Every free website builder, read down to the last asterisk.

Every free website builder makes the same offer: build a real site, pay nothing, no catch. Then comes the asterisk. Sometimes it is a discreet badge in the footer; sometimes it is a banner across the top of your site advertising the company that is not so much hosting you as using you for inventory. NilSite exists to read those asterisks. We go through the plan pages, the pricing FAQs and the help-center articles — the fine print nobody reads at signup — and write down what each free tier actually includes, what it withholds, and what it costs the day free stops being enough.

We do not run stopwatch tests or invent user stories. Our evidence is the vendors' own published terms, quoted with dates and billing-cycle caveats, and re-checked when the pages change. If a price only exists on annual billing, we say so. If a 'free domain' requires a stored card that auto-renews at full price, we say that louder.

The three questions we ask of every free plan

Every free tier we review gets the same interrogation, in the same order.

• Can you actually publish? Some free plans put a real site on the public internet. Others are locked previews — Squarespace's 14-day trial, which cannot be shared publicly, is the honest-about-it extreme.
• What's the toll? Nearly every free site pays rent: the vendor's ads or badge, and a subdomain that carries their name instead of yours. The toll runs from a small footer credit to a URL with your account name and the vendor's brand welded in.
• Where's the trap? Free plans are funnels. We look for the wall you will eventually hit — a lifetime form-submission cap, a five-page limit, a trial that silently downgrades — and what the first paid dollar really buys.

The state of 'free' in 2026

'Free' is having a rough 2026. Weebly, for a decade the default answer, announced in June that it is shutting down in 67 countries — sites go offline on September 27, 2026, and accounts with all their stored data are deleted on December 26. Squarespace offers no free plan at all, only a 14-day trial that never goes public. And at the other end, Google Sites remains the one mainstream builder that connects a custom domain for exactly $0. The distance between the best free tier and the worst has never been wider — which is exactly why the small type deserves a close read.

Start with the ledger

The centerpiece of this site is our ranked ledger of the best free website builders — ten free tiers scored on whether you can publish, what you pay in ads and subdomains, and how survivable each plan is long-term. One of the ten has no free plan at all, and its row in the table says so.

For the theory before the table, start with what 'free' actually includes, our field guide to the tolls every $0 plan charges. And if a plan page changes under our notes, tell us — corrections are the point.