██████╗ ██╗██╗ ██╗███████╗██╗ ██╔══██╗██║╚██╗██╔╝██╔════╝██║ ██████╔╝██║ ╚███╔╝ █████╗ ██║ ██╔═══╝ ██║ ██╔██╗ ██╔══╝ ██║ ██║ ██║██╔╝ ██╗███████╗███████╗ ╚═╝ ╚═╝╚═╝ ╚═╝╚══════╝╚══════╝ ███████╗████████╗██████╗ ███████╗███████╗████████╗ ██╔════╝╚══██╔══╝██╔══██╗██╔════╝██╔════╝╚══██╔══╝ ███████╗ ██║ ██████╔╝█████╗ █████╗ ██║ ╚════██║ ██║ ██╔══██╗██╔══╝ ██╔══╝ ██║ ███████║ ██║ ██║ ██║███████╗███████╗ ██║ ╚══════╝ ╚═╝ ╚═╝ ╚═╝╚══════╝╚══════╝ ╚═╝
# Plain-text mirror. Same words as the human page, minus everything a browser needed.
The upside is real and it is mostly one thing: the blank page is gone, and a working first draft now costs an afternoon instead of a fortnight. The downside is not the one this genre usually warns about. Generating is free. Publishing is not. Squarespace’s Blueprint AI is free to use and you need a paid account to publish anything it makes. Wix lets you build with AI for free and asks for a Premium Plan the moment you want a custom domain or online payments. Framer and Squarespace both meter the AI itself in credits. And the platform can retire the product under you, which Wix did to Editor X in January 2025.
The question in this post’s title has quietly stopped being a question.
You cannot really choose to build a website without AI any more. Wix opens with a prompt box and offers to “create a website with AI by describing what you want”. Squarespace asks a few questions about your business and generates the thing. WordPress.com invites you to “create and launch a WordPress.com website in minutes by chatting with AI”. Framer’s pitch is “describe the website, page, or update you need”. The template gallery, which was the entire interaction model of website builders for fifteen years, has been demoted to a fallback.
So the upside and the downside are no longer about whether to use AI. They are about what you actually get, what it costs the moment you want to publish it, and what happens when the platform changes its mind about the product you built on. I checked all three on the vendors’ own pages.
The upside is real and it is mostly one thing: the blank page is gone, and a working first draft now costs an afternoon instead of a fortnight. The downside is not the one this genre usually warns about. Generating is free. Publishing is not. Squarespace’s Blueprint AI is free to use and you need a paid account to publish anything it makes. Wix lets you build with AI for free and asks for a Premium Plan the moment you want a custom domain or online payments. Framer and Squarespace both meter the AI itself in credits. And the platform can retire the product under you, which Wix did to Editor X in January 2025.
Every mainstream builder now leads with generation rather than selection. That is the change worth understanding, because it moves the skill required from “can you use this interface” to “can you describe what you want”, and those are not the same skill at all.
[IMG: AI Website Generators]
Here is what each of the four I checked does, and where the money starts. Everything below was read on the vendor’s own pages on 30 July 2026.
| Platform | How it starts | Generating | Publishing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | A prompt. “Go from a prompt to a business-ready website.” | “Start building your site with AI for free.” | A Premium Plan for a custom domain or online payments. Website plans run from $17 to $159 a month on yearly billing. |
| Squarespace | Questions. “Answer a few questions about your business and brand.” | Blueprint AI is free to use. AI credits run from 10 one-time to 120 a month depending on plan. | “You need a paid Squarespace account to publish any website you create with the Blueprint AI Builder.” |
| WordPress.com | A chat. “Create and launch a WordPress.com website in minutes by chatting with AI.” | Not recorded, see below. | Not recorded, see below. |
| Framer | A prompt to an agent that “creates editable pages, sections, copy, and visuals directly in your project”. | Free plan with 500 credits to try. On yearly billing, Basic $10 a month includes 1,000 credits a month and Pro $30 a month includes 3,000. | Included in the plan. Extra editors are $20 a month each. |
The WordPress.com cells say “not recorded” on purpose. Its pricing page would not render a currency I trusted on the day I checked, so I am not putting a number in this post that I could not read with my own eyes. That is the rule I applied to the whole page. A figure that sounds right and cannot be traced is worse than no figure at all, because it buys trust it has not earned.
Strip the marketing and there are three things all four do. They turn a description into a first draft. They generate the filler for you, copy and images, so the draft looks finished rather than grey. And they keep a conventional editor underneath, because the generated result is never right the first time and everyone building these tools knows it.
[IMG: Key features of ai website builders]
Notice what none of them do. Not one of them decides what you are selling, who you are selling against, or what the page has to say to make somebody act. That work happens before the prompt, and it is the work most people skip because the tool no longer forces them to do it.
The blank page is gone. This is the whole upside and it is a bigger deal than the feature lists suggest. Most website projects do not die from bad design. They die in the six weeks nobody writes the first draft. A prompt box that returns something ugly but complete gets you past the exact point where projects stall.
A first version costs almost nothing. You can generate on Wix for free and use Squarespace’s Blueprint AI for free. You pay to publish, not to try. For validating an idea, that is genuinely useful and I would not talk anyone out of it.
Iteration is fast enough to be worth doing. Rewriting a section used to mean a ticket and a week. Now it means a sentence. If you are testing positioning rather than committing to it, the speed changes what is worth testing.
Personalisation has an evidence base, if a thin one. Epsilon published research in January 2018, run with GBH Insights, in which 80% of 1,000 US consumers aged 18 to 64 said they are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalised experiences. It is eight years old and it measures stated preference rather than behaviour. I am giving it to you with those caveats attached rather than dropping it, because it is at least a real study with a stated sample, which is more than most numbers quoted in this argument can say.
The free part is generation. The gate is publication. That is a deliberate design. You spend an afternoon making something you like, and the payment request arrives after you are attached to it. Know where the gate is before you walk through it, not after.
[IMG: Three stages: what you sell and who you are against is yours to decide before any prompt; generating is free on Wix and Squarespace with 500 trial credits on Framer; publishing is the paid gate, needing a Squarespace paid account or a Wix Premium Plan. The AI itself is also metered in credits.]
The AI itself is metered. Squarespace allocates AI credits by plan, from 10 one-time on the lowest tier to 120 a month at the top. Framer gives 500 credits to try, 1,000 a month on Basic and 3,000 on Pro. Anything genuinely iterative burns through an allowance faster than a pricing page implies, and top-ups are how the model earns.
The platform can retire the product under you. Wix completed Editor X’s transition into Wix Studio in January 2025, and new Editor X sites can no longer be created. Nobody did anything wrong. A vendor consolidated two products and the one you learned stopped existing. This is the risk that never appears in an upside-downside listicle, and it is the one I would weigh hardest.
Everything generated from the same patterns looks the same. I have argued this at length in AI website builders against custom development, along with what it costs over three years and why machine readability matters more than it used to, so I will not repeat it here. The short version: when every business in your category can generate your homepage in an afternoon, the homepage stops being an asset.
Learning curves did not disappear, they moved. The standard warning is that AI in web design demands technical understanding. That is not the barrier. The barrier is that a vague prompt returns a vague website, and most people find out how vague their thinking is only when a machine renders it. Our longer piece on artificial intelligence in web design goes into where the tools help and where they quietly do not.
I am not going to forecast. Prediction sections age badly, and they age worst exactly where they sounded most confident.
What I will say is that the interesting change already happened and most coverage missed it. Prompt-first became the default entry point across Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.com and Framer, and the template gallery got demoted. That shifts the scarce skill from operating software to describing intent, which is a strategy problem wearing a technology costume. If you want the version of this argument that covers platforms rather than AI specifically, we compared the major CMS platforms, and the no-code guide covers building without either a developer or a prompt.
Can I build a website with AI for free?
You can build one. Publishing is the paid step. Squarespace states that a paid account is required to publish anything made with Blueprint AI, and Wix requires a Premium Plan for a custom domain or online payments. Framer has a free plan with 500 credits to try before its paid tiers start at $10 a month.
Are AI credits a real constraint or a marketing device?
Both. Squarespace runs from 10 one-time credits on the entry plan to 120 a month at the top, and Framer from 500 trial credits to 3,000 a month on Pro. If you are generating a site once, the allowance is ample. If you are iterating seriously, it is the meter that decides your real monthly cost.
Is an AI-built website good enough for a real business?
For a presence site, often yes. For a site that has to differentiate you, rank, and get cited by AI engines, the answer is in our builders versus custom development breakdown, and it is more nuanced than either side of the argument usually admits.
What happens to my site if the builder is discontinued?
Ask before you commit, because it happens. Wix moved every Editor X site into Wix Studio in January 2025 and stopped allowing new Editor X sites. Check whether you can export your work and what form it comes out in, and treat any answer other than a straight yes as a cost.
Does using AI to build a site hurt its search visibility?
Not because it was generated. It hurts if the output is JavaScript-heavy with thin HTML, which crawlers struggle to read. Test whether your core content appears in the raw HTML of your published page. That is the check, not the provenance of the design.
I run Pixel Street, a web design studio in Salt Lake, Kolkata, and we use AI in every workflow we have. So take the following as the opposite of a defensive position.
The upside of building your website with AI is that you will have a website. That is not a small thing; most of the businesses that ask us for help have been putting it off for a year. The downside is that the tool will happily generate a confident, finished-looking page around thinking you have not done, and it will never tell you that is what happened.
Do the thinking first. What you sell, who you are against, what the page has to make someone do. Then open the prompt box, because it will save you weeks. If you want to work through that first part with people rather than a model, that is what we do, and if you would rather do it yourself, the DIY walkthrough is here.
You can build one. Publishing is the paid step. Squarespace states that a paid account is required to publish anything made with Blueprint AI, and Wix requires a Premium Plan for a custom domain or online payments. Framer has a free plan with 500 credits to try before its paid tiers start at $10 a month.
Both. Squarespace runs from 10 one-time credits on the entry plan to 120 a month at the top, and Framer from 500 trial credits to 3,000 a month on Pro. If you are generating a site once, the allowance is ample. If you are iterating seriously, it is the meter that decides your real monthly cost.
For a presence site, often yes. For a site that has to differentiate you, rank, and get cited by AI engines, the answer is in our builders versus custom development breakdown, and it is more nuanced than either side of the argument usually admits.
Ask before you commit, because it happens. Wix moved every Editor X site into Wix Studio in January 2025 and stopped allowing new Editor X sites. Check whether you can export your work and what form it comes out in, and treat any answer other than a straight yes as a cost.
Not because it was generated. It hurts if the output is JavaScript-heavy with thin HTML, which crawlers struggle to read. Test whether your core content appears in the raw HTML of your published page. That is the check, not the provenance of the design.
Every figure in this article traces to one of the following. Publisher and publication date are recorded so a claim can be checked against its origin, and re-checked when the origin changes.