How free is a free website builder? Six Iranian price lists

Six price lists, same afternoon

• webzi.ir gives fourteen days. The cheapest non-store plan runs 3,432,000 toman a year, and removing the builder's own copyright line is itself listed as a paid feature.
• webazto.ir also fourteen days. Base plan 4,350,000 toman a year, professional 7,500,000 for the first year.
• portal.ir seven days, cheapest package 3,000,000 toman a year.
• see5.net answers its own FAQ by saying the free version lasts seven days and calling it Decision Time. Base bundle 6,990,000 toman.
• sitesazz.ir starts at 790,000 toman a month, with one time plans between 12.8 and 35 million toman. Free here means hosting and a domain for the first year.
• sitedar.com talks about building a free site in its own body copy while its plans open at 2 million toman.

Prices were read on one day and will move, the way every price in Iran moves. The pattern underneath them will not.

Three different things all called free

When a sales page uses the word, it is almost always one of these, and none of them is a free website:

• A trial of seven or fourteen days, after which the site goes dark.
• One item bundled into a paid plan: a first year .ir domain, an SSL certificate, three months of support.
• Free to build and preview, paid to publish. This one costs the most time, because you only find out at the end.

International services that genuinely do run permanent free tiers charge somewhere else instead. Their subdomain stays in your address, ads appear, payment gateways are unavailable, and exporting your content is limited or impossible. For an Iranian business there is a further practical wall that has nothing to do with quality: paying for a subscription with an Iranian card.

What a trial never shows you

Fourteen days is enough to judge the editor and nothing else. The two things that actually decide whether you regret the choice only surface later:

• How the platform behaves when your catalogue grows past a few hundred items, which is where page speed and admin speed usually break.
• What support looks like in month eight, once you are no longer a prospect.

The number nobody puts on the pricing page

The real cost of a website builder is not the annual fee. It is that in year three you cannot pick the site up and take it with you.

A site built on WordPress or any open source content system is a folder of files and a database. Both can be handed over and stood up somewhere else. We do this regularly, and how a WordPress site gets moved are written up separately. A site built on a proprietary builder has no folder and no database to hand over. What you get, at best, is an export of products or posts with no template, no structure and usually no URLs.

So today's decision to save a few hundred thousand toman is settled three years later at the price of a rebuild. If you have earned any Google rankings by then, the changed URLs cost you those too.

When a builder is the right answer

We build custom websites for a living and we still say a builder suits some people. If all four of these sentences describe you, use one and spend the difference elsewhere:

• You want a page, not a website.
• Search is not your channel. Customers arrive from Instagram or from word of mouth.
• Nobody on your team has time to learn WordPress.
• Rebuilding from scratch next year would cost you nothing important.

Break any one of those and the arithmetic changes, especially the second. A site meant to earn customers from search needs its URL structure, its speed and its schema to be reachable, and on most builders those three are not yours to touch.

Set against a real WordPress bill

Put the numbers side by side. The cheapest annual plan above was 3 million toman. A simple WordPress site on shared hosting with a registered domain costs less than that per year. What gets added is the one time build, and that is where the difference lives. The full breakdown sits in what a website actually costs.

One thing comparisons usually miss: a builder's fee includes the server, the updates and the security patching. Build a WordPress site and abandon it, and you pay for that next year in a hack or a slowdown. The fair comparison is a builder against WordPress plus maintenance, not against WordPress alone.

Three questions before you sign up

All three can be asked in a support ticket, all three deserve a written answer, and none of them becomes obvious during a trial:

• If I stop paying, what happens to my content and my URLs, and what exactly can I export?
• Can I connect my own domain, or only your subdomain? If I leave later, who holds the domain?
• Do I get access to robots.txt, the canonical tag and the page schema?

Hardly anyone asks the third, and it is precisely the one that caps how fast and how findable the site can ever become. A no is fine. Just understand that your site will then grow exactly as far as that control panel permits.

Common questions

Is there a permanently free website builder?

Among the Iranian services that rank for the phrase, we found none. International platforms do offer free tiers, with their subdomain, their ads and no payment gateway as part of the deal.

What about building a free site with Google?

That usually means Google Sites, which really is free. It works well for a simple informational page and poorly for a shop or anything that has to be found in search.

Which Iranian website builder is best?

The sharper question is which one lets you attach your own domain and hands your content back when you leave. Between two plans at a similar price, the one that answers both in writing carries less risk.

Are website builders bad for SEO?

Being a builder is not the problem. Restricted access is. If you cannot change URL structure, canonical tags or schema, the panel decides the ceiling on your SEO work, not you.