Type what your business does, wait a minute, and a website appears. Wix, Squarespace, Hostinger, Framer and 10Web all do it now. Lovable, Bolt, v0 and Replit go further and build a whole application from a chat. Against a quote for thousands, a US$25 plan looks like the obvious choice.
The catch is the second price under the first one. Every AI builder sells a subscription, and inside it is an allowance of credits or tokens that runs down with every prompt, every edit, every blog post and every image. The subscription is fixed. The allowance is where the cost lives.
This guide shows how the meters work using each vendor's own figures, what the same tokens cost direct from Anthropic or OpenAI, and why a custom full stack site on Vercel, in your own name, is cheaper to own.
The trend: AI generation in every builder
The page builders added AI to what they already sold. Wix Vibe creates a site from a prompt and gives a Premium site 50 chat credits a day. Squarespace spends credits per prompt run, from 10 one-off credits on Personal to 120 a month on Advanced Commerce. Hostinger's cheapest plan includes 5 AI credits for site creation. Framer Basic includes 1,000 credits a month. 10Web's AI Starter generates a WordPress site with 100 credits a month.
A newer group skips the page builder. Lovable calls itself an AI software engineer. Bolt sells 10 million tokens a month on Pro. v0, made by Vercel, generates a Next.js codebase and deploys it. Replit's Agent builds and hosts full apps and bills each piece of work as a checkpoint.
The first draft of a website now takes minutes. That part is real. What has not changed: the site still has to take enquiries, connect to your tools, publish content and be maintained. Generation is the easy ten percent, and it is the only part the meter makes cheap.
Two prices on every pricing page
The monthly number is in large type. The allowance is in small type. The allowance decides how much you can actually do.
- Bolt: Pro is US$25 a month from 10 million tokens. Free caps at 300,000 tokens a day.
- Lovable: Pro includes 100 credits a month. Top-ups cost US$15 per 50 credits.
- v0 by Vercel: Plus is US$30 a month with US$30 of credits per user. Free gives US$5 and 7 messages a day.
- Replit: Core is US$20 a month with US$20 of credits. Agent work is billed per checkpoint, priced by effort.
- Durable: Launch is US$22 a month with 50 AI images and 10 AI blog posts a month. Free gives 10 messages and 5 images.
- Squarespace: Business includes 20 AI credits a month. Each generated image spends credits.
None of this is hidden. It is all on the vendor's own pages. But a monthly fee is predictable and an allowance is not.
How the credits get spent
Editing costs as much as building
Lovable publishes examples. Changing a button to grey costs 0.5 credits. Adding login costs 1.2. A landing page with images costs 2.0. On a 100-credit month that is 50 to 200 messages, and every message counts, including the ones that fix the last one. Bolt's documentation says most token use is Bolt re-reading your project files, so each edit costs more as the site grows. Bolt's own quickstart shows a title change using about 70,000 tokens.
Content eats the same allowance
Say you run a blog and want two posts a week with a header image each. On Durable's Launch plan the blog agent writes 10 posts a month and you get 50 images, so week four is out of posts. On Squarespace Business you have 20 credits a month for copy, images and the AI Visibility tool combined. On Hostinger, one credit generates one image and the cheapest plan starts with 5. On the chat-to-app tools, a blog post is just another prompt against the same credits that build and fix the site. The content plan and the development plan compete for one balance.
Failed attempts and expiry
Replit prices each checkpoint after the work, and you see the cost once credits are debited. Hostinger says undo does not refund credits. A founder on Hacker News described 10 million Bolt tokens spent largely on fixing problems the tool introduced. One case, not an average, but the metering allows it. Then the allowances vanish: Wix Vibe credits reset daily, Framer credits do not carry over, Lovable credits expire after two months, v0 credits after 65 days.
What the same tokens cost direct from Anthropic or OpenAI
Every builder on this list resells model access from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. The model providers publish their own prices per million tokens, so the markup is visible if you do the sum. Anthropic lists Claude Sonnet 5 at US$2 per million input tokens and US$10 per million output tokens, Claude Opus 5 at US$5 and US$25, and Claude Haiku 4.5 at US$1 and US$5. OpenAI lists GPT-5.6 Terra at US$2 and US$12, and GPT-5.6 Luna at US$0.20 and US$1.20. Both offer a 50% discount for batch jobs that can wait.
Anthropic's own rule of thumb is that one token is about three quarters of a word. So a 1,500 word blog post is roughly 2,000 output tokens, plus perhaps 1,000 tokens of brief and instructions. At list price that post costs about 2 cents on Sonnet 5, 6 cents on Opus 5, 1 cent on Haiku 4.5, 3 cents on GPT-5.6 Terra and under half a cent on Luna.
- Same post through a builder: Durable's Launch plan writes 10 posts for US$22, which is US$2.20 a post if the posts are all you use. A Lovable prompt runs 0.5 to 2 credits, US$0.15 to US$0.60 at the US$0.30 top-up rate. Bolt sells 10 million tokens for US$25, a flat US$2.50 per million with no input and output split, and its own quickstart burns about 70,000 of them on a title change.
- The gap: 10 to 100 times the model provider's list price for the same words. Part of that pays for the editor, hosting and convenience. The rest is margin.
- What it takes to pay list price: a site that can call the provider's API directly with your own key. That is exactly what a full stack site is, and what a page builder is not.
Why a custom full stack site on Vercel is the better buy
A custom full stack site uses the same technology the generators produce: TypeScript, React and Next.js, Node.js on the server, a database behind it. The difference is that a person builds it for your business and creates everything in your accounts. Vercel hosts it. Every change gets a preview link before it goes live. There is no server to patch.
The pricing is the inverse of an AI builder. The build is a fixed project price, quoted after a discovery conversation. Vercel Pro is US$20 per developer seat a month with US$20 of usage credit and no AI meter, because Vercel does not generate anything. Publishing a blog post costs nothing extra. Nothing runs down when you edit a page.
- Fixed price, not a meter. You know the cost before the build starts. No top-ups for a bad afternoon.
- Content as data. Services, prices and posts live in one place and appear wherever needed, including in an AI assistant later.
- Owned outright. The Vercel project, domain, repository and database are in your name from day one. The chat-to-app tools can export code, but hosting, database and login default to the vendor.
- AI on your terms. Connect an agent to your real data when you are ready. Switch it off if you are not.
That is what agentic ready means. The builders put the AI in the tool that makes the site. A full stack build puts the site in a shape where AI can work for the business afterwards, on data you control.
How to decide
A generator is right for a one-page test, a personal site or a prototype you will throw away. Set a credit budget and stop when it is spent.
It is wrong for a site that takes enquiries, publishes content regularly, connects to a CRM or bookings, or will be maintained by anyone other than the person who prompted it. For that, get a fixed quote for a full stack build on Vercel in your own accounts, and compare it against two years of subscription plus top-ups. Then ask two questions of any provider: which accounts are in my name, and what does it cost to leave.
Key takeaways
- 01
Every AI builder bills in two layers: a subscription, and an allowance of credits or tokens that runs down with every prompt, edit, post and image.
- 02
Lovable prices a simple edit at 0.5 credits and a landing page at 2.0. Bolt's quickstart shows a title change using about 70,000 tokens.
- 03
A 1,500 word post costs about 2 cents direct from Anthropic on Claude Sonnet 5. Through a builder the same post runs 15 cents to US$2.20, because the builder resells the model with a margin on top.
- 04
A custom full stack site on Vercel is a fixed build price plus US$20 per seat hosting, no AI meter, and every account in your name.
Frequently asked questions
Are AI website builders worth it for a small business?
For a brochure site that will never connect to anything, or a quick test of an idea, yes. For a site that takes enquiries, publishes content or connects to your tools, the credit meter turns every improvement into a variable cost and the platform becomes hard to leave.
Why do AI builder credits run out so fast?
Because every message costs credits, not just the ones that add something. Fixes, retries, blog posts and images all draw from the same balance. In tools such as Bolt, each message re-reads your project files, so the cost per edit grows with the site. Most allowances also expire or reset.
Can I use an AI builder to write my blog?
Yes, within the allowance. Durable's Launch plan writes 10 posts and 50 images a month. Squarespace Business gives 20 credits a month across all AI tools. On chat-to-app tools each post is a prompt against the same credits that build the site. Past the allowance, you buy top-ups.
How much does it cost to generate a blog post directly with Claude or GPT?
At list price, about 2 cents on Claude Sonnet 5, 6 cents on Claude Opus 5 and 3 cents on GPT-5.6 Terra for a 1,500 word post, using the providers' published per-token rates. Builders charge 15 cents to a few dollars for the same post because they resell the model with a margin. Paying list price needs a site that can call the provider's API with your own key.