AI website builder hosting costs: 7 builders compared

The domain paywall

Two of those cells need the footnote spelled out, because they're the interesting ones.

v0 is the only builder here that bills you twice. v0 builds the app; Vercel hosts it. A custom domain on the Vercel side is free — Hobby allows 50 domains per project — but Vercel's docs state plainly that "the Hobby plan restricts users to non-commercial, personal use only." A portfolio that lists your rates is commercial. So the honest number for a v0 site that earns anything is $0 for v0 plus $240 a year for Vercel Pro, and v0's own $30/month Plus tier buys you messages, not hosting.

Replit gives the domain away and charges for the badge. Replit's custom-domain docs list the price as "Pay your domain provider" with no plan gate, and publishing works on the free Starter plan — but Starter caps you at one published app and stamps "Made with Replit" on it. Removing the badge is a Core feature: $20/month billed annually, $240 a year. Everywhere else the domain and the badge come off at the same moment; on Replit they're separate purchases, and the badge is the expensive one.

Free tiers meter two different things

When a comparison says "Lovable's free tier is 30 credits a month," that's a build allowance — how much the AI will do for you. It says nothing about how much traffic the resulting site can take. Those are separate meters and only some vendors publish both:

• Lovable caps building hard (5 credits/day, 30/month) and doesn't cap traffic at all. Its hosting docs say "your plan does not cap visitors, requests, or bandwidth," and "a live site does not consume credits on its own." A finished Lovable site on the free plan can be hugged to death by Hacker News for free — you just can't edit it much.
• Bolt caps both, and the traffic cap is the one that bites: 333,000 web requests a month on Free, 1 million on Pro. At roughly 20 HTTP requests per page view, Free is about 16,000 page views a month.
• Framer and Webflow cap bandwidth, not requests — 1 GB each on their free tiers, which is a few thousand page views on an image-heavy site and the reason most people upgrade before they hit a page limit.
• Base44 and Replit publish a build meter (message credits, agent credits) and no public traffic meter at all.

If you're comparing free tiers, compare the one that matches your problem. A finished marketing site nobody is editing cares about the traffic meter. A site you're still iterating on cares about the build meter.

The second paywall: getting your code out

If the plan is to stop paying the builder and host the build somewhere you already pay for, the domain price is the wrong number to look at. This one is:

Four of the seven let you leave for free. Base44's pricing page lists "Github integration" only from the Builder tier upward, while its FAQ says two-way sync exports your source "at any time" — those two statements disagree, and I wouldn't budget on the FAQ.

Webflow is the one worth doing the arithmetic on. Code export lives on the Core Workspace plan, $19/month billed yearly. But Webflow's branding docs say the "Made in Webflow" badge appears on published sites by default and can only be hidden with "a Growth, Agency, or Enterprise Workspace plan or a paid site plan" — and that same toggle is what renames webflow.js to your-site-name.js in the export. So the cheapest legitimate route to an unbranded Webflow export is Core Workspace ($228/yr) plus a Basic site plan ($180/yr) — $408 a year to stop hosting with Webflow, which is more than the $180 a year it costs to just stay.

Framer has no route at all. Framer's help centre is direct about it: "Framer does not offer HTML export for self-hosting," because "Framer uses dynamic backend services to optimize your website after it is published." They name the consequence: "If you require complete control over hosting infrastructure or need to export source code, Framer may not be the right solution for that workflow." No plan changes this. If you're on Framer and want your files, you're rebuilding.

Where I come into this

Four of these builders hand you a Git repo for free. What that repo doesn't come with is somewhere to put the build output, which is the gap Parkstatic fills: a GitHub Action runs your build, pre-renders each route to a real HTML file, and pushes the result to the WordPress hosting you're already paying for. $29.99 a year or $89.99 once, one licence per site (checked 6 August 2026) — below every domain price in the first table, and it replaces a bill you already have rather than adding one. The deploy guides cover the per-builder mechanics.

When it's the wrong tool. If you're on Framer, it can't help you — there's no export to deploy, full stop. If your Base44 or Lovable app uses backend functions, auth, or a database, the build isn't static and pre-rendering it will produce a shell that logs everyone out. And if you don't already pay for WordPress hosting, buying some to escape Framer's $120 a year isn't a saving, it's a lateral move — that comparison is here, and the alternatives hub covers the dedicated static hosts, several of which are free and genuinely better if you have no WordPress in your life.

When paying the builder is the right call

Lovable's uncapped hosting is a real feature and nobody else in this table matches it. Bolt's Pro tier bundles pre-rendering ("SEO boosting") you'd otherwise have to build — though pre-rendering fixes fewer indexing problems than people expect, so don't upgrade for that alone. Webflow's CMS and Framer's animation runtime stop existing the moment you self-host — Framer says so itself, and it's being honest rather than defensive. Under about $250 a year, for one site you're not going to touch again, staying put is usually the rational choice. The arithmetic only tips when you have several sites, or when you're already paying a hosting bill that's sitting idle.

Keeping this honest

Every number above is from the vendor's own pricing or documentation page, checked 6 August 2026. This space moves fast enough that I've watched a competitor's meter double inside four months, so I re-check this table quarterly — next pass November 2026. If you cite it, cite the check date with it; if you find a cell that's gone stale before I do, tell me and I'll fix it.

If the arithmetic came out the other way — your builder exports for free, your site is genuinely static, and you already pay a WordPress host that's sitting there serving one brochure page — then you're choosing between $120–480 a year and $29.99. Static site hosting on WordPress is the long version of that argument, and Parkstatic's pricing is the short one.