Is a "free website" ever really free?

No — a free website is never really free. Every free offer recovers its cost somewhere, and the only useful question is where. Freedom35 Web Design is one of those offers: we build custom websites free, in about seven days, and you pay $180 to $1,200 a year only if you decide to keep the site. That is our catch. This page itemizes it in full, next to the catches the other kinds of "free" prefer not to print.

We are writing this because "free website" is a phrase that has earned its suspicion. It usually means one of three quite different things, and two of them cost more than a paid website would have.

What are the three kinds of "free website"?

None of these is a scam by default. Each is a real business model with a real cost structure. The difference is how plainly the vendor tells you where the cost went — which is what the rest of this page is for.

Our catch, itemized

Here is the complete list of what keeping a Freedom35 site costs. It is the same list a suspicious person would go hunting for in our terms, so we have saved you the hunt.

• $180 to $1,200 a year, prepaid. Hobby $180, Business $600, Pro $1,200 — one payment a year, not twelve. What each plan includes is on the pricing page, along with what it doesn't.
• A 12-month minimum. After the first year it renews annually, and you can cancel any time before renewal. If your business might not exist in a year, this term is wrong for you, and we say so at more length here.
• Your domain is not included — deliberately. You buy it in your own name, direct from a registrar, for about $12–15 a year. We help you set it up. Keeping it in your name is what makes the next item survivable.
• Stop paying and the site comes offline at the end of your paid term. You keep the domain. On request we send a zip of your content and any customer data the site collected, in open formats. Then we delete our copy.
• Update requests are capped. 4 a year on Hobby, 12 on Business, 24 on Pro. One request is one email of small changes, up to about half an hour of work. Bigger jobs are quoted before they start.
• Prices are locked for as long as you stay. If we raise prices later, existing clients keep theirs.

That is the whole catch. There is no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and year two costs the same as year one.

What does walking away actually cost?

You: nothing. You fill in the form, we build the site, you look at it on a private preview link, and if you don't want it you say so. There is no invoice and no follow-up sequence. The full process has the stopping points marked.

Us: about seven days of work. So the obvious question is why the math works for us, and the honest answer has two parts. First, we are fast — we build from our own toolkit rather than a blank page, so a "no" costs us a week, not a month. Second, the build is our marketing budget. Other shops spend money on ads and salespeople to get in front of you; we spend the week building the actual thing you are deciding about. A finished site is a better pitch than a proposal, and enough people keep them that the free ones are covered.

We only earn anything at all if the site is good enough to keep, and we only earn year two if year one was worth it. That is the incentive structure, and it is the least suspicious part of the whole offer.

How do you spot the bad kind of free?

Whoever you are considering — us included — ask these five questions before accepting anything free. A good vendor answers all five in writing without flinching.

• Whose name is the domain registered in? If the answer is not "yours", the free website is a lease, and the domain is the lock.
• What is the total cost in year two? Year three? If nobody will put the number in writing, the number is the catch.
• What happens the month you stop paying? "The site comes down" is a fair answer. "You lose everything including the domain" is not.
• Can you get your content out, and in what format? An export in open formats should be a request, not a negotiation.
• Do you see finished work before paying, or a mockup? A mockup is a promise. A working site you can click through on your phone is evidence.

Our answers: yours; printed on the pricing page; the site comes offline and you keep the domain; yes, as a zip in open formats; and you see the finished site — there are live ones to click through in the meantime.

Common questions

Is a free website build a scam?

The model itself isn't — it is a sales cost worn openly. But any individual offer can be, so apply the test above: you should see the finished site before paying anything, the ongoing price should be published, and the domain should be yours. An offer missing any of the three deserves your suspicion. Ours passes all three, verifiably.

What if I take the free site and never pay?

You can't, quite — and that is by design rather than fine print. The finished site lives on a private preview link until you are on a plan; nothing goes live on your domain before then. So the worst case for you is seeing a website you didn't want, and the worst case for us is building one. We think that is the right allocation of risk, since we are the ones claiming to be good at this.

Why not just charge for the build like everyone else?

Because the usual way makes you pay a deposit to find out whether we understood you. We would rather you find out first. It costs us more when someone walks away, and it is still the better trade — a client who has seen the actual site stays because they like it, not because they are sunk-cost committed to a deposit.

Wondering what websites cost when they aren't free? We wrote down the real numbers for every route — DIY, freelancer, agency, subscription, and us.