Honest answers.

The build is free. Your site goes live on a Hands Free Sites address so you can click around every page.

To keep it live for good, it's $10–12/mo — hosting, SSL, and the CDN, all handled. When you're ready to publish it for good (badge gone, found on Google, free branded email, your own domain connected), that's a one-time $99.

$10/mo base hosting plus a small usage charge (typically $1–2/mo, often pennies), itemized on your invoice — most sites land at $10–12/mo total.

It keeps your site up and maintained — hosting, SSL, the global CDN, uptime monitoring, and support. The $10–12 is a $10/mo base plus AWS bandwidth and storage billed on top at AWS's price. We don't mark it up — usually a dollar or two a month, so most sites land at $10–12/mo total.

If we ever raise it, you'll get 30 days notice. We don't grandfather customers into rotting plans — we just keep the price right.

The build is free, so there's nothing to refund there. Monthly plans are cancel-anytime — billing stops the moment you cancel, and you can download a full copy of your site. For the one-time $99 Branded step, see our refund policy. You keep your files either way.

Annual contracts are how the website industry locks small businesses into rotting products. We bill monthly so we have to keep earning your $10–12 each month. If we stop earning it, you walk.

Business name. What you do. Who you serve. Where you are. Roughly a hundred words of description. That's the whole form — if you can describe your business to a stranger at a barbecue, you have everything you need.

Five minutes is the median. Sometimes faster, occasionally 10. You'll get an email when it's ready — go grab a coffee.

Reply with what's off (“the colors are too dark”, “talk more about catering”, “I never said ‘family-owned’”) and we re-do it.

The build is free, so there's no risk in walking every page first.

No. We design from scratch — palette, type, layout, imagery, copy. Two different bakeries will get two visually different sites. That's the whole reason this works.

Yes — paste it in the description box and we build the site around the words you wrote. If you don't have copy yet, we write it from your description.

Just ask. “Redesign the homepage” or “I want a darker mood” — every site gets 5 free AI changes to start, then it's $1 per change.

Not at all. We create relevant imagery for your site — abstract, contextual, never weird. You can swap in your own photos later from the dashboard, anytime, free.

Amazon Web Services — the same infrastructure Netflix, Pinterest, and Airbnb use. Specifically: S3 for files, CloudFront for the global CDN, Route 53 for DNS.

Yes. Sub-100ms response time for most US visitors thanks to the CloudFront CDN. Built mobile-first, which means it's actually fast on a 4G phone, not just on your laptop.

Yes — automatic, included, auto-renewing. You'll never see a “your connection is not secure” warning.

Yes. Sitemap auto-generated on every change. Server-rendered HTML (not a JavaScript blob). Open Graph and meta tags filled in. Submitted to Google Search Console is on you, but everything else is wired up.

Yes. Paste your Measurement ID (G-XXXXXX) or Meta Pixel ID into the dashboard. It's live on every page within a minute. No premium plan, no extra fee.

Not to build it — your free site goes live on a Hands Free Sites address right away. Going Branded is a one-time $99, and connecting your own domain is part of that step. When you're ready you have three options for the domain:

1. Bring yours. Free. We walk you through pointing the DNS at us.
2. Buy through us. At cost plus the card-processing fee, no markup. WHOIS in your name.
3. Buy from another registrar yourself. We'll happily wire it up.

Yes. After you pay, the dashboard walks you through the 3-step DNS swap. Most registrars: copy our two nameservers into your registrar's control panel, done. Propagation is usually under an hour, occasionally up to 24h.

You do. The WHOIS record shows your name (or your business name) — you can verify at whois.com. Transferring out is one click in your dashboard; AWS auto-approves within 5 days. We never block, never delay.

Free branded email is included with Branded, but it's forwarding — receive-only. Mail to you@yourdomain lands in the inbox you already use; you can't send out from your domain with it.

The only email we set up free is that forwarding. For a full mailbox you also send from, you need a real mailbox at your domain, which is a paid plan from an email provider. Proton (Mail Plus for one inbox, or Business for a team) is the paid plan we use ourselves: set up real email with Proton →. Zoho Mail is a paid alternative if you'd rather use them.

Proton and Zoho are independent companies, not part of your Hands Free Sites plan. If you sign up for Proton through this link, we may receive Proton account credit at no extra cost to you.

It's a switch, not an add-on: a domain routes mail to one place (its MX record), so turning on Zoho or Proton replaces our free forwarding — you can't run both at once. It's a one-time DNS change, and each provider has a setup wizard.

In your dashboard there's a text box that says “What would you like to change?” Type “make the headline shorter” or “swap to a navy palette” or “the hours on the about page are wrong.” We make the change and show you a preview.

Every site gets 5 free AI changes to start, then it's $1 per change. Either way, preview first, approve, live in a minute.

Type what you want (“Add a Services page covering kitchen remodels, bathroom remodels, and decks”) and it appears in your nav. A brand-new page counts as an AI change (it uses one of your free changes, or $1 after that).

Yes. One click in your dashboard (Account → Billing) and your card stops getting charged.

Your site stays live for 5 days after you cancel — a grace period where you can reactivate with one click if you change your mind, or download a zip of all your files. After 5 days it's permanently removed from our hosting (it isn't kept or archived). Your files are exportable anytime and your domain stays yours. See Cancelling, Refunds & Keeping Your Site for the full story.

We monitor 24/7 and page someone. Targeted 99.9% uptime — the actual AWS infrastructure underneath us is more like 99.99%, but we add a buffer for our own deploys and rare misconfigurations. If your site is down longer than an hour, we refund a month of hosting.

Yes. Download a zip from your dashboard. It's the actual HTML/CSS/JS/images — no proprietary format. Drop it on any host (Netlify, Vercel, S3, even your own server). The blog and shop addons are a little more involved if you're moving those too — email us, we'll help.

Yes — email hello@handsfreesites.com. We reply within one business day (usually much faster). No chatbots, no “tier 1” deflection, no escalation queue.

Monday–Friday, 9 AM – 5 PM Central. Weekend emails get answered Monday morning. We're a small team — your email reaches a real person, not a triage system.

Put URGENT in the subject. We watch for it. Site outage, payment problem, lost access — those get a same-day response even on weekends.

If a potential customer would google your business and expect to find a website, yes. We've built sites for: alpaca breeders, dog-treat bakers, mobile car detailers, voice-over coaches, doula collectives, model-train shops, and a guy who builds custom backyard pizza ovens.

What this doesn't work for: complex web apps, multi-vendor marketplaces, anything requiring user logins beyond a contact form. If you need that, you don't want us.

Half our customers are launching their first website ever. It works just as well from “we just opened” as it does from “we've been here 30 years.” Bring whatever you have — even a one-line business plan is enough to get a free build going.

Yes — that's literally who we built this for. Type a paragraph about your business (probably the same thing you wrote in your FB “About” section), and 5 minutes later you have a real website you own, with a real domain, that doesn't disappear if Meta changes its algorithm.

Yes. We import your blog posts (your free AI changes cover them first, then $0.25 per post). Photos and gallery items you can drop in. Domain transfers via DNS — your existing domain points to us instead of them, no transfer fees, no waiting.

English ships day one. Spanish, Portuguese, French, German — usually doable on request. Just mention it during the preview phase. We don't currently support right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew) automatically.