An AI website builder produces a site from a conversation: you describe the business, supply an existing site or references for inspiration, answer a short questionnaire, and receive a working multi-page site at a link. Hosting connects through a deployment platform, and the site is edited afterwards through the same chat rather than in a page editor.

What Is an AI Website Builder?

An AI website builder is a tool that generates a complete, deployed website from a written description rather than from a template a person fills in. It differs from a drag and drop builder in where the work sits: you specify intent and content, and the layout, structure, and code are produced for you.

The approach described here runs through Dubb Agent with its custom website builder skill, deploying to Vercel. The agent asks a short set of questions, builds the site, and hands back a live link. Changes are requested in the same conversation, and the source can be exported as a zip file at any point.

What This Is For, and What It Is Not

Scope first, because misjudging what an AI website builder is for is the main way people end up disappointed.

This is for marketing websites. Five or six pages about you, your company, and your team. Profiles, a services page, links out to relevant things, a contact form or a lead generation form. Brochureware, in the old sense, and most businesses need exactly that and nothing more.

This is not for building a platform. If you need a robust search engine over a large catalogue, user accounts and a back end, payment logic, or anything where the software is the product, that is a different job and it needs a developer.

The line is roughly whether the site describes your business or whether the site is your business. Describing is well within reach. Being is not.

The Honest Bit About Web Developers

I spent years building websites. Agency work, small shops, my own agency for a while. Sites that cost tens of thousands of dollars to develop. So there is something uncomfortable about explaining that a chunk of that work now happens in a conversation.

The resolution I have landed on is that the work being displaced is not the work worth paying for. Template-based brochureware was never where a good developer's value sat; it was the necessary overhead you paid to get a presence online.

Where developers remain genuinely valuable is proprietary technology: the thing your competitors cannot buy, the integration nobody else has, the product itself. If anything, taking brochureware off their plate points their time at the work that actually compounds.

So this is not an argument that developers are obsolete. It is an argument about which jobs should reach one.

What You Need to Set It Up

Two things, both quick.

The custom website builder skill, turned on. In Dubb Agent, open the skills section in the left navigation and switch it on. This is what teaches the agent the whole build sequence. Without it you will get a conversation rather than a website.

A Vercel account, connected. Vercel is the deployment platform the build ships to. Go to integrations, search for Vercel, and connect it. It needs an API key, and the agent walks you through where to find it if you ask. Keep the integrations page open in a second tab so you can paste the key across.

Neither step is technical in the sense people fear. The API key is a string you copy from one page and paste into another.

The Hosting Plan Question

One thing to settle before you build, because it is easy to get wrong and the consequence is your site going offline rather than a surprise invoice.

Vercel's free tier is called the Hobby plan, and it is genuinely capable. It is also, according to Vercel's own documentation, restricted under their fair use guidelines to non-commercial, personal use only.

A company marketing site with a team page and a lead generation form is commercial use. So for the thing this article is about, the free plan is not the right plan, regardless of whether it would technically run the site. Vercel lists policy violations among the reasons an account or deployment gets paused, which means the risk is not a bill arriving. It is a business website disappearing.

The paid tier, Pro, runs at twenty dollars per month per developer seat at the time of writing. That does not really dent the headline: building a small business site for a couple of hundred dollars a year is still a different universe from what this cost five years ago. It is just not zero, and it is better to know that before you point a domain at it.

Use Hobby to experiment and to see what the agent produces. Move to a paid plan before the site is doing a job for your business, and check current terms yourself, since plan rules change.

The Conversation That Builds the Site

With the skill and the integration in place, you open a chat and tell the AI website builder you want to build a website.

The skill loads and you get a short questionnaire. What the business does, who it serves, what pages you want, your colours, and crucially, references: an existing website you already have, and examples of sites whose look you like. The more of that you supply, the less generic the result.

Then it builds, and you get a link. On a small marketing site this takes minutes rather than the afternoon you may be bracing for.

The input that matters most is the reference material. A description alone produces something competent and anonymous. An existing site plus two or three examples you admire plus your actual brand colours produces something that looks like it was made for you, because it was.

Why It Is More Than a Copy of Your Old Site

The thing that surprised me was that the AI website builder did not simply reproduce what it was given.

On one build, working from a client's existing site, the agent noticed that the contact form had gaps in its functionality, fixed them, and shipped a better version. It also added a live calculator that had not been asked for but obviously suited the business, updating in real time as you enter figures.

That is the difference between a migration and a rebuild. A migration moves your existing problems to a new address. Working from your old site as a reference rather than a specification lets the obvious improvements happen on the way across.

It also means you should read what came back rather than assuming it matches. Anything it improved, it changed, and changes want checking, particularly on forms.

Iterating After Version One

The build is not the end of the conversation. Adding a page, rewriting copy, dropping in a video, adjusting a layout: all of it happens in the same chat.

That changes the economics of small changes more than it changes the economics of the build. The reason business websites go stale is rarely that nobody has ideas. It is that every small change means a ticket, an agency, a quote, or learning a CMS, so the change does not happen. When updating a page costs one sentence, pages get updated.

Which is worth planning for. Ship version one before it is perfect, then improve it with real feedback rather than guesses. That loop is the one described in Eric Ries's The Lean Startup as build, measure, learn, and the measure step is the one people skip. Shipping fast only helps if you are watching what happens next.

The Zip File Escape Hatch

You are not locked into the chat, and this matters more than it might appear.

At any point you can export the site as a zip file. That opens several doors. Hand it to a developer who needs to add something the builder cannot do, such as a search engine over a real catalogue or a customer login. Open it in a desktop editor and change the code yourself. Or continue in another AI coding tool if you prefer.

Worth valuing this on its own terms. The usual bargain with easy website tools is that ease is paid for with lock-in, and the day you outgrow the tool you start from scratch. An exportable codebase means the AI build is a starting point rather than a dead end, and that is what makes it a reasonable foundation rather than a stopgap.

What It Actually Costs

Running an AI website builder has four cost components, and only one of them is the one people think about.

Added up, a small marketing site lands in the low hundreds of dollars a year rather than the tens of thousands it once took to develop. The last row is the one worth dwelling on: the tool removed the build cost, not the thinking cost, and a site built from a vague description reads exactly like one.

Before You Point a Domain At It

A short list that is not in the source training and belongs before launch rather than after.

The forms collect personal data. A contact form and a lead generation form gather names, email addresses, and often more. That brings obligations: a privacy policy saying what you collect and why, a lawful basis and consent where your jurisdiction requires it, and somewhere secure for the submissions to land. Generated sites do not come with a privacy policy that reflects what you actually do with the data.

Check who owns the reference material. Using your own old site as input is straightforward. Feeding in a site you admire is fine for inspiration, but the output should not end up carrying someone else's copy, images, or distinctive design. Read what comes back with that in mind.

Check it on a phone, and check it works without a mouse. Most visitors will be on a phone. Tab through the forms, confirm images have alt text, and check the colours you chose are actually readable. Accessibility is both a legal question in many places and simply whether people can use the site.

Read every factual claim. The agent wrote your copy. Titles, credentials, years in business, service descriptions and any numbers need checking against reality before they are published in your name.

None of this takes long. All of it is more expensive to fix after the site is live.

AI Website Builders Compared

The category is crowded and the tools differ mainly in what you get to keep.

The column that matters most over a few years is the third one. Every one of these will get a decent marketing site live. Whether you can leave with the thing you built is the question that decides how the next five years feel.

Common Mistakes and Troubleshooting

Expecting it to build a platform. Brochureware, yes. User accounts and payment logic, no. Know which one you are asking for.

Giving it a description and no references. The output will be competent and anonymous. Supply your old site, two or three you admire, and your real colours.

Leaving a commercial site on the free hosting tier. It is for personal, non-commercial projects. Move to a paid plan before the site does a job for your business.

Assuming it copied your old site faithfully. It may have improved things, which means it changed them. Test the forms.

Publishing the generated copy unread. Every claim goes out in your name. Check the facts.

Launching without a privacy policy. The forms collect personal data from the first day the site is live.

Iterating in dozens of tiny requests. Each round consumes credits. Batch your feedback.

Polishing version one forever. The point of building in minutes is to learn from something real. Ship it, then watch what happens.

Best Practices I Actually Follow

Gather references before you open the chat. Your existing site, two or three you like, your colours, your real copy. Ten minutes here decides the result.

Write the important copy yourself. Let it build the structure. Your positioning is not something to delegate to a first draft.

Batch revisions. Collect ten changes and ask once rather than ten times.

Export a zip once you are happy. A local copy of a site you rely on costs nothing and is worth having.

Test on a phone before launch. Every time, without exception.

Ship at good enough. Version one exists to teach you what version two should be.

Proof: Why This Actually Works

The reason an AI website builder works here is that a small marketing site is a well-understood problem. The pages, the structure, and the conventions are near-universal, which makes it exactly the kind of work a model does well, and exactly the kind of work that was overpriced when it required a person to assemble it by hand.

Two patterns hold consistently. The first concerns inputs. Builds that start with an existing site plus reference examples produce something the owner keeps; builds that start with a paragraph of description produce something that gets rebuilt. The quality gap sits in the brief, not the tool.

The second concerns what happens after launch. Sites people can edit through a conversation get edited, and sites that require a ticket to an agency do not. Over a year, that difference in maintenance shows up more clearly than any difference in the original build.

What I take from it is that the constraint moved rather than disappeared. It used to be the cost of building. It is now the quality of what you bring to the brief, which is harder to outsource and considerably cheaper to fix.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can AI really build a whole website?

For a marketing site, yes. Five or six pages covering your company, your team, your services, with a contact or lead generation form, generated from a conversation and deployed to a live link in minutes.

What it will not build is a platform. User accounts, payment logic, a search engine over a real catalogue, or anything where the software is the product still needs a developer. The dividing line is whether the site describes your business or is your business.

What do I need to build a website with Dubb Agent?

Two things. Turn on the custom website builder skill in the skills section of the left navigation, and connect a Vercel account through the integrations page, which needs an API key you copy from Vercel and paste across.

Then open a chat, say you want to build a website, and answer the questionnaire. Keeping the integrations page open in a second tab makes the key step easier.

Can I use the free Vercel plan for my business website?

No. Vercel's free Hobby plan is restricted under their fair use guidelines to non-commercial, personal use only, and a company marketing site with a lead generation form is commercial use.

Vercel lists policy violations among the reasons an account or deployment gets paused, so the risk is your site going offline rather than an unexpected bill. Use the free tier to experiment, then move to a paid plan, currently from twenty dollars a month per seat, before the site does real work. Check current terms yourself, since plan rules change.

How much does an AI-built website cost?

Four components: AI credits for generation and revisions, a hosting plan, a domain, and your own time. For a small marketing site the total typically lands in the low hundreds of dollars a year.

Your time is the largest cost and the one that decides quality, since gathering references and writing the real copy is what separates a site that looks made for you from one that looks generated.

Can I edit the website after it is built?

Yes, through the same chat. Adding a page, rewriting copy, embedding a video, or changing a layout are all requests rather than tasks.

You can also export the entire site as a zip file at any point, then hand it to a developer, edit it in a desktop editor, or continue in another AI coding tool. That export is what keeps the build a starting point rather than a lock-in.

What should I check before launching the site?

Four things. That you have a privacy policy reflecting what the forms actually collect and where submissions land. That no copy, images, or distinctive design from reference sites ended up in your output. That it works on a phone and can be navigated without a mouse. And that every factual claim in the generated copy is true, since it publishes in your name.

All four are quick before launch and considerably more awkward afterwards.

Ship Version One

The sequence: turn on the custom website builder skill, connect Vercel, gather your references, open a chat and answer the questionnaire, read what comes back properly, sort out a privacy policy and a paid hosting plan, then point your domain at it.

What has changed is not that websites got easier to want. It is that the gap between wanting one and having one collapsed from months to an afternoon, which means the sensible strategy is no longer to specify everything up front. Ship something real, watch how people use it, and improve it with evidence.

Dubb Agent handles the build and the deployment, and the zip export means you are never stuck with it. If a single page is all you actually need, our older guide to making an instant video website covers a simpler route.

If you change one thing after reading this, spend ten minutes gathering references before you start. The brief is now the only expensive part, and it is the part nobody can do for you.