How Long Can You Stay on a Free Plan? The Longevity Audit

How long can you stay on a free website builder plan? The pricing pages would prefer the question to feel paranoid, and 2026 turned out to be the year that proved it is not. The honest answer comes in three tiers of its own: plans that are free indefinitely by written policy, plans that are trials wearing a costume, and — the category nobody budgets for — free plans that outlive their usefulness because the product underneath them dies. This summer supplied a textbook case of the third kind.

Free by policy: the plans with no clock

Most of the field genuinely lets you stay. Wix's free plan runs indefinitely, no credit card required. Carrd's free tier is explicitly permanent — up to three sites, not a trial. Strikingly allows unlimited free sites, unique among the builders we cover. Jimdo's free Play plan, Framer's free plan, and Webflow's free Starter plan all persist without an expiry date. Google Sites, having no paid tier at all, has nothing for a free plan to expire into.

"No clock" is not "no ceiling," of course. These plans cap you in space rather than time — Wix at 500 MB of storage, Jimdo at five pages, Webflow at two pages and a lifetime allowance of 50 form submissions. You may stay forever; you may not want to. The full inventory of what each tier actually permits lives in our ranking of truly free website builders.

Trials in disguise

Two names in our coverage put a clock on you — one openly, one quietly. Squarespace is the open one: there is no free plan, only a 14-day trial, and the trial site cannot be shared publicly — it is a build sandbox, not a website. When the 14 days end, nothing survives for free; as best we can tell from Squarespace's own statements, expired trial sites are held for an unspecified grace window and then deleted. The quiet one is GoDaddy, which starts every new signup on a seven-day premium trial that auto-downgrades to the free tier without a proactive warning. The site survives the downgrade, but features you built with — including a connected domain — simply stop working. Our GoDaddy free website builder review has the play-by-play.

The dormancy clauses

Then there are the clauses about you going quiet. Google's general inactive-account policy — which, as best we can tell, extends to content tied to a personal account — permits deletion after roughly two years of account inactivity, meaning an untouched hobby site on Google Sites could vanish along with the account that owns it. The broader point matters more than any single builder's rule: most free-tier terms say nothing explicit about dormancy, and silence in a terms-of-service document is not a promise. A plan page that never mentions deleting idle sites has not committed to keeping them.

The Weebly lesson: "free forever" means "until the product dies"

Here is the case study we will be citing for years. Weebly's free plan never expired, never demanded a card, and still sits on the pricing page today at $0. It is also, in 67 countries, being switched off. On June 20, 2026, Weebly announced it was shutting down in those markets, citing "changes in regulation and simplifying global operations." Publishing of new pages stopped on June 29, 2026. Sites go offline on September 27, 2026. Accounts — and all stored data — are permanently deleted on December 26, 2026. No clause on the free plan predicted any of it, because product death is never a clause.

The warning signs were public for anyone reading: no new features for over a year, the mobile app pulled from stores on December 1, 2025, the community forum closed, social accounts dormant while owner Square pointed new customers at Square Online. Outside the 67 countries, Weebly limps on in maintenance mode, still accepting signups and payments. Our Weebly free plan review scores what remains, but the durable lesson is not about Weebly. A free plan's lifespan is the product's lifespan, and no policy page will warn you the product is dying.

So how long, really?

Pulled together, the audit reads like this. On Wix, Carrd, Strikingly, Jimdo, Framer, Webflow, and Google Sites, you can stay for as long as the product exists — the policy carries no clock, only capacity ceilings. On Squarespace you have 14 days, none of them public. On GoDaddy you have seven days of the real product before the quiet demotion. And everywhere, without exception, you have exactly as long as a strategy department somewhere decides the free tier is worth operating — a term that appears in no contract and, as Weebly demonstrated between June and December of this year, can turn out shorter than a single academic year.

That is not an argument against free plans; it is an argument for holding them correctly. A free tier held with your own domain and an off-platform copy of your content is a bargain with a manageable worst case. The same tier holding the only copy of your work, at an address you do not own, is a liability that has merely not matured yet.

How to hedge a free plan

• Own the address. Buy your domain yourself at a registrar and point it at the builder — never the reverse. Weebly users with their own domains lost a site this year; users on weebly.com subdomains lost their entire web presence. (For where "free domain" offers fit in, our piece on free website builders with a free domain reads the vouchers.)
• Keep your content off-platform. The words and images should live in a folder you control, so rebuilding elsewhere is an afternoon rather than an archaeology project.
• Keep a static mirror. A saved copy of every published page — even a folder of browser exports — turns a platform shutdown into an inconvenience instead of a loss.
• Diarize the dates. When a builder hands you a deadline, believe it. Weebly's September and December dates are not negotiating positions.

None of this is paranoia; it is the same reasoning as backing up a laptop. The builders that are free by policy today — and several genuinely are — remain products, and products end. What each free tier includes while it lasts is cataloged in what "free" actually includes, and the fine print waiting for you at the moment you outgrow one is mapped in our guide to free plan upgrade traps.