The paper that reads the asterisks

NilSite exists because 'free' stopped being a price and became a marketing genre, and free website builders are the genre's masterpiece: plan pages engineered to be skimmed, with the real terms — the ads, the subdomain, the caps, the renewal — held in smaller type or in a help-center article four clicks away. Someone should read all of it, slowly, and write down what it says. That is the whole job here.

The asterisk is where the product lives. 'Free website builder' can mean a real site on your own domain at $0, or a locked 14-day preview that never goes public, or a page wearing the vendor's advertising on a URL you don't control — and the plan pages use the same word for all three. The difference sits in the smaller type, so the smaller type is what we cover.

The method

We read primary sources: plan and pricing pages, the vendor's own help documentation, voucher terms, cancellation policies. Every material claim carries a date, and every price carries its billing cycle, because '$17/mo' billed annually and '$17/mo' billed monthly are different products. When we cannot verify a figure directly, we soften it in copy — 'around,' 'at the time of checking' — rather than presenting a guess as a fact.

Then we re-check, because plan pages are living documents that change without ceremony. Webflow repriced and reshuffled its tiers in May 2026. Weebly announced in June 2026 that it would shut down in 67 countries and delete stored data by December 26. Both changes rewrote our advice within weeks of the pages changing. A review site that doesn't re-read the terms is quoting a contract that no longer exists.

The scores we publish rate free tiers only, on three questions asked in a fixed order: can you publish, what's the toll, where's the trap. A score set by that rubric stays set — it does not drift when a vendor's commission structure improves, and it never rates the builder as a whole. A superb paid product can sit low on our ladder because its free tier is a brochure.

What we don't do

No invented user stories, no fabricated test measurements, no fake reviews. If we haven't verified something, we say so; the evidence base is the product's own published terms, not our imagination. We don't pad reviews to hit a word count — if the catch fits in a sentence, it gets a sentence. And we are never snarky about people who use free plans — only about the pages that sell them.

Independence

Some outbound links are affiliate links, routed through /go/ addresses and disclosed wherever they appear. Commissions never touch a free-tier score: our ranking of the best free website builders is topped by Google Sites, which has no affiliate program and pays us nothing. The full arrangement — including the obvious tension in earning from upgrades while regularly advising against them — is spelled out in our affiliate disclosure.

Corrections

If a plan page changed, a price moved, or we missed a clause, write to the desk. Corrections aren't an embarrassment here; they are the product working as designed.