How much an AI website builder costs, by business type

An AI website builder costs its monthly plan plus the credits each site uses, and the credits depend on what the site does. In 13 generations recorded on 21 October 2026, a complete website used 120 to 545 credits and a phone app 81 to 241, with shops, bookings and member areas at the top of the range.

Where the numbers come from

The table is read from OneCraft’s development project, not production: every generation in the sites job table joined to the credit ledger, on 21 October 2026. The rule is one row per business and job type, the latest completed run that went through the multi step pipeline. That gives 13 plans: 11 websites and 2 apps. The caveats matter more than the averages.

• n is 13, and under 10 for any single kind of business. No business type appears more than twice, so the table shows a range, not a price list.
• The briefs were written by the team to test features, so they are busier than many real small business sites. Several ask for a shop, bookings, a members area and an admin page in one go.
• One environment. All runs used the same development stack and model settings.
• The pipeline changed during the sample. The yoga studio runs on 17 October used an earlier version of the planner, which named fewer tables, and the two runs on 18 October stopped early when the test account ran out of credits.

What a credit pays for

On OneCraft, generation and chat bill model use at 1 credit per US cent. Builds of a website and exports of an app are free now; they cost 1 credit each when the table was measured. A new site costs 1 credit when it is created, which is not in the table. So the 267.9 credits of the kayak hire site are about $2.66 of model use and 2 builds.

What that buys is a sequence of agent runs. A plan names the pages, sections, shared components and capabilities. A foundation step writes the home page and a guide for the rest. Build steps write the other pages four at a time, each typechecked. A green build must pass a type check, ESLint, the production build and a layout check at 375, 768 and 1280 pixels. Then a fresh agent reviews the code and screenshots and returns up to 12 fixes, for at most two rounds. Each of those steps reads and writes code, and reading a growing codebase is where most of the model cost goes.

Cost by kind of business

Leaving out the two runs that stopped early, the nine complete websites cost 120.2 to 544.7 credits, with a median of 267.9 and a mean of 285.1. Per built page, they ranged from about 24 credits (the sourdough course and the first yoga studio) to about 39 (the running club and the ceramics shop).

Three patterns stand out.

1. Data heavy sites cost the most. The ceramics shop planned 19 tables for products, variants, bundles, reviews, orders, discount codes, loyalty points, delivery zones, gift cards and pre-orders. At 544.7 credits it cost nearly twice the median. The running club, with 15 tables for a feed, donations, an auction and a giveaway, came second.
2. Page count matters less than features. The agency site built 11 pages for 299.0 credits, close to the 10 page pottery site at 301.4. The sourdough course built 9 pages for 215.2, well under the 9 page kayak hire site at 267.9, which carries rentals, tours, guide hours and referrals.
3. Apps cost about the same as websites of similar scope. The 9 screen cleaning staff app with 9 tables used 241.2 credits; the 5 screen yoga app with 1 table used 81.2. App generation adds an export per check instead of a build, and the cleaning app needed 6.

Earlier, simpler runs

Before the pipeline, single pass runs on 14 and 15 October generated three and four page sites for 25.0 to 30.1 credits each, as the ledger shows. They skipped the plan, the steps and the review, and they built no database. If all you need is a few pages of information and a contact form, a site of that size is still the right comparison, and it costs a fraction of the busy sites above.

What it means against plan prices

OneCraft’s plans, as of October 2026, are Free at $0 with 100 credits a month, Starter at $8 with 500, Pro at $25 with 1,500 and Pro+ at $125 with 7,500. Read against the table, a busy website like the ones above uses more than a month of the free allowance, which is consistent with the two runs that stopped early on a nearly empty test account. Starter’s 500 credits cover one or two sites of the median size plus edits. Pro’s 1,500 cover several, and every plan includes a hosted site database.

Publishing, custom domains, payments and app builds need a paid plan either way, and the cost of running a site after it is generated is a separate question, covered in what an AI written website costs to run.

How to keep your own cost down

• Brief only what you need now. Every capability in the plan becomes tables, access rules, pages and an admin screen. A shop with discount codes, gift cards and pre-orders is three features more than a shop.
• Start from the pages that earn money. A one page site or a landing page can come first, and the rest can be added in chat.
• Use the database only when the site keeps data. The two cheapest complete runs planned 1 and 2 tables. Read what a Postgres schema is and what a database migration is to see what the agent sets up when it does.
• Restore instead of regenerating. Version history restores a known good version with one build, far cheaper than a new generation.
• Batch small edits sensibly. Editing with AI chat bills each turn; one clear change per message avoids paying for rolled back work.

For the steps the money buys, see the AI website generator page and how long AI website generation takes. For an app, the AI app builder page and the Expo build profiles explain what comes after generation, and pricing lists the current allowances.