One-page sites for $19 a year, built and run by two people, and still the cheapest way to be online
Carrd is a minimalist one-page website builder that lets anyone create responsive single-page sites (landing pages, link-in-bio profiles, portfolios, waitlists, and simple product pages) from a browser, with a free tier covering three sites and paid plans starting at $9 per year that add custom domains, forms, embeds, analytics, and branding removal.
Overview
Carrd is the outlier in this category and the reason it belongs here. Launched in late 2016 as a side project by a solo developer working under the handle AJ, it has stayed deliberately, aggressively small: one-page sites only, a stripped-down editor, no CMS, no team features, and pricing measured in dollars per year rather than dollars per month. The company still runs with a team of two and has hosted well over four million sites.
The product does exactly one thing. You pick from a library that has passed 320 templates or start blank, drop in text, images, buttons, forms, and embeds, and publish a responsive single-page site. Paid Pro tiers add the things that make a site look like it belongs to a business: a custom domain with SSL, no Carrd branding, contact and signup forms wired to services like Mailchimp and, as of June 2026, Resend, third-party widget embeds, analytics, and control over meta tags and social sharing images.
The pricing is the story. Pro Lite is $9 a year, Pro Standard is $19 a year for ten sites with custom domains, and Pro Plus is $49 a year for twenty-five sites plus password protection, redirects, variables, and downloadable sites. Twenty-five landing pages on custom domains for $49 a year is roughly what Unbounce charges for four days. The tradeoff is total: Carrd will never build you a blog, a multi-page site, or a conversion testing program, and it is not trying to.
Best for
Founders, indie makers, and small teams who need a credible single-page site fast and cheap: a waitlist, a pre-launch page, a link-in-bio, a portfolio, a simple product or event page, or a set of paid-traffic landing pages where volume matters more than sophistication.
Not the right fit for
- Anyone who needs a blog, a changelog, case studies, or any content that grows over time; Carrd has no CMS and no multi-page site structure at all.
- Teams that need to collaborate; there are no seats, no roles, and no shared workspace, only site transfers and share links between individual accounts.
- Performance marketers who want A/B testing, visitor-level routing, or conversion analytics; Carrd has none of it and will never compete with Unbounce or Landingi on optimization.
- Brands with a specific, demanding visual identity; the editor is intentionally constrained and there is a recognizable Carrd look that a discerning eye can spot.
- Companies with procurement, security review, or compliance requirements; a two-person vendor with no published SOC 2 or SSO is a legitimate governance concern regardless of how good the product is.
How it works
- 1
You start building immediately, before signing up. Carrd's editor loads in the browser with a template or a blank page, and elements (text, images, buttons, forms, embeds, containers) are added and configured from a compact sidebar rather than dragged onto an absolute canvas. Layout is section-based and responsive by default, which is why non-designers get a result that does not break on a phone.
- 2
Everything lives on one page, but Carrd supports multiple containers with in-page navigation, so a site can behave like a small multi-section brochure without becoming a multi-page site. Elements are unlimited on Pro plans; the Free tier caps what you can add.
- 3
Publishing on Free puts the site on a carrd.co subdomain with a Carrd badge. Pro Lite removes the badge and unlocks premium subdomain URLs and richer media (16 MB images, 64 MB video uploads, slideshows). Pro Standard and above connect a real custom domain with SSL, at which point the site is indistinguishable from any other small business page.
- 4
Data capture is handled through the Form element, which posts submissions to email or to a connected service such as Mailchimp or Resend rather than storing a contact database inside Carrd. Analytics, meta tags, and social sharing images are configured per site in settings. Pro Plus adds the power-user layer: password protection, redirects, canonical URLs, variables, uploaded site files, and a downloadable copy of the built site.
Feature breakdown
28 features in 5 modulesBuilding
A deliberately small editor that makes it hard to produce something bad.- Browser editor with no signup wall
- You can build a complete site before creating an account, which is a large part of why Carrd converts users without doing any marketing.
- Template library past 320 designs
- Carrd's changelog shows templates still shipping regularly through August 2026, with numbering into the 320s; you can also start from a blank page.
- Responsive by default
- Section-based layout reflows on phones automatically rather than requiring per-breakpoint work, the main reason non-designers get acceptable results.
- Unlimited elements on Pro
- The Free tier limits how much you can put on a page; every Pro tier removes the cap.
- Premium and custom templates
- Pro plans unlock the premium template set and let you save your own designs as reusable templates, which matters if you are producing many similar pages.
- Elements panel
- Added in August 2026, a navigable list of every element on a site, which makes dense pages far easier to work on than hunting through the canvas.
Media and presentation
The upgrades that separate a Free Carrd page from one that looks professional.- High-quality images and large uploads
- Pro tiers raise upload ceilings to 16 MB for images and 64 MB for video and serve images without the Free tier's compression.
- Video uploads and slideshows
- Native video hosting and image slideshows on all Pro tiers, avoiding a YouTube embed for a simple hero video.
- Site icons and social sharing images
- Custom favicons and Open Graph images per site, so links posted to social platforms preview correctly.
- Local fonts
- Pro Standard and above allow self-hosted fonts rather than only the built-in set, which matters for brand consistency and for avoiding third-party font requests.
- QR codes
- Generated per site on Pro plans, useful for events, packaging, and print collateral pointing at a landing page.
Domains, publishing, and control
How a Carrd site stops looking like a Carrd site.- Custom domains with SSL
- Available from Pro Standard ($19/year) upward; Pro Lite gets premium carrd.co subdomain URLs but not your own domain.
- Branding removal
- Every Pro tier including the $9 Pro Lite removes the Carrd badge, which is unusually generous at that price.
- Meta tags and canonical URLs
- Per-site title, description, and meta control on Pro Standard, with canonical URLs added on Pro Plus for duplicate-content control across similar pages.
- Redirects
- Pro Plus supports redirects, which is what makes campaign URL structures and domain changes manageable.
- Password protection
- Pro Plus can gate a site behind a password, useful for client previews, private pitch pages, and unlisted offers.
- Downloadable sites
- Pro Plus lets you download the built site, a genuine export path that Framer, Unbounce, and Instapage do not offer at any price.
Data capture and integrations
Carrd routes data outward rather than storing it, which keeps the product small.- Form element
- Contact and signup forms on Pro Standard and above, posting to email or a connected service rather than a built-in contact database.
- Email service connections
- Forms integrate with services including Mailchimp, and Resend support was added in June 2026 per the changelog.
- Advanced forms
- Pro Plus extends form capability with more field types and configuration than the standard element.
- Third-party widgets and embeds
- Embed any script-based widget from Pro Standard upward, which is how chat, booking, payment, and analytics tools get onto a Carrd page.
- Site analytics
- Built-in traffic reporting on Pro Standard and above, plus the option to embed a third-party analytics script.
Account and scale
How the site-count model works, and the few power features aimed at heavy users.- Site-count pricing ladder
- Each Pro tier is sold in site-count increments: Pro Standard runs 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, and 1,000 sites at $19, $39, $69, $119, $249, $399, and $599 per year respectively.
- Site transfers and sharing
- Sites can be handed to another Carrd account or shared for editing, the closest thing to collaboration Carrd offers and the mechanism freelancers use to deliver client work.
- Variables
- Pro Plus supports variables for reused values across a site, which reduces the tedium of maintaining many near-identical pages.
- Site files
- Upload arbitrary files to a site on Pro Plus, for lead magnets, PDFs, and verification files.
- Update frequency control
- Pro Plus exposes control over how often a published site refreshes, relevant for sites embedding changing external content.
- Trash and restore
- Added July 2026: deleted sites go to a Trash folder and can be restored for 3 days on Free and 14 days on Pro.
Use cases
4 documentedPre-launch founder collecting a waitlist
Needs a credible page with an email capture form live this week, has no design help, and refuses to spend $99 a month on software before there is a product.
A $19 a year Pro Standard plan buys a custom domain, a form wired to Mailchimp or Resend, and no vendor branding. Total first-year cost is less than a single month of any conversion platform in this category.
Freelancer or small agency producing simple client sites
Twenty clients each need a one-page site with a custom domain, and the margin does not support a per-site monthly platform fee.
Pro Standard 25 at $39 a year covers all of them, and site transfers hand ownership to the client when the engagement ends. The constraint is that none of those clients can ever get a blog without moving off Carrd.
Indie maker running several small products
Six side projects each need a page, and paying per site the way Framer or Umso do would cost more than the products earn.
A single Pro Standard plan covers ten sites for $19 a year with custom domains on each. This is the specific scenario where Carrd's economics are not merely competitive but categorically different.
Marketer running a short campaign or event
A conference talk, a webinar, or a product hunt launch needs a dedicated page with a QR code for print and a password-protected preview for internal review.
Pro Plus at $49 a year covers QR generation, password protection, redirects, and a downloadable copy of the page for the archive, with no monthly commitment to cancel afterward.
Pricing
from $9/year (Pro Lite)Annual subscription sold in three feature tiers (Pro Lite, Pro Standard, Pro Plus), each available in site-count increments; a permanent free plan covers three basic sites.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 per year |
Genuinely usable for a personal page or a scratch project, but no custom domain, forms, or embeds. |
| Pro Lite | $9 per year (3 sites) |
$14/year for 10 sites, $29/year for 25. No custom domains, forms, or analytics at this tier. |
| Pro Standard | $19 per year (10 sites) |
The tier almost everyone should buy. Scales at $39 (25 sites), $69 (50), $119 (100), $249 (250), $399 (500), and $599 (1,000). |
| Pro Plus | $49 per year (25 sites) |
Scales from $89/year for 50 sites up to $999/year for 1,000 sites. |
Billing notes
- Everything is billed annually. There is no monthly option, which is part of how a two-person company keeps overhead down.
- Pricing is by site count, not by traffic, pageviews, or seats. A Carrd page that goes viral costs exactly the same as one nobody visits, which is the single biggest structural difference from Unbounce, Instapage, and Landingi.
- Custom domains require Pro Standard or above. Pro Lite at $9 removes branding but still leaves you on a carrd.co URL, which is usually not what a business wants.
- A 7-day free trial is available on Pro plans, on top of a permanent free tier for basic sites.
- There are no seats and therefore no per-user costs; there is also no team collaboration to pay for.
- The export feature (downloadable sites) is Pro Plus only, so the $49 tier is the one to pick if platform lock-in worries you.
Value assessment: Nothing else in this category is close on price, and the comparison is not subtle: Pro Standard's ten custom-domain sites cost $19 a year, roughly what Unbounce charges per day on its cheapest annual plan. Because metering is by site count rather than traffic, a Carrd page that succeeds does not generate a bigger bill, which removes the single most common unpleasant surprise in landing page software. What you are buying with that money is a hard ceiling: no CMS, no multi-page sites, no testing, no team features. If the work fits inside one page, Carrd is the correct answer and the price is almost irrelevant. If it does not, no amount of savings makes it the right tool.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Price and metering model are structurally different from the rest of the category: $19 a year for ten sites, with no per-visitor or per-pageview charge to fear when a page succeeds.
- The constrained editor is a feature, not a limitation, for non-designers; it is genuinely hard to produce an ugly or broken Carrd page.
- You can build a complete site before signing up, which removes almost all friction from evaluating it.
- Pro Plus offers downloadable sites, a real export path that Framer, Unbounce, and most hosted competitors do not provide at any price.
- Actively maintained despite the tiny team, with a public changelog showing templates, integrations, and builder improvements shipping through August 2026.
- No seats and no upsell ladder; the most expensive thing you can accidentally do is buy more site slots than you need.
Limitations
- One page only. There is no CMS, no blog, and no multi-page site structure, and that is a permanent product decision rather than a roadmap gap.
- No A/B testing, no conversion analytics beyond basic traffic reporting, and no visitor-level optimization of any kind.
- No team features: no seats, no roles, no shared workspace, only site transfers and share links between individual accounts.
- A two-person company with no published SOC 2, no SSO, and no enterprise support tier is a real bus-factor and procurement risk, whatever the product quality.
- Custom domains are locked behind Pro Standard, so the headline $9 price is misleading for any business use.
- Sites have a recognizable house style; a design-conscious brand will hit the visual ceiling quickly.
Head-to-head comparisons
3 alternativesCarrd vs Umso
from $7/mo (Basic, billed annually) or $14/mo billed monthlyBoth target the founder who is not a designer, and both keep the option set small on purpose. Umso builds real multi-page sites with a blog, forms, multilingual content, and analytics for $7 to $20 a month per site; Carrd builds one page for $19 a year across ten sites. If you need a company website with a blog, Umso. If you need many cheap single-page sites, Carrd, and it is not close on cost.
Full Carrd vs Umso comparisonCarrd vs Framer
from $10/mo (Basic, per site)Framer is what you graduate to. It costs roughly six times more per site per year and gives you a design canvas, a CMS, localization, staging, and A/B testing. Carrd gives you a page and gets out of the way. Use Carrd for waitlists, link-in-bios, and disposable campaign pages; move to Framer when the site becomes a brand asset someone is judged on.
Full Carrd vs Framer comparisonCarrd vs Landingi
from $24/mo (Build, billed annually)Landingi bills by monthly visitors starting at 2,000 on its $24 plan; Carrd does not count visitors at all. Landingi has A/B/X testing, programmatic page generation, and 170-plus CRM integrations that Carrd will never have. The decision is whether you are running a measured conversion program (Landingi) or just need pages that exist and look fine (Carrd).
Full Carrd vs Landingi comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- Minutes. A template-based page can be published to a carrd.co subdomain in under fifteen minutes, and connecting a custom domain adds a DNS change plus propagation time.
- Learning curve
- The lowest in this category by a wide margin. The editor has few enough options that most people never read documentation, which is the entire point of the product.
- Onboarding
- Entirely self-serve with no sales contact. The build-before-signup flow means evaluation happens inside the product rather than through a trial gate.
- Migration notes
- There is no importer from other platforms; a Carrd site is built from scratch, which takes an hour rather than a project. Leaving is easier than most competitors allow, since Pro Plus can download the built site, though you would still need to host it yourself.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web app (browser-based editor)Published sites served from Carrd's hosting
- API
- No public API. Automation and third-party functionality happen through embeds, form integrations, and script widgets rather than programmatic access.
- Compliance
- No published SOC 2 or ISO certificationGDPR considerations depend largely on the third-party form and analytics services you connect
- Data residency
- Not published.
- SSO
- Not available. There are no team accounts to apply SSO to.
- Security notes
- SSL is provisioned automatically on custom domains. Carrd deliberately stores very little: form submissions route to email or a connected service rather than into a Carrd-held contact database, which reduces the amount of customer data the vendor holds but also means your data governance follows the connected tool.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportSupport forum
- Documentation
- Practical documentation and a public changelog, both concise; the product's simplicity keeps the surface area small.
- Community
- Large informal community of Carrd users and template sellers, plus a substantial third-party market in premium templates and tutorials.
Company
- Founded
- 2016
- Headquarters
- Nashville, Tennessee, US
- Ownership
- Founder-owned and independently operated
- Founders
- AJ (works publicly under the handle ajlkn; full name not publicly used)
- Employees
- Approximately 2, per founder interviews
- Funding
- Bootstrapped and profitable from early on; the founder has publicly described raising one small round around 2021, motivated by advice and network rather than capital need. Amount and investors have not been disclosed.
Timeline
- 2016AJ launches Carrd in late 2016 as a solo side project, built around a single constraint: one-page sites only.
- 2021The founder reports roughly 2.5 million sites created and $1M ARR, and takes a small outside round after years of bootstrapping.
- 2026carrd.co begins permanently redirecting to carrd.com, making carrd.com the primary domain.
- 2026June through August: Resend support lands in the form element, a Trash folder adds site restore (3 days on Free, 14 on Pro), an Elements panel improves navigation on dense pages, and the template library passes number 320.
Integrations
- Mailchimp (form submissions)
- Resend (form submissions, added June 2026)
- Email delivery for form submissions
- Any script-based third-party widget or embed (chat, booking, payments, analytics)
- Third-party analytics via embed
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsIs Carrd really free?
Yes, permanently. The free plan covers up to three sites with the full core builder, responsive layouts, and the template library, published on a carrd.co subdomain with a Carrd badge. Custom domains, forms, embeds, and analytics all require a paid plan.
How much does Carrd Pro cost?
Pro Lite is $9 a year for three sites, Pro Standard is $19 a year for ten sites, and Pro Plus is $49 a year for twenty-five. All three scale in site-count increments up to 1,000 sites ($599 a year on Standard, $999 on Plus). Billing is annual only, with a 7-day free trial.
Which Carrd plan do I need for a custom domain?
Pro Standard at $19 a year or above. Pro Lite removes Carrd branding and unlocks premium media, but it still publishes to a carrd.co URL, so it is not the right choice for a business page.
Can Carrd build a multi-page website?
No. Carrd builds single-page sites by design. You can use multiple containers with in-page navigation so a site reads like several sections, but there is no true multi-page structure, no CMS, and no blog. If you need a blog, look at Umso or Framer instead.
Does Carrd charge based on traffic?
No, and this is its most important structural advantage. Pricing is by site count, so a page that gets a hundred thousand visitors costs exactly what a page that gets ten costs. Unbounce, Landingi, and Instapage all meter monthly visitors and will raise your bill when a page succeeds.
Can you export a Carrd site?
On the Pro Plus tier ($49 a year and up), yes: downloadable sites let you take a built copy of the site away with you. That is a genuine export path, and it is more than Framer, Unbounce, or Instapage offer at any price.
Does Carrd support forms and email signups?
Yes, from Pro Standard upward. The form element posts submissions to email or to a connected service, with Mailchimp long supported and Resend added in June 2026. Carrd does not store a contact database itself, so your list lives in whichever tool you connect.
Is Carrd good for SEO?
It is adequate for a single page: you get meta tags and social sharing images on Pro Standard and canonical URLs on Pro Plus, and the pages are lightweight and fast. It is not a platform for a content-driven SEO strategy, because there is no CMS to publish articles into.
Who runs Carrd, and is a two-person company safe to build on?
Carrd was launched in late 2016 by a solo developer known publicly as AJ, based in Nashville, and still runs with a team of about two. It has been profitable for years, hosts millions of sites, and ships regularly (the public changelog shows updates through August 2026). That said, there is no SOC 2, no SSO, and no enterprise support, so it is a poor fit anywhere procurement gets a vote.
Carrd or Linktree for a link-in-bio page?
Carrd gives you a real custom domain, full design control, forms, and embeds for $19 a year, where link-in-bio tools give you a fixed template on their domain. Carrd takes maybe thirty more minutes to set up and produces something that looks like it belongs to you rather than to a platform.
Editorial verdict
Carrd is the best value in software this site covers, and the qualification is not about quality but about scope. For a waitlist, a link-in-bio, a portfolio, a pre-launch page, or a batch of simple campaign pages, $19 a year for ten custom-domain sites with no traffic metering is not merely cheaper than the alternatives, it is a different economic category. The ceiling arrives abruptly: the moment you need a blog, a second page, a teammate, a test, or a SOC 2 report, Carrd cannot help and will not pretend to. Buy it knowing exactly that, keep it for the things it does, and put your company website somewhere else.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.
Awards & badges
1 heldCarrd holds 1 award from the SaaSTracker editorial program. Badges may be displayed by the vendor; each embed links back to this profile.
Best Value · Landing Page Builders
“One-page sites from $19 a year, built and run by two people, still the cheapest way to be professionally online.”
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