What is the best free website builder?
Depends on the job: Carrd free for one-pagers (3 sites), Wix free for trying a full builder (with ads and a wix.com address), Square Online for a genuinely free store (you pay only card fees), and WordPress.com free for blogging. For anything representing a business, budget at least for a custom domain: free tiers with platform branding cost you credibility.
Free tiers split into two species: genuinely usable products and extended demos. The usable ones: Carrd free hosts three one-page sites with real polish (only a small badge and a carrd.co address), Square Online runs a complete store where the platform earns from payment processing instead of subscriptions, and WordPress.com free remains a real blogging home with a wordpress.com address. The extended demos: Wix and Strikingly free tiers work but advertise themselves on your site, which whispers "temporary" to every visitor.
The hidden cost of free is the address. yourname.wix.com or yoursite.carrd.co is fine for a hobby, a test, or a student project. For a business, the missing custom domain undercuts the entire purpose of the site: trust. Domains cost around $15 a year; the cheapest custom-domain setups in our lineup are Carrd Pro at $19 a year (total ~$34/yr) and WordPress.com Personal at $4 a month. That is the honest floor for a professional web presence, and it is very low.
One warning about free tiers as a strategy: the builders design them as funnels, and the upgrade pressure is engineered (storage caps, locked features, banner reminders). Decide what you need before you build, or the platform will decide for you mid-project. And know the exceptions where free is the permanent right answer: Square Online for a market stall’s store, Carrd for a personal link page, and any site whose job is an experiment.