A free AI-generated website is enough to validate an idea. It stops being enough when you start selling: code ownership, Law 11/2023 compliance, Core Web Vitals, and 21% VAT.
Because a free AI-generated website solves the mockup, not the business. If you need to validate an idea this week, use it. If you are selling, invoicing with VAT, relying on Google, or bound by Law 11/2023, you pay for code ownership, accessibility, measured performance, and someone who answers when something goes wrong.
You are right in your observation. You type three sentences into a generator, wait forty seconds, and out comes a website with a grid, decent typography, and a working form. Three years ago, that took two weeks of work. Today, it is free and takes less time than a coffee.
So let's start where almost no one starts: with the cases where you are absolutely right.
When AI is enough, put simply
We are not going to defend our craft by denying the obvious. There are projects where paying us would be a waste of money, and we will tell you so before you even write to us.
- Validating an idea before knowing if there is demand: one page, one form, two weeks of paid traffic
- An event landing page with an expiration date: it is published, fulfills its purpose, and is archived
- A personal portfolio you show in interviews that no one else visits
- The internal website for an association with fifteen members who only consult the calendar
- A prototype to show an investor what the product would look like, without real users behind it
The common pattern in those five cases: no one relies on the website being live in two years, no one is going to sue you for it, and no money is being processed through it. If your project is on that list, close this article and publish it today. We would rather lose a project than charge you for something you do not need.
The problem appears when the project leaves that list without anyone warning you.
The five frontiers where "free" stops being free
A generated website is a starting point, not an asset. The difference is noticeable in five very specific places, and all of them have a name, an article, and a date in Spain.
Frontier 1: ownership of what you have generated
Here is the data point you will not find in any website builder comparison. Article 5.1 of the Consolidated Text of the Intellectual Property Law states, literally, that "the natural person who creates any literary, artistic, or scientific work is considered the author." Natural person. A machine is not.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable. Regarding the part of your website that a model has generated entirely, without identifiable human creative intervention, there are likely no copyrights to assign or defend. If a competitor clones your entire website tomorrow, your legal position is much weaker than if you had commissioned it. It is not that you lose the website; it is that you have nothing to prevent someone else from copying it.
And there is a second part. If you hire someone—us or anyone else—Article 43.1 of the same text requires that the assignment of rights be express and limited to the modalities provided, with their time and territorial scope. A contract that does not name the assignment does not give it to you. A generator does not give it to you either, because there is no one to assign them.
We buy and sell ownership, not files.
Frontier 2: accessibility, which is now an obligation, not a recommendation
Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, has been applicable since June 28, 2025. In Spain, it is transposed by Law 11/2023, of May 8. It affects, among others, e-commerce services and banking services for consumers.
The exemption exists, and it is worth reading carefully: micro-enterprises that provide services are excluded, and micro-enterprise means fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or annual balance sheet not exceeding 2 million euros. Both size criteria simultaneously.
Translated to your case: if you sell online and have twelve people on the payroll, the law reaches you. An AI generator does not ask how many employees you have before writing the markup. It produces insufficient contrast, random tab order, form fields without an associated label, and custom components without an accessible role, and it does so with a confidence that does not correspond to anything.
It is not that AI is incapable of generating accessible code. It is that it does not know if you are obligated, and therefore it does not check it.
Frontier 3: performance, which does have public thresholds
Core Web Vitals are three metrics with fixed numbers, not opinions: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, and CLS under 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real loads, separating mobile and desktop.
A generated website usually passes the LCP without breaking a sweat, because it has almost no content. The CLS is another story: fonts loaded without space reservation, images without declared dimensions, and blocks that appear out of sync. And the INP degrades as soon as you add the third third-party script, which is exactly what any real business does in its second month.
What is verifiable is this: the thresholds are published and free to measure. What is not free is fixing them when the site is already in production with traffic.
Frontier 4: content, where Google has drawn an explicit line
Google Search's spam policies mention large-scale content abuse: pages generated primarily to manipulate ranking rather than to help people, and they expressly include the use of generative AI tools to produce many pages without adding value.
Notice the nuance, because half the sector explains it backward. Google does not penalize using AI. It penalizes generating volume without providing anything. The generator that builds your website also offers to fill twenty service pages in one click, and that is where the savings turn into risk.
The industry standard: Publishing 20 generated pages at once to "cover keywords" and expecting traffic. It is exactly what Google's spam policies describe as large-scale content abuse.
Our criteria: Publishing 4 pages that answer questions someone actually types, with our own data and cited sources. Fewer pages, each one defensible.
Frontier 5: the day it breaks
A generated website has no version control that you control, no staging environment, no change history, and no one to write to. When the generator changes its rendering engine—and it will—your site changes while you watch.
Here, the number that matters is not the price; it is the 36-month cost. And almost no one gives you that calculation.
The invisible invoice of "free"
Free usually means a subdomain, someone else's brand, and zero portability. Framer publishes a free plan at $0/month with a Framer domain and 1 GB of traffic; a custom domain starts with the Basic plan, $10/month billed annually (consulted 08-27-2026). Wix keeps its free plan on a wixsite.com subdomain, without a custom domain (consulted 08-27-2026, prices of the international version in dollars).
Two Spanish consequences that none of those pages explain to you:
| Concept | "Free" generated web | Commissioned project |
|---|---|---|
| Custom domain | Requires paid plan | Yours from day one, in your name |
| Invoice and deduction | Service invoiced in dollars from outside Spain | Spanish invoice with 21% VAT, deductible with a single entry |
| Source code | Does not leave the platform | Delivered with source files and documentation |
| Accessibility | Unaudited | Checked against criteria, with report |
| Transfer | Does not exist | Documented, so your team can continue without us |
A Spanish budget of €4,000 becomes €4,840 with VAT, and if you are a freelancer or a company with activity, you deduct that VAT. A $30/month subscription for three years is not deducted the same way, does not give you the code, and does not give you anyone on the phone. Estimation, with the reasoning visible: $30/month for 36 months is $1,080, not counting the domain, professional email, or the hours you spend maintaining it.
The hours you put in are also a cost. They simply do not appear on any invoice.
What you are buying exactly when you pay
You do not buy pages. You buy decisions made with judgment and sustained over time.
| # | Phase | What we do | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Listening | We start by asking, not proposing. | Interviews · Audit · Agreed brief |
| 02 | Defining | We agree on what winning means before moving a pixel. | Objectives · Scope · Success criteria |
| 03 | Mapping | Structure before aesthetics: which page exists and why. | Architecture · Flows · Content |
| 04 | Designing | Grid, typographic rhythm, and proportion, not templates. | Design system · Components · States |
| 05 | Building | Proprietary, accessible code, measured against public thresholds. | Repository · CI/CD · Testing |
| 06 | Launching and support | The launch is a checklist, not a leap of faith. | Handoff · Documentation · 30 days of support |
A generator gives you movement 04 and part of 05. The other four are provided by you, even if you do not know it. That is where the real savings are and where the real risk is, in the same sentence.
| Item | Figure | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Listening and defining | — | — |
| Mapping and designing | — | — |
| Building | — | — |
| Launching and support | — | — |
— = data being measured; we will publish it once we have our own sample.
The breakdown above is the short answer to why a commissioned website costs more than a generated one: because more than half the work happens before a pixel exists.
Our projects are charged for the decisions that organize the website, not for the pages seen at the end.
The decision criteria, in three checks
We will spare you the grandiose diagnosis. Write these three answers on a piece of paper.
Name what stops if the website goes down on a Tuesday morning. If nothing measurable stops, AI is enough. If orders, appointments, or quote requests stop, it is not enough.
Name what you take with you if you change platforms tomorrow. If the list is reduced to screenshots, you do not have an asset; you have a rental.
Name who answers if an accessibility or data protection requirement arrives. If that name is yours and you do not know where to start, the cost of learning already exceeds the budget.
The industry standard: Choosing by starting price and discovering the ceiling six months later, with traffic already on it and no code to migrate.
Our criteria: Choosing by what happens the day the project works: ownership, portability, and someone who responds in less than 24 working hours.
We accept a limited number of projects per year, with a fixed price per phase agreed upon before starting and no surprise hours. That means we say no to quite a few proposals. We reject some precisely by telling the person writing that they have enough with a generator.
Platform prices verified on 08-27-2026 on the official websites of Framer and Wix. They change frequently and vary by country and currency: check the price in euros and with Spanish VAT before deciding. Core Web Vitals thresholds and Law 11/2023 dates were verified on the same date.
AI has made the part that was always cheap free: drawing a page. The part that was never cheap still costs the same: deciding which page deserves to exist, who owns it, and what happens when it breaks.
The generator starts at zero euros; our brand website starts at €3,000 including VAT, and the difference between the two figures is not design: it is ownership, proven accessibility, and a phone that someone picks up. If nothing stopped when you did the three checks, stick with the generator and do not write to us yet. If orders stopped, send us your generated website URL and the sentence you wrote on the paper: we will answer you in less than 24 working hours with a two-paragraph diagnosis—what you migrate, what is discarded, and what phase would start first—before talking about budget.
Frequently asked questions
Can I start with an AI-made website and switch to a commissioned one later?
Yes, and it is a reasonable sequence: validate with the generated one and commission when there are numbers that justify the investment. Keep in mind that content is migrated but code is not, so budget the redesign as a new project, not as a continuation.
Does a website generated with AI rank on Google?
It can rank: Google does not penalize the use of AI, it penalizes generating many pages without providing value, according to its spam policies. What the generator does not give you is the content structure or the proprietary data that makes a page citable.
Does the accessibility law apply to me if I am a freelancer with a simple website?
If you provide services and are a micro-enterprise—fewer than 10 employees and up to 2 million euros in annual turnover or balance—Directive (EU) 2019/882 exempts service providers. Even so, an inaccessible website leaves you out of real clients, and no exemption fixes that.
Do you use AI to work?
Yes, in building and in repetitive tasks, with human review of every commit. What we do not delegate is the decision: the grid, the proportion, and the content criteria are ours, and we answer for them.
How long does a commissioned project take compared to the forty seconds of the generator?
Brand and website in 6 to 12 weeks, with a fixed price per phase agreed upon before starting. If your date is next week, we are not the right option and we will tell you in the first call.
Keep reading
- Bespoke website, template, no-code or AI: what you really get with each option
- I have an MVP made with AI that does not work: how much does it cost to rescue it
- How to do web design with Claude and other AIs without it being noticeable
- Who owns my website code: intellectual property and work-for-hire in Spain
- Total cost of a website at 36 months: the number that almost no one gives you
Transparency note. Some of our own data in this guide is still being measured on real projects, with a single method. We will publish it with its sample size and date range once the sample is large enough; until then, every figure you see carries its source and date of consultation.
Sources
- https://web.dev/articles/vitals — 'good' Core Web Vitals thresholds: LCP 2.5s, INP 200ms, CLS 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real loads, segmented mobile/desktop. Verified 08-27-2026.
- https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1996-8930 — TRLPI (RDLeg 1/1996): art. 5.1 'the natural person who creates any work is considered the author'; art. 43.1 express assignment limited to modalities, time, and territorial scope. Verified 08-27-2026.
- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/ES/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32019L0882 — Directive (EU) 2019/882 (European Accessibility Act): application from 06-28-2025; exemption for micro-enterprise service providers; definition of micro-enterprise (<10 workers and turnover or annual balance ≤ 2 M€); covered services, including e-commerce. Verified 08-27-2026.
- https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2023-11022 — Law 11/2023, of May 8: Spanish transposition standard for Title I, transitional period until 06-28-2025, obligations of service providers (chap. IV, arts. 13-15). Verified 08-27-2026.
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies — Google Search spam policies: definition of large-scale content abuse and express inclusion of the use of generative AI to produce many pages without providing value. Verified 08-27-2026.
- https://www.framer.com/pricing/ — free plan $0/month with Framer domain and 1 GB traffic; custom domain from the Basic plan at $10/month with annual billing. Verified 08-27-2026.
- https://www.wix.com/plans — free plan on wixsite.com subdomain, without custom domain; paid plans listed in dollars in the international version. Verified 08-27-2026.
Want to see this thinking applied to a real project?