The cheapest number in the category
You have seen it. $2.99 a month, on every comparison page that ranks website builders, usually near the top.
It is real. It is also not a monthly price, and Hostinger's own card explains why in a sentence directly beneath it.
Hostinger Website Builder scores 7.3 under how we rate and sits in the also-considered list of our comparison.
What the Hostinger headline price buys
Forty eight months, paid upfront, at $2.99 a month.
The card says it: 48 months for $143.52 against a regular price of $575.52, renewing at $10.99 a month afterwards. So the advertised figure requires committing four years in advance, and there is no twelve month version of it.
That is why this comparison anchors Hostinger at its renewal rate, $131.88 for twelve months. It is the same treatment Private Internet Access gets in our VPN comparison, for the same reason: an introductory rate that ends is not the price of the product.
Priced that way, Hostinger is mid-table rather than cheapest. WordPress.com is $48 for a year and Framer is $120.
The part where Hostinger comes out ahead
Now the thing that surprised us.
Hostinger prints that renewal figure on the same card as the offer, in plain text, where anybody can see it before they buy. Wix, Squarespace and Webflow publish nothing of the kind.
That is a real difference in how a company treats the person reading its pricing page, and it points the criticism where it belongs. The misleading thing about that headline is not what Hostinger says about it. It is what comparison pages do with it when they lift the number and leave the sentence underneath behind.
One caveat on Hostinger's own arithmetic, because two figures on the card do not reconcile. The regular price of $575.52 over 48 months works out at $11.99 a month, which is the struck-through rate beside the offer, while the stated renewal is $10.99. Those are a list price and a renewal price rather than one number written twice, and only the second is what you will be charged.
Two more marks in its favour. There is no free plan, and Hostinger says so plainly rather than offering a subdomain demo and calling it free, which four rivals on this page do. And ecommerce carries no transaction fee from Hostinger at all, where Squarespace takes two percent at its entry tier.
What the year actually includes
The custom domain is free for the first year. So are the mailboxes. Both become separate costs from year two, on top of the renewal rate, and that pattern is the same at Wix and WordPress.com.
Above Premium sit Unlimited at $203.88 a year and Cloud Startup at $311.88, both quoted at their renewal rates and both advertised the same way, as multi-year prepayments.
There is a 14 day free trial and a 30 day money-back guarantee, which together are more protection than most of this category offers.
Where the ceiling is
The editor is good and unremarkable: drag-and-drop, an AI first draft, around three hundred templates. A beginner will get a site out of it, and somebody with a specific idea will run into the edge of it sooner than they would at Wix.
There is no code export. There is no third-party app market of the kind Wix, Webflow or WordPress carry. And the hosting is fine rather than fast, which is the honest way to put it next to Framer and Webflow.
This is a platform for one small site where the running cost matters more than the ceiling, and it is priced and built accordingly.
Who should buy it
The decision is about the four year commitment rather than about the builder.
If prepaying four years is genuinely fine with you, $143.52 for the whole term is very good money, and you get hosting, a domain, email and a builder on one bill. If it is not, compare $131.88 against the rest of this page and ignore the headline, at which point Hostinger is a reasonable mid-table option rather than a bargain.
Either way the site stays here, there is no export, and the ecosystem is thinner than the bigger platforms. Neither matters much for one small site, which is what this is for.
Prices, renewal rates, trial and guarantee terms on this page were read from the vendor website builder page on .
