Can I get a website with no monthly fee?

A website has parts, and they're billed in different ways. Some you pay once, some every year, some every month. "No monthly fee" means every part is paid once or yearly, or costs nothing.

• The pages. Bought once from a kit or a designer, or built by you. No monthly bill.

• Hosting. The computer that serves your pages. Squarespace's plans include it, and there's no free Squarespace plan, only a trial.³ A simple site of plain files can be hosted free, as below.

• The web address. Paid every year. A host can also give you a free address of its own, but then the address isn't yours.

• Email. Often a monthly fee for each mailbox. Cloudflare lists Email Routing, which forwards mail sent to your address on to an inbox you already have, as available on its free and paid plans.⁴

• Updates. Your time, or a care plan from someone else, which is usually billed monthly.

Most don't, because a builder's plan pays for the hosting, templates and support bundled with it. Squarespace has no free plan, only a 14-day trial.³ Wix does have free sites. Wix says free sites get access to most, but not all, of its products, and that its Premium plans come with a custom domain and remove Wix branding.⁵ We price both over three years in website kit or Wix and Squarespace alternatives with no monthly fee.

Google Sites works a third way. Google's help says you can connect a domain you bought from another registrar, and that a new domain bought through Google Sites needs a Google Workspace plan.⁶

If you want your own address and no monthly fee, the other route is a site you host yourself.

Yes, if the site is plain files: pages, pictures and a stylesheet, with no database behind them. Cloudflare says requests for static files are free and unlimited on its free and paid plans.¹ Its free Pages plan allows up to 20,000 files per site, 25 MiB for a single file, 500 builds a month and 100 custom domains per project.⁷ A Classic kit look is 15 files and about 150 to 240 KB (we measured three), so none of those limits comes close.

Read the host's terms before you put a business on a free plan. GitHub says Pages is not allowed as free hosting to run an online business or e-commerce site.⁸ Vercel's Hobby plan is restricted to non-commercial, personal use.⁹ Our own kit guide tells you not to use Vercel's free Hobby plan for a business site, for that reason.

Free plans can change. A site of plain files moves to another host by copying the files, so keep a copy of yours.

• The web address, every year. For a .com, Verisign charges registrars $10.26 a year for each name now and $10.97 from November 1, 2026.² What you pay is your registrar's price on top of that. Cloudflare says it does not mark up domain prices and that its prices are always at or below what registries and ICANN charge it.¹⁰ GoDaddy's guide lists domain names at $0 to $30 a year.¹¹ Look at the renewal price, not the first-year price.

• Connecting the address to your host. On Cloudflare Pages, a root domain such as example.com has to be a Cloudflare zone, which means pointing its nameservers at Cloudflare. A subdomain such as www.example.com can stay with your registrar and use a CNAME record.¹²

• Email. Forwarding can be free. A mailbox with your own address is usually priced per person.

• Your time. You write the words, take the photos and publish the site, or you pay someone to.

A site of plain files can show information and let people reach you. It can't run software on a server, because there isn't one. In practice that means:

• No contact form. Our Classic and Motion kits use tap-to-call, text and email links instead of a form. We checked: none has a form tag, and every one has tap-to-call links. A call or text link opens the visitor's own phone app, and nothing is sent for you.

• No store, bookings or payments of its own. Those need a service you connect, and payment companies take a cut of each sale.

• No logins or member areas. Those need software running on a server.

• Changes are done by hand. You edit the files, or ask a free AI helper to edit them, and upload the folder again. The kit includes copy-and-paste prompts for that.

If you need those things, a builder or a site built for you makes sense, and a monthly fee is the price of them.

Here is the arithmetic for a site you set up yourself from one of our Classic kits, using the lowest figures above. Your registrar's price will differ. For the prices of other ways to get a site, see what a small business website costs.

It fits a business whose customers mostly need to find you, see what you do and call or text: a plumber, a salon, a cleaner. It's a poorer fit if you sell online, take bookings on your own site, or change prices every week and don't want to touch files. To weigh it against a builder or a designer, see kit, builder or web designer: which to choose.

If you'd rather not do the setup yourself, we also build sites. Tell us about your business.

1. Pick the kit for your kind of business at website kits and download it after you pay. Try Plumber, Electrician, Landscaping, Cleaning service or Hair salon.

2. Fill in your name, hours, services, prices and photos using the kit's fill-in sheet. Do it by hand, or paste the kit's prompts into a free AI helper.

3. Make a free Cloudflare account and upload the folder to Cloudflare Pages with Direct Upload, which is drag and drop. The kit guide says the pages.dev address you get costs nothing.

4. Put that address in your files where the example address sits, and upload again.

5. If you want your own .com, buy it from a registrar and connect it on the Pages project's Custom domains screen. Keep it renewed.

6. Open every page and tap every call link on your phone before you tell anyone.

The guide in our Classic and Motion kits walks through these steps.

We sell website kits and build sites, so we have a stake in this answer. The hosting, domain and plan facts come from each company's own pages, linked below. The kit facts come from our own store and our own kit files, which we checked. The totals are our arithmetic on those numbers. Cloudflare, GitHub, Vercel, Squarespace, Wix and GoDaddy all sell something, so read their terms yourself before you commit.