How to Make a Website for Free, and What Free Costs You

You can make a website for free, and this course would rather tell you exactly what free costs you instead. Nothing on this page is a trick: there are three genuine routes to a live site at no cash cost, all of them serving real pages over HTTPS. What each one takes in place of money is different, and it is usually one of three things: the address is not yours, somebody else's branding sits on your pages, or the terms of service quietly forbid what you were planning to do. Read the last one carefully, because it is the one that catches people out long after launch day.

What free actually means on each route

Start by separating the four parts a site needs: an editor, storage, something that turns your content into pages, and the hosting and certificate underneath. A free builder plan gives you all four and keeps them. Free static hosting gives you the last part only, and you supply the rest yourself. That difference explains every other trade below.

• A free plan on a hosted builder. You get the editor, the hosting and HTTPS, on a subdomain the platform owns, usually with its branding on your pages and caps on storage or page count.
• Free static hosting. Generous limits and no branding, but you write the HTML yourself, and the acceptable-use terms decide whether your project is allowed at all.
• A page inside an account you already have. Fast and genuinely free, and this course has not audited the limits of those products, so read them yourself before you rely on one.

One thing is free on every route and worth saying plainly, because people still budget for it: the padlock. Certificates are issued automatically at no charge, so HTTPS is not a cost item in 2026 on any of the routes below. What free never includes is the address. A domain has a hard floor set by the registry, currently around $10.46 a year for a .com once the ICANN fee is added, rising after 1 November 2026. Nobody gives that away permanently, and any offer that appears to is a first year with a renewal behind it.

The three routes, and the terms behind them

The numbers below are from the platforms' own documentation, and the last column is the part almost no tutorial mentions. Our lesson on making a website without a builder goes through each host's published limits in full.

Do the Netlify arithmetic slowly, because it is the trap on that list. Twenty production deploys is one normal afternoon of building, and when free credits run out the project is paused and visitors get a site-not-available page. You cannot buy extra credits on the free plan; you wait for the next cycle or you upgrade to the $9 a month tier. And read the Vercel line as written: a business site on Hobby is out of terms no matter how little traffic it gets. A great many tutorials recommend these hosts for small-business sites, which means those tutorials are recommending a terms violation.

When to spend the first ten dollars

Spend it on the domain, before anything else. A name you own is the only part of this arrangement that survives every platform change you make later, and it costs roughly the price of two coffees a year. Everything else on a free plan is replaceable; the address is not, because links, search results and every business card you printed point at it. Buy the domain, point it at whichever free host you chose, and you have converted a temporary experiment into something you can keep.

The second dollar goes on hosting, and only when one of two things becomes true. Either the site starts earning money, in which case put it on a plan that expects the site to earn money, which is $9 to $20 a month and removes the terms problem entirely. Or nobody is going to run the upkeep, in which case pay somebody to: a managed host like SiteGround renews the certificates, takes the backups and applies the updates, and a hosted builder removes the whole category of work for a subscription. Our lesson on what a website costs runs the five-year totals for each of those, and five years is the number to look at rather than the first year.

Where free stops

Anything that needs a database

Static files cannot run a contact form, a login or a booking system on their own. Bolting on a third-party service is possible and is a different afternoon's work, so if any of those three is central to what the site does, a free static host is the wrong starting point. A free builder plan handles forms natively, which is often the single reason to prefer one.

The day you want to leave

On a free builder plan you are making the same trade as a paying customer: convenience bought with control. Export gives you your text and not the design, and the subdomain cannot come with you. That is a fair deal for a first site, provided the address is yours. It is a poor one if you have written two hundred pages by the time you notice, so make the trade knowingly, because a trade you chose is a decision and a trade you did not notice is a trap. If leaving is the likelier ending, take the route that can be left: your own files on hosting you rent, where a managed plan still keeps the upkeep off your desk.

When the free plan is genuinely enough

More often than the market would like. A personal site, a project page, a portfolio, a notice board for a club: none of those needs a paid plan, and adding one changes nothing a visitor can see. Publish on the free tier, check it against the launch checklist before you announce it, and upgrade the day a limit actually bites rather than the day you imagine it might.