The Free Website Guys Review: What It Really Costs

The Free Website Guys, at thefreewebsiteguys.com, will build you a WordPress website for nothing, in exchange for buying your hosting through their link. That is the whole arrangement, they say so plainly on their own site, and it is not a scam. It is also not free in the way most people read the word. This is what the model actually is, what the build includes, what the reviews say when you read past the star rating, and what the site costs you in year two.

Where we stand before you read this

We should get this out of the way first, because you would work it out yourself by the end. SiteAim sells WordPress maintenance. The Free Website Guys build sites and hand them over without maintenance. Their former clients are, quite obviously, people we would like to hear from.

So read this the way you would read any review written by somebody with a stake in it. Everything factual here is sourced, and most of it comes from their own website, which is more candid about the arrangement than most agencies are about anything. Where we could not verify a number ourselves, we say so. Where the service is good, we say that too, because it mostly is.

Who they are

They are a web design and development firm based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. According to their Clutch profile they were founded in 2020, employ between 10 and 49 people, and charge $25 to $49 an hour for the paid work they do. They build on WordPress, and they work almost entirely with small businesses.

The free-website programme is the thing they are known for. You apply, and if they accept you they build you a simple WordPress site at no charge. Their own How It Works page says they accept around 30 per cent of applicants and review most applications within 48 to 72 hours.

How the business model works

This is the part people search for, and to their credit it takes about thirty seconds to find on their own site rather than thirty minutes of digging.

To put a WordPress site online you need hosting. They ask you to buy that hosting through their affiliate link, with either Bluehost or IONOS, on a plan of at least one year. The hosting company pays them a commission for the referral. You do not pay a penny more than the hosting would have cost you anyway, and you never give them a card number.

In their words, from their FAQ: "We cover our website development costs by asking you to sign up for web hosting with either Bluehost or IONOS, both great options, using our affiliate link. When you use our link, we get a commission. This commission is paid to us by the web hosting company. You pay nothing extra yourself."

There is a second half to the model that they are equally open about. The free build is a way of meeting people who will later pay for something bigger. They say 10 to 20 per cent of free-website clients go on to hire them for paid projects: more complex sites, apps, ongoing development. The free site is the introduction, not the product.

None of that is dishonest. It is an affiliate business, disclosed as an affiliate business, and it is a much better deal for a small business than most of what gets sold to them. The thing worth understanding is where the money is, because that is what shapes everything else about the arrangement.

What the free build actually includes

They describe it as 7 to 10 hours of developer time, and they say most sites are finished within 15 to 20 days. Here is what is in and out, taken from their own description of the service:

That is a genuinely reasonable specification for a small business brochure site, and for nothing it is hard to argue with. They are also honest about the limits: they say outright that they do not build highly complicated websites with lots of advanced functionality as part of the free offer.

The last row of that table is the one this article is really about, and we will come back to it.

What it costs, honestly

Three numbers matter, and only the first one gets advertised.

Year one: the advertised price

Their FAQ describes hosting as "just a few dollars a month" and says you will get a full professional website "for less than $50". That is achievable on a promotional twelve-month rate. It is not a fixed figure: what you pay depends on which host, which plan and how many years you commit to upfront.

Year two: what the hosting renews at

This is the number nobody plans for. Introductory hosting pricing is promotional for the first term only. Bluehost's entry plans advertise from roughly $2.95 to $4.99 a month depending on term length and renew at something like $8.99 to $11.99, so a two to three-fold increase when the term rolls over. That is not specific to this arrangement, it is how shared hosting is sold everywhere, and we wrote about it at length in our hosting comparison. But it does mean the true cost of a "free" website is the renewal price of a hosting plan you are now on, for as long as the site exists.

The theme, if you want one

They offer the option of a paid premium template and usually recommend Divi. It is genuinely optional and they say so; free WordPress themes are also on the table.

So the honest summary on price: a professional small business website for the cost of hosting is a good deal in year one, and a normal deal after that. What you are really signing up to is a hosting relationship, and the agency's income depends on you starting it rather than on you being happy with it in month eighteen.

What the reviews say

They are very good, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The Clutch figures we checked ourselves on 13 August 2026. The others are as reported and move constantly. Clutch verifies its reviews, which makes 1,988 of them at 4.9 a genuinely difficult thing to fake, and the volume across platforms is far too high to be manufactured. Whatever else is true, a great many people have had a good experience.

Where the low ratings cluster

Read the low ratings and a consistent set of themes shows up. They are a small minority, and every agency has them, but they cluster:

• Communication going quiet, particularly around handover, with several reviewers describing chasing over multiple emails.
• Delays against the stated 15 to 20 day timeline.
• Surprise at the hosting requirement, from people who understood "free" to mean no spending at all.
• Limits on what can be edited afterwards, from clients who expected more freedom than a customised template gives them.

That last one is the most instructive, and it is not really a complaint about the agency. It is what happens when somebody who has never used WordPress is handed a finished WordPress site and a video.

So is it a scam?

No. It is the question people most often go looking for an answer to, and searches like "thefreewebsiteguys scam" or "is The Free Website Guys legit" turn up threads of people hunting for the catch. The reason is structural rather than sinister: people have been trained by decades of the internet to assume that "free website" means a trap, and when they go looking for the catch they find an affiliate link and think they have caught somebody out.

They have not. The affiliate arrangement is the catch, it is disclosed on their own FAQ page in plain language, no money changes hands between you and them, and both hosts carry a 30-day money-back guarantee. Compare that with the genuinely predatory end of this market, where "free" means a subscription you cannot cancel, a site you do not own, or a domain registered in somebody else's name.

The fair criticism is not that it is a scam. It is that "free" describes the build and not the outcome, and the part that costs money is the part that never ends.

What happens after they hand it over

Here is the gap, and it is not hidden either. Their own material says the handover comes with instructions so that you "won't ever need to hire a website developer" to make updates or changes.

What the handover video does not cover

The video is true about content. You can edit your own text and swap your own images, and they teach you how. It is not true about the other kind of updates, and the two get conflated constantly:

• WordPress core updates land several times a year, and major versions break things.
• Plugin and theme updates arrive weekly across the handful of plugins they installed. Applying them blind is how sites break; not applying them is how sites get hacked.
• PHP version changes get forced by your host on their schedule, not yours. A site built in 2026 will meet this within a couple of years.
• Security is not a plugin you install once. Most WordPress compromises come through a known vulnerability in an out-of-date plugin, months after a fix was published.
• Backups being configured is not the same as backups being checked, and an untested backup is a guess.
• Nobody is watching. If the site goes down on a Saturday, it is down until you notice.

None of this is a criticism of the build. It is the difference between a project and a service. They finish; the site keeps going. Everything on that list is work that arrives after the last person with a commercial interest in your site has moved on.

The pattern we see, and the reason this article exists, is a site that was fine for eight months and then was not: a fatal error after an update, a white screen, a hacked homepage, a contact form that quietly stopped delivering months before anybody noticed. By then the goodwill of the free build has expired along with everything else.

Who it is genuinely right for

Being fair about this matters more than being negative about it.

Go for it if you need a straightforward brochure site, you have no budget, you are comfortable that you will be responsible for it afterwards, and you were going to buy hosting anyway. Ten hours of professional design work for the cost of a hosting plan is a good trade and there is no catch beyond the one described above.

Think harder if your site takes bookings or payments, if downtime costs you money, if you have never administered a WordPress site before, or if you know from experience that you will not be logging in to apply updates. In those cases the free build is fine, and the year after it is the problem.

Look elsewhere if you need anything complex. They say themselves that the free programme is not for that, and you would be paying agency rates for it either way.

What we would do, if it were us

If you have a site from The Free Website Guys and it is running, do not move it and do not rebuild it. There is nothing wrong with it. What it needs is somebody to take responsibility for the parts nobody handed over.

That is our job. WordPress maintenance is the whole of what we do, and it starts at £35 a month: core, plugin and theme updates rehearsed on a staging copy before they touch the live site, a full backup every 24 hours kept for 50 days, monitoring around the clock rather than in office hours, and an engineer who answers when something breaks. There is no contract and nothing to give notice on.

You do not have to move hosting to do this. That matters here specifically, because you have just paid Bluehost or IONOS for a year upfront and it would be absurd to write that off. We will look after the site exactly where it is. When the renewal does come around, and the price roughly triples, that is the moment to have the conversation about whether to move it, and managed hosting is included in our plans anyway, so the two bills often become cheaper than the one.

If something is already broken rather than merely unattended, that is a one-off job and not a plan you have to join. And if you would rather do it yourself, genuinely, the honest version of that is: put the updates in your diary monthly, test them somewhere that is not your live site, and check a backup actually restores before you need it.

The short version

• Founded 2020, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 10 to 49 staff, building on WordPress.
• The model is an affiliate arrangement with Bluehost and IONOS, disclosed openly, with the commission paid by the host rather than by you.
• You commit to at least a year of hosting. That is the real price of entry.
• The build is 7 to 10 hours of developer time on a customised template, delivered in about 15 to 20 days.
• Reviews are genuinely excellent: 4.9 on Clutch across 1,988 verified reviews, 4.8 on Trustpilot across roughly 4,000.
• It is not a scam. The catch is published on their own FAQ page.
• It ends at handover. Updates, security, PHP versions, monitoring and anything that breaks afterwards are yours.
• Year two is the number to plan for, on the hosting renewal rather than on anything the agency charges.

Frequently asked questions