Why we built this
A note on what we believe and why this exists
A small website should be free to put online. Always. Not a teaser. Not a trial. Not "free for fourteen days then we charge you". Free, every year, for the rest of your life.
A note from the founder
"This is daylight robbery."
That was the bakery owner two streets from my flat, holding her annual website bill. Two hundred and ten pounds, the same as the year before, the same as the year before that. For one page. With her opening hours and a photo of a sourdough loaf. The bill shows up on the same line every January, next to insurance and the accountant.
I asked the plumber. Three hundred. The dance teacher. Two hundred and forty. The yoga studio. Three hundred and eighty, because their site embeds a YouTube video and that needs a "premium" plan apparently. Same pattern across every small business I checked.
The websites do almost nothing on a quiet day. They are a name, an address, a phone number, a couple of photos, and a contact form. The technical cost of keeping one of them online, on the kind of infrastructure your bank uses, is a few pence a year. Pence. Everything above that, every year, is rent.
So we built Whatimade. Drop your files in, or describe your site in a sentence, or paste the link to one you already have somewhere else. It is online in under a minute. The address is on us. The bill stays at zero. Forever.
If we ever charge for anything, it will be one optional line for a real web address (yourbakery.com instead of yourbakery.whatimade.app), at $1 a month plus whatever your registrar charges, passed straight through. Not a freemium funnel. Not a trial timer. Not a subscription disguised as a hosting bill.
The bakery owner pays nothing. The plumber pays nothing. The yoga studio pays nothing. Whatever we are, that is what we are.
How it works, in five steps
Most people are signed in and have a working site online within ninety seconds. The five steps below are deliberately boring; that is the point.
- Sign in with Google. One click. No password to remember. We never see your Google password and we ask only for the narrowest Drive permission, which lets us write into a single folder we create.
- Pick a path. Three options on the home page. Drop the files you already have (a folder, a .zip, or HTML you copied out of Claude or ChatGPT). Describe your site in a sentence and let our AI draft it. Or paste the address of a site you already have somewhere else, and we tell you what you are paying now and how much you could keep.
- Review the preview. If the AI drafted it, you get a side-by-side preview before anything goes live. Re-roll, edit by hand, or hand it to a different AI and paste the new version. Nothing publishes until you click publish.
-
Publish.
One click. The site is live at
yourname.whatimade.app, on Cloudflare's network, with HTTPS already on. The first version also lands in your own Google Drive automatically. - Edit any time, from anywhere. Type the change ("make the prices bigger"), talk it ("change the headline to..."), or drop a new file. The change is live in seconds. Mobile browser works exactly the same as desktop.
Who builds sites here
Every card below describes a real customer or example. Click through to see the live version.
Bakers, plumbers, dance teachers, yoga studios
One page, three sections, big phone number. Hours, location, what you do, and a way to reach you. The kind of site Wix and Squarespace charge two hundred pounds a year for; the kind that does not need to charge anything.
Writers, podcasters, newsletter authors
Simple landing page that points at the real channel: Substack, YouTube, Spotify, an RSS feed. A short bio, a contact form, and a list of recent posts you maintain by hand or by AI.
Designers, models, photographers, illustrators
Image-led portfolio with a clean grid, a contact form for booking enquiries, and a press section. WhatImade hosts the static page; you upload the images straight into your folder.
Single-product launches, lookbooks, pre-orders
For showcasing what you sell and pointing the buyer at a checkout that already exists (Stripe Payment Links, Shopify, Etsy, Gumroad, even an email enquiry). WhatImade does the front; the back-end stays where it is.
Weddings, conferences, dinner parties, fundraisers
One-page event site with a programme, an RSVP link, and directions. Cheaper than Paperless Post, more flexible than Eventbrite's free tier. Disappears when the event ends if you want it to.
Developers shipping a prototype
A landing page for a side project that probably needs to launch by Friday. Drop the static files, let the back-end live somewhere else, and forget about the hosting. The free tier covers the visit volume of most demos.
Plumbers, electricians, builders, mechanics
Trust signals first: years in trade, service area, before-and-after photos, big phone number at the top of every page. The kind of site a customer in a panic with a leak needs to scan in three seconds.
Memorials, family histories, hobby pages
For things that should not have a monthly bill. A page for a parent who has passed. A family-tree project. A list of every book you read in 2026. The site stays up, free, for as long as you want it.
Use with Claude
If you just want a website, the Describe your site path on the home page is the right one. The two sections below assume you are comfortable copying text from one app to another, like ChatGPT or Claude on one side and WhatImade on the other.
Claude is good at design. Ask Claude for a complete webpage, copy what comes back, and paste it into WhatImade. The whole loop is two browser tabs.
The prompt that works
Build me a complete single-file index.html for [your site].
Include <!DOCTYPE html>, all CSS in a <style> tag in <head>,
mobile-responsive with a media query for under 720px.
Use [colour palette / mood] and [serif|sans-serif] type.
Sections: [hero / about / contact / etc.].
The phone number is [...]. The email is [...].
No JavaScript except a simple mobile menu toggle.
No external image hosts; use inline SVG illustrations.
Output the full HTML and nothing else.Copy what Claude gives you, open whatimade.app, sign in, click "Drop the files I already have", paste the webpage into the textarea, and click publish. The site is live at yourname.whatimade.app within seconds. The Drive backup writes a copy in the same step.
Want to iterate? Ask Claude for a change, copy the new version, paste it back into WhatImade. Or use the AI built into WhatImade itself, which can read your current webpage and edit it in place: open the site, click "Edit with AI", and tell it what you want.
Use with ChatGPT
ChatGPT works the same way. The Code Interpreter feature is also useful for generating placeholder images and bundling them into a folder you can drop in directly.
The prompt that works
Generate a complete index.html plus any CSS or JS files needed,
ready to deploy as static files. The page is for [...].
Include a hero, an about section, three feature blocks, and a
contact form that posts to [endpoint] or mailto:[address].
Mobile-first, no frameworks, vanilla CSS.
If you generate images, save them as a .zip I can download.
Show the file structure at the end.If ChatGPT writes a single file, copy and paste as above. If it gives you a zip (a folder bundled into one downloadable file) with multiple files, download the zip and drop it directly into the WhatImade upload box. We unpack everything in the browser; nothing leaves your device until you click publish.
The same trick works on the ChatGPT mobile app. The "Drop a file" box on whatimade.app accepts a paste from your phone clipboard or a download from the ChatGPT iOS / Android app's share sheet. The whole loop, on a phone, is one minute.
How we compare to Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and WordPress.com
Same one-page site, five providers. Prices are the cheapest plan each one offers that publishes to a real web address, taken from each provider's public pricing page in April 2026. Verify yourself; we link the sources under the table.
| What matters |
WhatImade
Your best option
|
Wix |
Squarespace |
Webflow |
WordPress.com |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you pay, every year | $0Forever. Optional $1/month for a real address (your registrar's price passed through). | $204 / year$17/mo · "Light" plan | $276 / year$23/mo · "Personal" plan | $168 / year$14/mo · Basic site hosting | $108 / year$9/mo · "Personal" plan |
| Credit card to start | No | Yes, on the trial | Yes, after 14 days | Yes, to publish | Yes, for anything but a subdomain |
| Sign-up time | One Google click | Email, password, plan picker, billing form | Email, password, template picker, billing form | Email, password, workspace picker, seat form | Email, password, plan picker, billing form |
| How you make changes | Drop files. Or talk to the AI. Or use any AI you like. | Locked drag-and-drop builder | Locked block editor | Visual tool with a learning curve | Block editor + plugin sprawl |
| Use with Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek | Yes, drop the file in | Locked editor only | Locked editor only | Custom code blocks only | Only on a paid plan |
| Ads on your free site | Never | Yes, on the free address | No free tier | No true free tier | Yes, on the free address |
| Your files in your own Drive | Yes, mirrored on every publish | No, manual export only | No, manual export only | No, manual export only | No, manual export only |
| If they shut down | Your site is already in your Drive | You lose hosting and the site | You lose hosting and the site | You lose hosting and the site | You lose hosting and the site |
| Address registered in your name | Yes, day one | Yes, with their registrar | Yes, with their registrar | Yes, with their registrar | Yes, with their registrar |
| Tracking on your visitors by default | None | Multiple, opt-out | Multiple, opt-out | Multiple, opt-out | Multiple, opt-out |
| Public proof your backups work | Yes, every month | No | No | No | No |
Prices are the cheapest plan each provider offers that publishes to a real address, taken from Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and WordPress.com at the time of writing. Verify yourself; competitor comparisons are offered in good faith.
Why it can be free
The infrastructure for hosting a static website at small scale has, quietly, become almost free. Cloudflare, the company whose network we run on, gives away enough capacity in their generous free tier to serve millions of visits a month. The price you and I see on the consumer end of the web has not caught up with that fact, because the platforms charging the rent have no incentive to lower it.
So the maths works like this. Your site is small. The hosting bill, on the kind of professional infrastructure your bank uses, comes to a tiny rounding error per year. We can absorb it without thinking, the same way a coffee shop does not charge you for a glass of tap water.
If a site ever became extremely popular, that maths changes. We will tell you long before that happens, and you will have the full archive of your files in your own Google Drive, ready to take anywhere. We do not lock you in to make the books work later.
How we keep the lights on
The bills are small and we cover them. The free tier is permanent and the only line on the bill is an optional one for a real web address (yourbakery.com instead of yourbakery.whatimade.app), priced at $1 a month plus what your registrar charges. If we ever add anything else, it will be for things genuinely above and beyond the free service, never as a way to put existing free sites behind a wall.
What you actually own
The reason this can be a real promise rather than a marketing one is that we built the product so that not coming back is straightforward.
- Your files are in your own Google Drive. Every publish writes a copy to a
WhatImadefolder you can open today. If we vanish, that folder stays. You can move it to any other host in an afternoon. - Any domain you buy through us is registered in your name. Not in ours. You are the registrant from day one with Cloudflare. No middleman, no transfer fee, no consent needed from us if you ever leave.
- Every visit loads over an encrypted connection. The padlock in the address bar is always on, always free. So is daily backup, restore-test verification, and a clean export.
The whole thing is described, with measurable numbers, on the durability page and the trust page.
What this is not
It is not a freemium funnel where the real money lives behind a paywall after thirty days. It does not collect data on your visitors and sell it. It does not train AI on your content. It does not run advertising on your site. It is a thin layer between your files and the people who want to read them, and that is all it is going to be.
Useful pages on the web
Plain how-to references for the things people search for around the topic of putting a small site online. Each link goes to a third-party page or one of ours.
- How to publish a website with no coding: open whatimade.app, sign in with Google, drop a file or describe your site. Five steps above.
- How to put a website that an AI made for you online: see Use with Claude or Use with ChatGPT. The same approach works for any AI that gives you a webpage file.
- How to publish a website on a custom domain: our pricing page walks through it. From $1/month plus the registrar's price.
- How to get your site off Wix or Squarespace: our "Find your site" path on the home page checks where you are now and tells you what you are paying. Then drop the export into our import.
- How backups work and where the files live: see the trust page and the live durability page.
- API and developer reference: /docs if you want to publish from your own scripts.
If this resonates
The free tier is the product. There is nothing else to upgrade to today, and the only thing we ask is that you tell other small business owners about us if it works for you. Sign in, drop your old site in, or describe what you want, and we go from there.
If you have a question, an angry email, or a story about being stuck in a contract somewhere unpleasant, write to support@whatimade.app. A real person reads every one.
G2G Advisory Ltd, England & Wales