What "free" means here, and what it actually costs
Start with the question every buyer should ask: if the build is free, where does the money come from, and what will this cost me a year from now?
Here is the whole arrangement. We design and build your website or landing page at no charge. In return — a condition, not a suggestion — you host it with us. Hosting is free for three months, then AED 50 per month. The domain you pay for yourself: it is registered in your name, you own it, and it is not part of the offer.
That is the entire deal: no second invoice, no free domain — a domain is not ours to give away. One recurring cost, AED 50 a month, from month four.
Free design and build. Your domain, bought and owned by you. Our hosting, free for three months and AED 50 a month after that.
The first year in numbers
Three months free, then nine at AED 50: AED 450 of hosting in year one. A .com domain costs roughly AED 40 to 60 a year from a registrar, and that price moves, so check it yourself. First-year cash cost is therefore about AED 490 to 510; from year two, AED 600 plus renewal.
AED 50 a month is not nothing, but it is a small recurring cost instead of a large one, and it pays for something specific: a site somebody else keeps online. The full terms sit on our offers page.
The three-year comparison, honestly
The useful comparison is not "free versus a large invoice" but what you spend over the life of the site, your own hours included. Most small businesses choose between three routes: someone builds it, you build it on a subscription platform, or you pay a freelancer.
The figures below are illustrative — typical list prices at the time of writing, rounded. They vary by plan and country, and a freelancer's quote could easily be half or double. Check current pricing before you decide, ours included.
| Route | Build | Hosting or subscription, 3 years | Domain, 3 years | Indicative 3-year total | The real risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built by us | AED 0 | AED 1,650 — free for 3 months, then AED 50 a month | About AED 120–180, paid by you | About AED 1,770–1,830 | You host with us, so moving away later means moving the site. |
| Single-page builder (Carrd and similar) | AED 0, plus your time | Roughly AED 210–540 for a paid single-page plan | About AED 120–180 | About AED 330–720 | One page, limited structure, and you are the designer. |
| Full site builder (Squarespace, Wix and similar) | AED 0, plus 15–40 hours of your time | Roughly AED 1,050–2,700 for a paid plan | About AED 120–180 | About AED 1,170–2,880 | You rent the platform. Stop paying and the site disappears. |
| Cheap freelancer | AED 1,500–6,000 | AED 0–1,800, where hosting is billed separately at all | About AED 120–180 | About AED 1,620–7,800 | Continuity. When they stop replying, the credentials go with them. |
Two things worth saying out loud. The cheapest route is the single-page builder, and for one page with a form on it that is a legitimate choice: if your time is free, Carrd will cost less than we will. Ours is not the smallest number here — it is the most predictable, and the only one where somebody else is on the hook when the form breaks on a Friday night.
The cost the table cannot show
Subscription builders are priced as though your time were free. Writing the words, fighting a template, resizing images, discovering the mobile view looks nothing like the desktop preview: put a value on those evenings and the gap between DIY and having it built is thinner than the price suggests. Freelancers have the opposite problem: priced properly, then the relationship ends.
Why we can build it for nothing
We are not being generous. In an agency the margin sits in the build; with us it sits in the hosting, which is why we give the build away and ask you to host with us. Our team already builds web applications, so a landing page is a day or two of work for people we employ anyway. The cost to us is low; the value is a customer who stays.
There is a second reason, less flattering to us. Nobody buys a website from a company they have never heard of, and quoting a build fee to every stranger would cost more in chasing that first yes than the build is worth. Free removes the risk from your side; hosting puts it back on ours — if the site is slow, broken or ignored, you leave in month four and we have spent the engineering for nothing.
Sometimes a free build grows into something bigger — an internal tool, an automation, a product — which tends to happen when a relationship starts with delivered work rather than a proposal. What the offer does not include, because implying otherwise would be dishonest: the domain, the words, the photographs, logo design, unlimited revisions, or anyone to promote the site after launch. We design and build it; everything else is yours to bring, or separate work, and we will say which.
We are buying the first few months of a working relationship with a couple of days of engineering time. It is a trade, not a favour, and you should know its terms before you say yes.
What a landing page actually needs to convert
"Convert" is a cold word for "somebody does the thing you wanted". Most pages fail for boring, fixable reasons.
One offer, one action
A landing page exists to make a single action obvious. The common failure is four calls to action — book a call, download the brochure, follow us, read the blog — and no signal about which matters. Choose one. Every section either supports it or answers an objection; anything else is decoration.
The first screen has one job
Say what you sell and who it is for, in the first line, without cleverness. "Accounting for contractors who hate paperwork" beats "Empowering your financial future", because the second could belong to anyone and so belongs to no one. Then one sentence on what changes for the customer, then one piece of proof: a real screenshot, a real photograph, a client logo you have permission to use. If you have no proof yet, say what you will do and by when. Never invent any.
Speed is a design decision, not a later fix
Every heavy element is paid for by the person on a mid-range phone. A lighter hero image and CSS animation will feel faster than a cleverer page that weighs more — our own home page hero is plain CSS for that reason. Aim for text on screen within a second over 4G, the largest image under roughly 200KB, and 2.5 seconds to the largest visible element as the line not to cross. Those are targets, not promises.
Mobile is the default, not the fallback
Design the narrow screen first: tap targets of at least 44 pixels, no interaction that depends on hovering, the right keyboard for email and phone fields, a phone number that dials when tapped, nothing below 16 pixels. Then test on a real phone, not a resized browser window: that is where layout bugs hide.
A form nobody answers is worse than no form
Ask for as little as you can: a name, one way to reach them, one open field. Every extra field costs submissions, and demanding a budget on first contact costs more than it is worth. Decide what happens after somebody submits before you launch — if the notification lands in an inbox nobody opens, the page is decoration. One person, one inbox, a reply inside a working day.
When a free build is the wrong choice
We turn work down, and this is one we turn down regularly. If you recognise yourself below, a free landing page is not what you need — saying so early saves us both a wasted month.
Real e-commerce
A shop is not a page. Product variants, stock, tax, shipping rates, returns and refunds are software with genuine failure modes, each a project in its own right. You want a platform built for it, not a page with a checkout bolted on.
Heavy integrations
Booking with live availability, your CRM or finance system, single sign-on, payments, multi-language content: each is defined engineering with its own testing and support burden — reasonable in a paid project, not in a free build with no budget for the week a third-party API changes its mind.
You already have a site and a design system
If your current site works and is simply out of date in places, starting again throws away the parts that were fine. You need maintenance and targeted improvement on the existing codebase, which is paid web development work we will quote for.
You need a publishing platform, not a page
If several people must publish and edit pages every week, you need a content management system with roles and review. A landing page is not that, and pretending otherwise produces a support queue.
You cannot give feedback on a schedule
The build is free, so our only cost control is time. When a project takes eight weeks because comments arrive in dribs and drabs and nobody owns the decision, the offer stops working. We would rather decline.
What you need to bring
The build is free. These are not, and they are not optional. Every stalled free project came to rest on one.
- The domain. Buy it in your own name and keep the registrar login. Tell us where it lives and we will tell you what to point at us.
- The words. What you sell, who buys it, what it costs, why somebody picks you over the alternative. We do not write your copy — nobody outside your business can do that well.
- Images you have the right to use. Photographs of real work, real premises, real people beat stock every time, and phone photographs are fine. If you have nothing, we will use licensed placeholders.
- One decision maker. Not a committee. Pick the person who can approve a headline without consulting three colleagues, then let them approve it.
- Feedback in one round. Read the page, collect the comments, send them together. Ten small messages over three weeks is the biggest cause of slow free builds.
- An inbox somebody checks. Name the address enquiries go to before launch, not after the first submission vanishes.
How to get one
Email info@wethinkdigital.solutions with four things: what you sell, who buys it, whether you already have a domain, and one site you like and why. That is enough for us to say whether this is a fit, and what we would build. Prefer a form? Use the contact page. Want to see how we think first? Read a few of our engineering notes.
If it is a fit, we design and build the site at no charge, you keep the domain you bought, hosting is free for three months, and after that it is AED 50 a month. If it is not, we will tell you what you actually need, even when that is a platform we do not sell. Either answer beats a sales call.