The honest comparison

The website you build yourself is never free

Most people in this world try to build it themselves. First on Wix or Squarespace, now with AI, because AI looks faster.

This page is the arithmetic of all three routes: the drag and drop builder, the AI builder, and me. What each one costs in money, in months, and in the energy you were saving for your own work. Read it and decide with the numbers in front of you.

Tiago smiling at the camera among tall plants, a jumper tied over his shoulders.

Where the money, the months and the energy go

Most people never see the whole bill: the hosting that renews at double, the credits spent changing a font, the Sunday that disappeared into one bug. Here are the three routes, in the order people usually try them.

Tap any row, or its , to read the story behind it.

An AI builds it, five credits at a time

The first ten minutes feel like magic. Then the credits run out in the middle of the thought you were having, and the rest of that idea waits until tomorrow.

What it really costs you
Vibe-coding (Lovable)
Working with me
The look you had in mind
Comes back as something else
Built from your references
You show it your old Wix page, a Canva poster, your Instagram grid, and ask for that. What comes back is a different website wearing a different atmosphere, and you have no vocabulary to explain why it is wrong, so you describe it again, and again. I start from those same references and tell you in words what we keep from them and what we replace, before anything is designed.
Credits, every time
Every change costs credits
Free, no meter
With Lovable-style tools, every edit burns credits, even changing a font, a colour or a size. Free plans cap you at a few credits a day, so you hit the limit exactly when you were getting somewhere, and one question about connecting your domain can use up a pile of them without fixing anything. My workflow (Claude Code + Sanity CMS) makes every update free, and getting unstuck, or fixing a security hole, never costs you credits or your afternoon.
Members / course area
Slow, credit-hungry
Easy, free to iterate
A members area (free vs paid access, and testing what a buyer sees versus someone who hasn't bought yet) is exactly where vibe-coding turns slow, fragile and credit-hungry for a non-tech founder. With me it's straightforward to build and free to refine until the membership flow is right.
Who owns it
Locked in a black box
100% yours to keep
Vibe-coding tools keep your site trapped inside their platform and their credit system. My builds are 100% yours: the code, the domain and the content, in your name. No lock-in, no hostage situation.

You build it yourself on Wix, Squarespace or WordPress

Starting is easy. Two years later you are still paying every month, and the site still sounds like the template instead of like you.

What it really costs you
Wix / Squarespace / WP
Working with me
Hosting bills
Monthly fees; doubles in year 2
0€ a year, forever
Wix, Squarespace and WordPress charge every month, and cheap hosts like Hostinger are only cheap in year one, then the renewal quietly doubles. I build on modern hosting that costs 0€ a year. The cheapest website is the one you stop paying for.
Email & domain setup
Broken email, hours of settings
Done right in minutes
Email verification is where people get stuck: you click “verify”, nothing happens, and then it's hours of settings nobody explains. I set up domain, DNS and email properly the first time, the 3-minute version of a 3-hour headache.
Sounding like your practice
Sounds like the template
Sounds like you
To fill a template you end up borrowing layouts and colours from other people's sites, just to have something on the page. And every template in this world looks like a spa: beige, minimal, stock yoga on a beach. None of it carries ceremony, or fire, or night, or plant work. I design the identity around what you actually hold, down to details nobody else would have thought of.
Speed & SEO
Bloated, slow pages
Lean, fast, ranks better
Builder platforms ship heavy, slow pages full of code you never asked for, and Google notices. Custom-built sites are lightweight and fast: better ranking, a better first impression, more people who actually stay.

You do it alone, and ask the AI everything

Confident answers arrive in seconds. Judging whether they are right is the part you are being handed.

What it really costs you
You + ChatGPT
Working with me
Explaining who you are
Hours writing about yourself
Two conversations, I write it
For an AI to catch the essence of your work, you would have to sit down and write a long document about yourself: who you serve, what you offer, what you stand for, how you sound. That is hours of the hardest writing there is, about yourself, alone, before you even start the site. I get it out of you by talking, and hand it back as a Brand Message Playbook you keep. Clients use theirs for captions, retreat descriptions and pricing conversations long after launch.
How long it actually takes
Three to five months of evenings
About two weeks
People come to me after months of it: a bit of progress, then a wall, then a pause, then starting over because the platform changed something. The same site takes me about two weeks, because this is what I do every day. Those months are the part nobody refunds.
When something goes wrong
Sure-sounding advice, then a forum
A real person + maintenance
API, DNS, SEO: the technical side is full of terms nobody explains, and AI's confident answers are sometimes wrong. If you're not in tech you can't tell, so you follow the bad advice and lose hours, and when the site breaks you're alone in a support forum at midnight. With me you have a real person who catches that before it costs you money and a weekend, and an optional maintenance plan from 50€/month, so the site never quietly goes stale.
Your evenings
Tutorials, forums, the same bug
Yours again
The tutorial at eleven at night, the forum thread that doesn't match your version, the thing that worked yesterday. You spent years getting good at something rare, and this was never going to be the second one.
The real 2-year cost
Hundreds of euros, and climbing
Build once, 0€ after
Add up hosting + plugins + credits + the wrong subscription an AI recommended, and the “cheap” route quietly passes several hundred euros over two years, and keeps climbing. Put your own numbers in below. My stack: pay once for the build, then nothing.

Now put your own numbers in

Everything above is what these routes cost in general. This is what yours costs. Drag the sliders to what you actually pay today.

Nothing is sent anywhere. It all stays in your browser.

23 €/mo
1 €/mo
10 €/mo
0 €/mo
8 €/mo

The “cheap” route, over 2 years

1,008€

504 €/year · 42 €/month, and climbing

With me: 0€ a year on hosting, and no credits. You edit, add and remove pages yourself for free, or I do it for a small monthly fee. The only two things you ever pay for are the domain and a one-off 25€ if you pass 250 form submissions. The number I aim at: the site pays itself back within two years.

If that number surprised you, send it to me and I'll tell you what I would do in your place.

Talk to me

A WhatsApp message with your number already in it. Nothing to prepare, nothing to sign.

If you also sell

Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or Shopify all rent you a checkout for about 20€ a month. When the shop is new and the sales are still few, that is around 240€ a year going out before much comes in. If what you sell is a set of pieces you make yourself, there is a version of this you buy once. Skip this one if you do not sell.

What it really costs you
Shopify, Wix, Squarespace or WordPress
Working with me
The monthly fee
≈20€/month, ~480€ over two years
No monthly fee, just the domain
Every shop builder rents you the checkout: around 20€ a month on the entry plans, more once you want a feature they put on the tier above. That is roughly 480€ over two years, whether you sell four pieces or four hundred. Your shop is built on Sanity for the content and Stripe for the payments, and at this size neither one charges a monthly fee. You pay for the domain, and you pay the card fee on each sale, which is the same wherever you sell.
How it looks
A theme thousands of shops share
Designed around your brand
A shop builder hands you a theme to fill in. Adding a new section, moving a block or using a colour the theme never planned for goes from fiddly to impossible, and the shop ends up looking like every other shop on the same theme. What you offer is yours alone, and the shop should feel that way too. I design every page around your brand and build it in code, so there is no theme to squeeze into and nothing you are stuck with.
VAT
Automated, billed every month
Priced in, nothing to configure
VAT is an accounting decision before it is a technical one. The simplest version, and the one most small shops are already on, is a price with VAT included at a single rate, which needs no configuration anywhere. Their automatic per-country calculation starts to earn its keep once you sell across borders past the EU threshold, somewhere around 10,000€ a year. Below that you are paying every month for a machine you never switch on. Above it, Stripe Tax does the same job, charged per transaction.
Shipping
Zones and rates, on the plan
Zones and rates, already in checkout
This one is close to even. Stripe's checkout already does shipping by zone out of the box: one rate for Portugal, another for the rest of the EU, a third for everywhere else. It is an afternoon of setup and nothing gets built from scratch. The difference is that the afternoon does not renew every month.
Managing orders
A dashboard you rent
A dashboard you own, built in
The honest version: this is the part that is genuine build work. They hand you an orders panel on day one. On your shop I build it, and it is included: an order lands in your CMS the moment it is paid, the piece marks itself sold, and you get a private page listing what has come in, with a button to mark each one sent. A few days of my time, once. After that it sits beside your content, in the same place you edit the rest of the site, and it never renews.
Confirmation emails
Branded templates, ready made
Receipt from day one, branded when you want
Stripe emails a receipt automatically from the very first sale, so nobody is ever left wondering whether the order went through. Making that email look like your brand instead of a plain receipt is a small separate piece of work. It's worth doing, and it's an extra step, so I'd rather you hear that from me now than find out after your first sale.
Proper invoices
Does not issue them
Does not issue them either
Worth saying plainly, because this is the one line where the comparison is a draw. In Portugal a legally valid invoice has to come out of software certified by the tax authority, with its QR code and its ATCUD. Shopify does not issue one. Stripe does not issue one. What your buyer receives is an order confirmation in both cases, and you will be using a certified invoicing program either way. Nothing on this page saves you from that one.
When Shopify is the right answer

Shopify exists for a reason, and there are shops where I would tell you to go and pay for it. Four things make that call, and the number of products is not one of them.

Real variants. One piece in ten combinations of size and colour, each combination holding its own stock, is ten things to keep count of. Twenty five products like that is two hundred and fifty. At that point you want software whose entire job is counting.

Volume. Dozens of orders a day, where handling each one by hand stops being possible.

More than one place to sell. Your own shop, Instagram, Etsy and a market stall, all pulling from the same stock at the same time, all needing to agree with each other.

Tax across borders. Real sales in several countries, each with its own VAT rules to satisfy.

Without any of those, this setup carries a shop comfortably past fifty or a hundred products. With any of them, that monthly fee is buying you something real, and I will tell you so on the call instead of selling you a build.

Even then, the shop looks like you. I build sites in a kind of bento box, one compartment per tool, and Shopify becomes one of those compartments. It works behind the scenes as your stockroom and your till: the products, the variants, the stock, the payments and all the paperwork that comes with them. What your customers see sits in another compartment, designed by me and built in code around your brand. You keep everything Shopify is good at, and none of its themes.

Tell me what you sell and how you sell it, and I will tell you which of these two your shop actually needs, even when the answer is the one with the monthly fee.

The part no calculator can add up

Everything above is money, and money is the easy half.

You do this work for other people. To hold a room, a ceremony, a table of ten, you have to arrive with something in you. That is what the website has been quietly spending. The evening you meant to rest. The dinner where you were somewhere else. The attention that belonged to your offer, your practice, the people who need what you do.

Nobody invoices you for that one. It arrives as tiredness, and then as a thought you have probably already had: I need to hand this to someone.

Hand it over. You go back to the cacau, the dance, the treatments, the workshops, the things you make with your hands. I build it in about two weeks, and you see every step as it happens.

And you will not have to explain your world first. I am in the same rooms as you are. I go to the ceremonies and the dances, I meditate, I keep fire. So when you say why yours is not a spa, that part is already understood.

“I originally built my website myself on Wix. It no longer feels like a DIY website, and I feel much more confident sending potential clients there.”
Bárbara Santos, bridal makeup artist in the Algarve. Read her story
Talk to me

Tell me where you are stuck. You don't need to know what you want yet, that part is my job.

Still not sure which route is actually yours?

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