Build free, pay to publish: what that actually means

Most website tools ask you to pay before you can see what you are buying. You choose a plan, hand over a card, and then find out whether the thing it builds is any good.

We do it the other way round, and since "free" is a word that has been worn out by people who did not mean it, it is worth writing down exactly where the line sits.

What free actually covers

You can build the entire site. Not a demo, not three pages, not a watermarked preview. The whole thing.

You can change it as many times as you like, in as many directions as you like. You can rebuild the homepage four times, try every look, write the words and rewrite them, add pages, remove pages, and look at the result on your laptop and your phone as often as you want.

There is no card and no time limit on any of that. Nobody is counting down fourteen days at you.

What you cannot do without a plan is put it in front of the public. Publishing is the paid line, and connecting your own domain goes with it, since an address pointed at a site that is not live has nothing to point at.

Why that particular line

Because it is the honest place for it.

Everything before publishing is you finding out whether this works for your business. Charging for that means charging people to discover the answer is no, which is a bad way to run a business and a worse way to treat somebody's Saturday.

Everything after publishing is us hosting your site, serving it to your visitors, keeping it up and taking your enquiries. That is an ongoing cost with our name on it, and it is a reasonable thing to charge for.

So the deal is: see the actual thing, then decide.

Credits, and what they are for

There is a second number alongside the plan, and it is the one people ask about, so here it is plainly.

Building runs on credits. Every time you ask for something to be made or changed, that work costs a small amount. A paid plan comes with a monthly allowance of credits, you can see what is left at any time, and you can top up if a big week runs you short.

The reason it is metered at all is that building is genuine work being done on your behalf, and a flat fee would mean the people who ask for one small change every month subsidise the people who rebuild their site nightly. Metering it keeps the base price honest for the ones who barely use it.

In practice a normal month is a few changes: new prices, a seasonal photograph, a paragraph rewritten. That is not where the allowance goes. A full rebuild is where it goes.

What a plan gets you besides going live

Publishing and your own domain are the headline. Alongside them, a plan raises the room you have for the messages your forms collect and the files you upload, and unlocks the more thorough build styles, which take longer and think harder about what they are making.

The exact figures live on the pricing page, and paying yearly costs less than paying by the month. There is no point restating numbers here that a price change would leave out of date.

What it does not do, at any price

Worth saying, because knowing early saves everyone time.

Spanli makes sites that inform, persuade and collect enquiries. You can show a catalogue and take orders through a form, but there is no checkout and no logins for your visitors. If you need to take card payments on the page, that part is a different tool.

The rest is genuinely yours. The words, the pictures and the site itself, and a domain you buy here is registered in your name. Your published site is an ordinary website at your own address, not a page inside somebody's app.

So the sensible way to try it

Build the thing. Take an hour, describe your business, look at what comes back, push it around until it is right. Show it to somebody whose opinion you trust.

Then, and only then, work out whether it is worth putting online. By that point you are not deciding whether to buy a website. You are deciding whether to publish one you have already seen, which is a much easier question and a much fairer one to be asked.

Build free.