Should I vibe code
Hosted website builder for portfolios, businesses, blogs, and stores
Nobody wants a website builder. They want to change the opening hours on a Sunday without texting you.
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Their verdict, the Basic price and the build-time estimate come from their entry, MIT-licensed. Checked 2026-08-04.
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Our verdict, the regret score and everything below it. Editorial and unsponsored — nobody can pay to be moved.
The honest answer
why the verdict is what it is
Two different projects hide behind this one word. Building a website is a solved, pleasant afternoon — Carrd's entry is the short version, and an agent will hand you something faster and better looking than most templates. Building Squarespace is not that. It is a hosting bill, a certificate renewal, an image pipeline, a form that has to reach a human inbox, and above all an editor that somebody who does not write code can use on a Sunday without asking you first. That last one is the actual purchase. You will get the site in a weekend and it will be genuinely good; what you will not finish is the part where you stop being the deploy button. Duda's entry covers the version where the sites belong to clients. This is the quieter one, where the site is yours or a friend's, it works fine for a year, and the enquiries stopped arriving in March.
What actually breaks
not "if". the specific failures.
- The contact form, on the day an email key rotates or a sending domain drifts out of alignment — nothing on the internet reports a missing enquiry, so you hear about it from the person who assumed you ignored them
- The certificate, ninety days after you set it up, because renewal was a cron job you meant to write
- The editor, the first time somebody pastes three paragraphs out of Word and the layout you were proud of folds in half
- Images, because a 12-megapixel phone photo uploaded at full size gets served at full size to somebody on 4G
- The plumbing nobody thinks about until it is missing: redirects from the old URLs, a sitemap, canonical tags, the Open Graph image that makes a shared link look like a real business
- The store, if there is one, at which point this stops being a website entry and becomes one of the checkout entries on this site
- The deploy, which works beautifully until the only person who can run it is on a plane and the price list is wrong
Is that you?
the verdict is a default, not a law
- The site is yours, mostly static, and you are the only person who will ever change it
- Content lives in files in the repo and publishing is one command anybody could run
- There is no checkout, no login, and no form a stranger fills in expecting a human reply
- You are building a site rather than a builder — the moment there is an editing UI for someone else, price the next five years
- The person who owns the site is not a developer and needs to change it weekly
- It is a client's site, or you are charging for it, which makes you a hosting company with no status page — see Duda
- There is a store, a booking flow, or anything that takes a card
- Nothing checks whether the contact form has actually delivered anything this month
If you build it anyway
the checklist, then the prompt that enforces it
- Persist form submissions to your own storage first, then attempt delivery. A mail failure should cost you a notification, never the enquiry.
- Run a synthetic check that submits the form on a schedule and alerts when the message stops arriving. Silent form failure is the most common way a small business site quietly stops working.
- Generate static output and keep the content in version control. Rollback becomes a revert, and the site outlives whichever framework you picked this year.
- Put the domain and DNS in an account that is not solely yours, and turn on auto-renew for both the domain and the certificate. Two-year-old sites die on renewal dates.
- Resize and re-encode on upload, cap stored dimensions, serve responsive sizes, and strip EXIF. Nobody editing their own site will remember to do any of that.
- Write the old-URL-to-new-URL redirect map before launch, not after the traffic drops.
- If a non-developer has to publish, the publish button lives in a browser and involves no terminal, no token and no you.
I am building my own website instead of paying for a hosted builder. Treat the boring infrastructure as the project and push back when I try to skip to the design.
1. Ask me first who will edit this site after launch. If the answer is anyone but
me, say plainly that an editor for a non-developer is the entire product I
would be replacing, and estimate it honestly before we continue.
2. Content lives in version-controlled files with a defined schema. Show me the
schema and the export path before any layout work.
3. Build the contact form second, in this order: write the submission to storage,
return success, then attempt delivery separately with retries. Never let a
mail failure discard an enquiry.
4. Add a scheduled synthetic submission that alerts me when a test message stops
arriving. Say plainly that a silently broken form is the failure mode here and
that nothing else will report it.
5. Then the deploy: one command, documented in the README, runnable by somebody
who is not me, with a rollback that is a revert.
6. Then TLS and the domain. Use a host that renews automatically, and write down
the renewal dates and who owns the registrar account.
7. Then images: resize on upload, cap dimensions, emit responsive sizes, strip
EXIF including GPS.
8. Then the plumbing — sitemap, canonical tags, Open Graph, and a redirect map
covering every URL the old site had.
9. Refuse to build a store, a booking flow or any card handling here. If I ask,
tell me it is a different project with a different risk profile and point me
at hosted checkout.
10. Out of scope on purpose: a visual page editor, multi-site management,
template marketplaces, analytics beyond a privacy-preserving counter.
11. Finish by telling me what $25 a month buys that this does not: renewals
nobody has to remember, an editor the owner can actually use, and an inbox
with somebody else's on-call rota behind it.That one keeps you out of trouble. For the prompt that actually builds it, canivibecodeit.com has one.
their build prompt ↗Or don’t build it
the boring option, and the way back out
The site belongs to a business that is not primarily you, or the person updating it does not write code. $25 a month buys certificate renewals nobody has to remember, an editor a shop owner can operate on a Sunday, an image pipeline that is already correct, and a contact form with somebody else's uptime behind it. Build your own while the site is yours and static; buy it the moment the answer to "who edits this?" is a person who would otherwise text you.
$25/mo is cheaper than your weekend.
Keep every page as Markdown with its images beside it in the repo, and keep form submissions in a table you can dump to CSV. That combination imports into anything, including Squarespace if you give up, and it means the content is portable even when the framework is not. Hold the registrar account separately from the hosting so that moving the site is a DNS change rather than a negotiation.
The incumbent open-source CMS, and still the shortest path to a site somebody else can edit.
Open-source visual site builder aimed squarely at the drag-and-drop half of what Squarespace sells.
Questions
Carrd is SHIP IT here and Squarespace is not. What is the difference?
Scope, and who edits it. Carrd is one page you own and rarely change, which is a file and a deploy. Squarespace is sections, a blog, images, forms, often a store, and an owner who is not you. Each of those adds either a maintenance obligation or a person who depends on your code without ever having chosen it.
What actually goes wrong most often on a self-built business site?
The contact form stops delivering. Not dramatically — a key rotates, a DNS record changes, a provider tightens authentication, and messages start disappearing. There is no error page, no alert and no complaint, because the person who filled the form assumes you read it and chose not to reply. Write submissions to storage before you attempt to send them, and test delivery on a schedule.
Is a static site really enough for a small business?
For the pages, almost always. What it does not give you is an editor, and that is usually the thing being bought. A git-backed CMS closes part of the gap and a single form endpoint closes most of the rest, but be honest about whether the owner will ever use it — an editor nobody can operate means every change routes through you, forever.
Every week, someone ships something they shouldn’t have.
New verdicts, the worst thing that landed in the trap, and the occasional incident report. No other email, ever.
last reviewed 2026-08-04 · verdict is editorial and unsponsored · shared entry data from canivibecodeit under MIT · not legal advice