Free Website Builders: Page Caps, Traffic Caps and Hidden Take Rates
Ten builders and storefronts. Which free tiers are permanent, which are trials in disguise, and what each one takes from you instead of money.
Website building is the category where free tiers lie hardest. Two vendors in this list have removed their free plan entirely while still ranking on comparison pages that call them free, and two more describe a fourteen-day window as a plan.
Read whether the free tier expires before you read what it includes. Wix, WordPress.com, Webflow, Framer, Netlify, Carrd, Square, Payhip and Big Cartel all offer something permanent. Ecwid offers nothing free at all, and Shopify and Squarespace are trials.
All 11 reports in this category
- Big Cartel's Free Gold Plan Sells Five Things, Fee Free. Five products, no monthly cost and no commission. The oldest free tier in e-commerce is still the cheapest way to run a small shop honestly.
- Carrd Gives You Three Free Sites and No Domain of Your Own. One page, three sites, every core feature, and an address that is not yours. Carrd is the cheapest good page on the internet until you want a domain.
- Ecwid No Longer Has a Free Plan. Its Pricing Page Proves It.. The free plan that made Ecwid popular is not on the pricing page any more. The cheapest entry is a paid tier with a ten-product cap.
- Framer Free Is Buildable and Explicitly Non-Commercial. Almost no page limit, almost no bandwidth, and a licence that rules out the one thing most people want to build. The restriction is legal, not technical.
- Gumroad Has No Free Plan. It Has a 10% Cut.. There is no plan to choose. You pay nothing to list and a tenth of everything you sell, or a third if the buyer came from Gumroad.
- Netlify Gives 300 Credits a Month. Here Is What They Buy.. A hosting plan metered in credits rather than gigabytes, where a single production deploy costs fifteen and bandwidth costs twenty per gigabyte.
- Payhip Is Free Forever and Takes 5% of Everything. Every feature is on every plan, including free. The only thing that changes as you pay more is how large a cut Payhip takes.
- Square Free Takes 3.3% and Gives You a Store. No subscription, a real online store and a point of sale. The cost is entirely per transaction, which makes the maths depend on how much you sell.
- Webflow Free Allows Two Pages. That Is the Entire Plan.. The most capable visual builder in this category gives away almost nothing. Two static pages is not a website, it is a demonstration of one.
- Wix Free Gives You a Whole Site, Just Not an Address. The free plan is not a trial and it does not expire. It is a complete site on an address you do not own, with advertising you did not ask for.
- WordPress.com Free Is 1GB and Someone Else's Adverts. Unlimited posts, unlimited users, one gigabyte of media, and advertising you cannot switch off. The limits sit somewhere nobody expects.
How these were measured
Every report records the same fields: what the free plan includes, what it withholds, what the first paid tier costs, and the point at which paying starts to make sense. Figures are taken from the vendor's own pricing and documentation pages and carry the date they were checked. Plan terms change without notice, so treat each number as a dated snapshot.