Building a free website: the truth nobody tells you

The short answer

No, you cannot build a real website that is 100 % free. Two technical reasons make it impossible:

1. A domain name costs money. yourname.com or yourname.co.uk costs a registrar money, every single year. No custom domain, no website that truly belongs to you.

2. Hosting costs someone money. A website has to live somewhere, on a server that stays on day and night. That server draws electricity, takes up space and needs maintenance. Somebody pays that bill. If it is not you, it is the host — and they get their money back another way.

Every « free » offer you see in ads works around those two constraints with trade-offs nobody spells out. Let us look at them.

And since we are about to review those trade-offs, let us be upfront: Leopar has a free plan too, and it obeys exactly the same physical constraints as everyone else's. The difference is that we tell you precisely what it includes, what it does not, and why. See what Leopar's free plan does.

Why a domain name cannot be free

A domain name is your address on the internet — say martin-bakery.com. That address belongs to nobody by default. To reserve it in your name you go through a registrar (an accredited organisation), which itself pays a yearly fee to the registry that runs the extension (Verisign for .com, Nominet for .uk, AFNIC for .fr).

In practice a .com costs a registrar around $8 to $10 a year, a .fr around €5. Registrars then resell it between €8 and €20 a year to end customers. That chain of costs exists everywhere: nobody can give away a custom domain name forever, it would mean losing money at every renewal.

When a service such as GoDaddy, Hostinger, Wix or Squarespace advertises a « free domain name », the small print always says: « for the first year ». From year two you pay €15 to €70 a year depending on the extension. For them it is a customer acquisition cost, which they recoup afterwards.

The subdomain trick — and why it is a problem

To offer something « genuinely free », most platforms use a trick: instead of a custom domain, they give you a subdomain on their own domain. Which produces addresses like:

mysite.wixsite.com/restaurant (free Wix)
mysite.jimdofree.com (free Jimdo)
xyz.my.canva.site (free Canva)
mysite.site123.me (free Site123)

Technically, it is free. Practically, it creates three real problems:

It does not look professional. When a customer reads « mysite.wixsite.com » on your business card, they immediately understand you have not invested a penny in your online presence. For a business, that is a deal-breaker.

Google rankings suffer. Google recognises the subdomains of free platforms and ranks them noticeably lower than custom domains. You work on your content, but it struggles to surface in results.

You do not own your address. The day you want to move elsewhere, your address does not come with you. You start from scratch with a new URL, and every link you have shared (business cards, social media, e-mail signatures, Google Business Profile) has to be updated one by one.

Why hosting cannot really be free either

A website is a set of files (HTML, CSS, images…) that must be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, anywhere in the world. To make that happen they sit on servers — specialised computers, permanently on, in cooled and powered data centres.

That infrastructure is extremely expensive to build and maintain. Same as with domains: nobody can host millions of websites for free without something in return. When a service announces « free hosting », it has found another way to get paid. Here are the three most common ones.

1. Adverts forced onto your website

Several platforms (free Jimdo, free Site123, various free hosts) display their own adverts on your website, with no way to remove them. Visually that means a banner at the top, an advertising footer, sometimes pop-ups. Your customers get nothing out of it: the platform earns money from the traffic you bring.

2. Essential features locked away

Free Wix limits storage to 500 MB and bandwidth to 500 MB a month. Free Site123 limits storage to 250 MB. Canva caps you at 5 published sites. All of them block everyday features — online shop, advanced forms, detailed statistics, removing the ads. The goal: make you want the paid plan.

3. The disguised trial period

Many hosts offer « free » hosting for 6 or 12 months. After that you pay the standard rate (between €50 and €200 a year depending on the options). If you do not cancel in time, renewal is automatic. That is not free, that is free for a while.

Is there a genuinely free solution anyway?

Honestly: yes, but with serious trade-offs. If you accept a subdomain instead of your own name, and your project does not need to look professional, two technical options exist.

GitHub Pages hosts a static HTML/CSS site for free at yourname.github.io. No adverts, no bandwidth limits. But you need to handle code and a Git repository — clearly for developers.

Netlify offers a free plan with a yourname.netlify.app subdomain, advert-free. Again, you need to produce code and deploy it.

For a general audience with no technical skills, those options are hard to reach. And even they do not solve the custom domain problem: if you want yourname.com, you still have to pay a registrar for it.

That is exactly the gap Leopar's free plan fills: the same kind of trade-off (a borrowed address, no search indexing), but without writing a single line of code, with a complete website built for you in seconds. Here is exactly what it contains.

Leopar's free plan: what it does, what it does not

Since September 2026 you can build your website on Leopar and publish it for free, with no credit card and no time limit. You describe your project to Léo, he builds the page in about thirty seconds, and you choose to put it online right away. Here is the deal, in plain words.

What you get, for free: a real, complete website — introduction, offers, an « about us » section, reviews, frequently asked questions, contact details — with real photographs and a carefully made design. A contact form that genuinely works: messages from your visitors land in your e-mail inbox, it is not a prop. A visit counter, so you know whether your page is being seen. And Léo adjusting colours, photos, opening hours and texts for you: twenty tweaks free the first month, then ten a month.

What you do not get: your domain name. Your site lives at an address we lend you, shaped like leopario.com/yourname.com — the name you wanted appears in it, but it is not reserved in your name: anyone can still register it. Your page is not indexed by Google (we deliberately mark it « noindex »), it carries a small « Site réalisé avec leopar.io » signature at the bottom, and it has no dedicated server, no backups and no export. Requests beyond that scope — adding a page, a shop, a booking system — belong to the full plan; Léo says so plainly instead of pretending.

What we do not do, and it changes everything: no adverts forced onto your site, no credit card asked for, no trial period that quietly turns into a charge. The free plan does not stop after six months. It is an honest showcase of what Leopar can do, not a renewal trap.

To use it you simply need a Google or Apple account — that is our safeguard: these pages are published under our own domain, and we must be able to answer for what they contain. One free site per account.

The day you want your real name, you upgrade from your dashboard: the domain is registered in your name, the site goes live on it with every tweak you already made, the signature disappears and Google can finally find you. You start nothing over.

Try it for free from the home page — describe your project and you will see your website before deciding anything.

And the full plan: €39/month or €298.80/year, everything included

The free plan shows you your website; the full plan gives it to you. Rather than promising free that is not free, Leopar states a single, transparent price covering everything you need for a website that is genuinely yours.

For €39/month or €298.80/year (that is €24.90/month), you get the domain name in .fr, .com or .net registered in your name (not Leopar's), hosting on a dedicated server, the SSL certificate, the full build of the site with Léo — Leopar's AI — and a monthly allowance of Léo usage, reset every month, to keep the site evolving.

No adverts forced onto your site. No odd subdomain. No essential features held back. No domain given away the first year then billed €70 afterwards.

For comparison, add up an equivalent project elsewhere: a domain (€10 to €15 a year), classic hosting (€30 to €100 a year), an SSL certificate (often included, sometimes €30 a year), a site builder (between €60 and €300 a year depending on the plan). You quickly reach €100 or more before you have created a single page. Leopar bundles all of it into one all-inclusive price.

How does it actually work?

You land on Leopar. You write to Léo the way you would text a friend:

"I'm a florist in Bristol, I want a simple site with photos of my arrangements, online ordering with card payment, and a WhatsApp button for special requests."

Léo reads, understands your project, and refines the details with you: "warmer", "I'd like to see inside the shop at the top", "use a softer colour". You can publish the result for free straight away, or pick your domain name in .fr, .com or .net (free checks, as many attempts as you like), start your subscription, and Léo puts the site live — you follow the progress in real time, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes, and an e-mail tells you when it is online.

To keep it evolving afterwards, same thing: you write to Léo from your phone. The change is applied immediately.

In short

A real website, on a real custom domain, with no forced adverts and no arbitrary limits, cannot be free — no more than a phone plan or a postal address can. It is infrastructure mechanics, not a matter of goodwill.

Services that promise otherwise are playing with words: they hand you a subdomain nobody can remember, they run their adverts on your site, they lock the important features behind a paywall, or they give away the first year to bill you better for the second.

Leopar chooses transparency, both ways. Free: a real website online, with a working contact form and a visit counter, at an address we lend you (leopario.com/yourname.com), no adverts and no credit card — but no Google and no domain of your own, and we tell you beforehand, not afterwards. On the full plan: €39/month or €298.80/year (that is €24.90/month), everything included, your real domain name in your name, no adverts, no hidden features.

You describe. Léo builds. It is online — and you can start without paying.