Gamma vs Pitch: Gamma is built to hand a solo user a finished, restyleable deck from an outline in about a minute.
• ElevenLabs vs Murf AI: Murf's own wrongFor already names the split: voice cloning, where ElevenLabs is a clear tier ahead.
• Suno vs Udio: Udio's own verdict already says it: take it over Suno when the vocal is the point, but Suno is still better at finishing a whole track.
• Otter.ai vs Fireflies.ai: Otter is built to nail the meeting itself: live transcription and clean, actionable notes with the more generous free minutes (300/month vs Fireflies' free tier, which trades minutes for AI credits).
• ChatGPT vs Claude: ChatGPT's own wrongFor names the gap outright: long documents that must be held accurately in a single pass.
• Deepnote vs Julius: Deepnote's own wrongFor names the split: people who do not write code, where Julius answers the question and Deepnote just hands you a notebook.
• Figma Make vs Magic Patterns: Figma Make's advantage is not the model, it is that the output already speaks your design system, generating against your existing Figma components rather than inventing new ones, but it only unlocks meaningfully on a Professional Full seat and is wasted on anyone not already paying for Figma.
• Cursor vs Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf): Both are VS Code-derived editors with a whole-repo agent loop, priced identically at $20/mo for the entry paid tier.
• Make vs n8n: Make's own verdict states the position outright: real logic, no server to run, but the canvas gets messy fast at scale.
• Perplexity vs Gemini Notebook: Perplexity's own wrongFor names its gap outright: reasoning over your own private documents.
• Ahrefs vs Semrush: Ahrefs' own verdict is blunt: you are paying for the index, not the interface, and on link data nothing else is as trustworthy.
• Jasper vs Grammarly: Jasper's own verdict is explicit about what you are buying: brand-voice enforcement across a team, not raw writing quality, which a $20 assistant already matches.
• ChatGPT vs Gemini: ChatGPT is the broad, ecosystem-agnostic default: best mobile app, native image generation in the same window, and the app most colleagues already have open.
• Cursor vs GitHub Copilot: Copilot is the cheaper, more conservative choice: native to GitHub and nearly every IDE, priced at half of Cursor's entry tier, and built around inline completions rather than a rebuilt editor.
• Zapier vs n8n: Zapier is the hosted default: the largest app catalog at 7,000+ integrations, nothing to maintain, and billing by monthly task count.
• Runway vs Kling: Runway is the credible, production-grade suite: motion brush, green-screen removal, and Aleph's describe-the-edit workflow, plus every paid plan also unlocks third-party models like Kling 3.
• Notion AI vs Mem: Notion AI is an add-on to a workspace you already maintain, it searches and summarizes across docs, Slack, and Drive, but only pays off if your team's knowledge genuinely already lives in Notion.
• Flux vs Recraft: Flux is open-weight, self-hostable, and the strongest option for photographic realism and prompt adherence, the default base a lot of other tools quietly run underneath their own interface.
• Hex vs Rows: Hex is a notebook connected to your warehouse, its AI writes SQL grounded in your actual schema, not guessed column names.
• Elicit vs SciSpace: Elicit is built for breadth: it searches across 138M+ papers, then extracts methods, sample sizes and outcomes into a comparable table, with a dedicated workflow that can screen up to 5,000 papers on the Pro plan.
• Count vs Deepnote: Count is a freeform canvas where SQL, Python, charts and text sit side by side, and multiple AI agents can investigate different questions in the same canvas at once, visible to the whole team.
• Consensus vs Perplexity: Consensus searches nothing but its index of 200M+ scientific papers and adds a consensus meter that shows where the studies actually agree, plus filters by sample size, study design, and journal quality.
• Cline vs Codex: Cline is a free, open-source VS Code extension where you bring your own API key and pay your model provider directly, with every action shown and approved before it runs.
• Replit vs Bolt.new: Replit is a browser IDE where the agent, database, secrets and hosting live in one place, so publishing a working app never leaves the product.
• Leonardo AI vs Krea: Leonardo is built for repeatability: you train a custom model on your own images, then generate consistent variations from it, which suits an asset pipeline.
• Canva vs Adobe Firefly: Canva is a layout and design tool with AI features bolted on, it hands back a finished deliverable, not just a raw image.
• Clay vs Instantly: Clay is a data enrichment and research platform, it pulls prospect data from 100+ sources through waterfall enrichment and runs agents to research each lead before a message gets drafted, priced usage based from $167/mo (Launch, 15,000 actions and 3,000 data credits/mo).
• Surfer SEO vs Semrush: Surfer scores one document at a time against what is currently ranking, a live content score, an outline built from the current top 10, and internal linking suggestions pulled from your own site.
• Relume vs Framer: Relume's AI only goes as far as a sitemap and a set of grayscale wireframes, then exports that structure to Webflow, Figma, or React so a human finishes the actual visual design.
• Uizard vs Visily: Uizard's free tier caps you at 3 AI generations a month and 2 projects, and even its $12/mo Pro plan tops out at 500 generations with developer handoff limited to React/CSS export.
• Writesonic vs Copy.ai: Writesonic has pivoted from a straight AI writer into an AI-search-visibility platform, its Starter plan tracks how ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews mention your brand alongside a capped 15 articles and 10 site audits a month, all for one user.
• Sudowrite vs Jasper: Sudowrite is metered by credits with no seat concept, $10/mo gets 225,000 credits, and its core feature (Story Bible) exists to keep characters and plot consistent across a manuscript.
• Grok vs DeepSeek: Grok's whole pitch is native access to the X firehose, useful for reading a live conversation as it unfolds, but its API is priced like a frontier model (grok-4.
• Lindy vs Gumloop: Lindy is built around agents that hold a goal across many steps, like running an inbox, scheduling, or following up on leads, and keep acting on that goal rather than firing once per trigger.
• CrewAI vs n8n: CrewAI is a Python library first, Crews for agents that delegate to each other, Flows for deterministic event-driven control, and it ships MIT licensed so you can self-host the whole thing for free with no execution cap.
• Krisp vs Otter.ai: Krisp works at the audio device layer, cleaning noise, echo and cross talk out of your mic and the incoming call, on-device, inside any app (Zoom, Meet, Teams, Discord) without an integration.
• B12 vs 10Web: B12 hosts everything on its own proprietary stack and says outright that you cannot take the code elsewhere if you leave.
• Beautiful.ai vs Plus AI: Beautiful.
• SlidesAI vs Gamma: SlidesAI is a Google Workspace add-on, it never leaves Google Slides, it just takes pasted text and slots it into a theme with automatic slide breaks.
• Raycast vs Notion AI: Raycast is a macOS-only launcher, hit a hotkey from any app and you're chatting with a model, no document context involved.
• Granola vs Fireflies.ai: Granola never puts a bot in the call, it listens locally and merges its transcript with the rough notes you already typed, staying free forever on Basic and charging $14/user/month (Business) only when you want unlimited history and integrations.
• Luma Dream Machine vs Pika: Luma's whole pitch is start and end frame control, you give it a first and last image and it interpolates a predictable path between them.
• Descript vs OpusClip: Descript is a complete text-based editor, you cut video and podcasts by deleting words from a transcript, and it also handles filler-word removal, Studio Sound cleanup, and eye-contact correction.
• Higgsfield vs Runway: Higgsfield's whole pitch is unlimited-generation tiers and a library of named motion presets layered over several third-party models, so you iterate without rationing credits.
• Veo vs Kling: Veo runs inside a Google AI subscription: Pro at $19.
• Freepik AI vs Canva: Freepik bundles many different AI image and video models plus a large stock library on one relatively affordable credit-based plan, aimed at breadth: many models, one subscription.
• Claude vs Gemini: Claude Pro is a flat $20/mo subscription ($17/mo billed annually) built around long-document writing, careful reasoning, and code, with no image or video generation in the same window.
• Grammarly vs Copy.ai: Grammarly works on a draft you already have: grammar, tone, sentence rewrites, plagiarism and AI-text detection, on a flat $12/mo Pro plan with a 2,000-AI-prompt monthly cap per member.
• Ahrefs vs Surfer SEO: Ahrefs answers what should I target and who's already ranking: backlink data, competitor research, keyword tracking, and site audits, starting at $129/mo for Lite (5 projects, 750 tracked keywords, 100,000 monthly crawl credits, 1 seat).
• GitHub Copilot vs Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf): GitHub Copilot starts at $10/user/mo (free tier: 2,000 code completions/mo, 50 chat requests/mo, access to Haiku 4.
• Midjourney vs Flux: Midjourney is subscription-only at $10/mo ($8/mo billed annually, about 3.
• Ideogram vs Recraft: Ideogram keeps a real free tier (10 slow credits/week, no card, though images are public and undeletable) and its $8/mo Basic paid tier (400 priority credits/month plus 100 slow credits/day) is built specifically for legible text inside images: posters, logos, thumbnails.
• Luma Dream Machine vs Runway: Luma has no free tier at all (third-party trackers report roughly 80 credits/day on some legacy access, watermarked, no commercial rights, about one video a day, but this isn't listed on Luma's current pricing page) and its Plus plan starts at $25/month billed annually ($30/month billed monthly, 10,000 credits/month), built around interpolating between two fixed frames rather than long narrative clips.
• Pika vs Higgsfield: Pika's free tier (80 monthly credits, capped at 480p, watermarked, no commercial use) steps up to a $8/month Standard plan (billed annually, $10/month billed monthly) for 700 credits/month at all resolutions, watermark-free, with commercial use allowed, built for short novelty effects rather than anything that needs to look expensive.
• Claude Code vs Codex: Claude Code has no free tier at all, it requires Claude Pro at $20/mo ($17/mo billed annually), and shares its 5-hour rolling plus weekly usage pool with Claude.
• Base44 vs Durable: Base44 starts at $16/mo (free tier: 25 message credits/month, 5 apps) and is built to get a real, working app on your own domain cheaply, though complex apps hit its ceiling early.
• Hostinger Horizons vs B12: Hostinger Horizons starts at $6.
• Lindy vs Zapier: Lindy starts at $29.
• Visily vs Magic Patterns: Visily starts at $11/editor/month billed annually ($14/mo billed monthly, 3,000 AI credits/month, Figma round trip, code export, MCP server), with a free tier of 300 AI credits/month, 2 editable boards, and watermarked exports, built for PMs and founders specifying a product before a designer exists, though it isn't built for real design-system work (no variables, branching, or component API).
• Rows vs Count: Rows starts at $6/user/month billed annually ($8/user/month monthly, 200 AI Tasks/month, daily Data Table automation, 10 integrations), with a free tier of 5 AI Tasks/month and manual data import only, built around live dashboards that work like a spreadsheet, though it's the wrong tool for heavy statistical work.
• Elicit vs Consensus: Elicit's free tier is unusually generous: unlimited search across 138M+ papers, unlimited summaries, unlimited chat with papers, with only its Research Agent and Research Reports features limited; its paid tier is $49/user/month billed annually ($588/yr), built for systematic reviews across many papers, and it's the wrong tool for any field without a real body of published literature.
• Pitch vs Beautiful.ai: Pitch has a genuine forever-free tier (100 one-time AI credits, unlimited presentations) and its paid tier starts at €10/month billed yearly (higher if billed monthly), built for startup and sales teams who co-edit decks together and need to see who viewed them, though it's overkill for a solo user who just wants a fast AI draft with no collaboration or tracking overhead.
• Figma Make vs Uizard: Figma Make is built for a code-accurate, clickable output that plugs directly into a Figma-centric workflow, aimed at product teams who want a functional prototype before an engineer opens an editor rather than a quick low-fidelity sketch; it's bundled into Figma's Professional plan at $16/mo (Full seat) rather than sold standalone.
• Relume vs Magic Patterns: Relume's Starter plan is $18/mo, unlocking Webflow/React/Figma export at 30 components, with a Pro tier at $40/mo (1,000+ components, unlimited projects/pages, mobile component variants) for teams that outgrow the starter limit, built around structuring a whole site (sitemap, wireframes, styling) before you build it.
• Julius vs Hex: Julius starts at $20/mo ($16/mo billed annually, 2,000 credits/month, frontier models, unlimited file storage and exports), with a free tier of 15 messages/month that don't roll over, built for analysis without knowing pandas, though it's the wrong choice for data that can't be uploaded to a third party.
• Plus AI vs SlidesAI: Plus AI has no free tier at all, only a 7-day trial requiring a card, starting at $10/user/month billed annually ($15/month billed monthly), built for teams stuck on Slides or PowerPoint who want AI without leaving the file format, though it works inside your existing template so an ugly deck stays ugly, just faster.
• Krisp vs Granola: Krisp's free trial (7 days, no card, unlimited transcription, noise cancellation, recording, AI notes, limited accent conversion) leads into an $8/user/month plan billed annually ($16/month billed monthly), built around clean call audio from a noisy room, though it only cleans a live stream, it can't repair a file you already recorded badly.
• Carrd vs Durable: Carrd costs $9/year (Pro Lite) with a free tier of 3 sites on a carrd.
• Gemini Notebook vs SciSpace: NotebookLM's free tier is unusually generous with no account purchase needed: 100 notebooks, up to 50 sources/notebook (each up to roughly 500,000 words), 50 chat queries/day, 3 Audio and 3 Video Overviews/day, 10 reports/day, 10 Deep Research sessions/month; Google AI Plus at $4.
• Make vs Gumloop: Make starts at $9/month (Core plan, 10,000 credits/month, unlimited active scenarios, 1-minute scheduling, API access), with a free tier of 1,000 credits/month capped at 2 active scenarios, built for branching multi-step logic without code, though simple two-app triggers are quicker to set up in Zapier.
• Writesonic vs Sudowrite: Writesonic has no permanent free plan, only a one-time trial worth roughly 10,000 words plus 1 article, 1 site audit, and 5 Chatsonic generations, before its Starter plan at $79/month billed annually ($948/year) unlocks 15 AI articles/month, 50 prompts and 50 tracked answers/day, and 10 site audits, built for SEO articles and content marketing on a budget, though the prose isn't good enough to publish unedited.
• Magnific vs Leonardo AI: Magnific is no longer a standalone product: Freepik rebranded its whole AI platform to Magnific in April 2026, so its $20/mo Premium plan ($14.
• Synthesia vs Descript: Synthesia's free tier gives 1,200 credits/month, up to 10 minutes of video, and 25 AI video assets with no card required, stepping up to $29/mo, built for AI avatars that never need a camera or a human presenter at all.
• HeyGen vs OpusClip: HeyGen starts at $29/mo, built for fast, UGC-style AI avatar videos and video translation, generating new content rather than cutting down existing footage.
• ElevenLabs vs Udio: ElevenLabs starts at $6/mo with a generous free tier (10,000 credits/month across Text to Speech, Speech to Text, Sound Effects, Voice Design, and a newer Music feature), and is the clear leader on voice cloning and narration, though its Music tool is a secondary feature bolted onto a voice platform, not its focus.
• Murf AI vs Suno: Murf's free tier gives the full 200+ voice library but no downloads or commercial rights, stepping up to $19/mo billed annually ($29/mo billed monthly) for about 2 hours of voice generation a month, built for polished e-learning and ad voiceovers, not music.
• Softr vs B12: Softr's free tier gives 3 builders and 5 combined app users, stepping up to $19/mo billed annually ($25/mo billed monthly, Basic plan), built for internal tools over Airtable or Sheets, and it's the wrong choice for public marketing sites.
• Glide vs 10Web: Glide's free tier gives 1 editor and 25,000 rows, stepping up to roughly $10/mo, built for internal, mobile-shaped apps over spreadsheet data, but it's the wrong choice for anyone who needs the app on their own domain without hitting Glide's $199/mo Business tier for custom domains.
• Krea vs Freepik AI: Krea's free tier gives 100 compute units/day at limited quality with no commercial license, stepping up to $9/mo (Basic, 5,000 units/month, about $5.
• Adobe Firefly vs Magnific: Adobe Firefly's free tier gives roughly 25 generative credits/month with watermarked outputs, stepping up to $9.
• Grok vs ChatGPT: Grok's free tier lives inside X and grok.
• DeepSeek vs Claude: DeepSeek has no subscription tier at all: its consumer chat apps are free with no published cap, and its API is pay-as-you-go from as low as $0.
• Cline vs Replit: Cline is entirely free as an extension, with no required paid tier at all: you supply your own model API key and pay that provider directly, with an optional ClinePass at $9.
• Raycast vs Mem: Raycast's free tier is a one-time lifetime allowance of 50 AI messages (not renewing monthly), stepping up to Pro at $8/month billed annually ($10/month monthly, unlimited AI messages on base models), built for reaching a model without changing windows, though it's the wrong tool for Windows and Linux users since Raycast is Mac-only.
• Clay vs Zapier: Clay's free tier gives 500 actions/month and 100 data credits/month, stepping up dramatically to $167/mo (Launch, 15,000 actions/month), built for research-heavy outbound at scale, and it's the wrong tool for anyone sending fewer than a few hundred emails a month.
• CrewAI vs Lindy: CrewAI's free Basic tier gives 50 workflow executions/month with a visual editor and AI copilot, and separately the underlying CrewAI framework is MIT-licensed and free to self-host with no execution cap at the cost of only your own LLM API spend, built for developers building multi-agent systems that live in version control, though beyond the free hosted plan the only path is custom-quoted Enterprise with no published mid-tier price.
• Veo vs Runway: Veo has no standalone consumer product; it's accessed via Google AI Pro at $19.
• Instantly vs Copy.ai: Instantly is sending infrastructure with no persistent free tier, entry Growth plan at $37.

Sources

• Lovable lovable.dev · checked 2026-07-18
• Bolt.new bolt.new · checked 2026-07-18
• v0 v0.app · checked 2026-07-18
• Framer www.framer.com · checked 2026-07-18
• Base44 base44.com · checked 2026-07-18
• 10Web 10web.io · checked 2026-08-18
• Carrd carrd.co · checked 2026-07-18
• Softr www.softr.io docs.softr.io · checked 2026-08-18
• Glide www.glideapps.com · checked 2026-07-18
• Durable durable.com · checked 2026-07-18
• B12 support.b12.io · checked 2026-07-18
• Hostinger Horizons www.hostinger.com · checked 2026-07-18

SearchAll.ai does not sell a site builder and is not affiliated with any tool listed here. Some outbound links are affiliate links, marked as sponsored. Affiliate status never affects ranking or the figures above. Corrections: the vendor page linked in each row is the authority, and we update when it changes.