Framer
Visual website builder with AI design, CMS and code agents built in; free tier carries a watermark, paid plans start at $10/mo.
Who it's for
Solo builders who want a marketing site, portfolio or landing page with real design control and an AI agent that edits on the canvas, not a chat window bolted onto a template.
Standout details
- Four paid tiers plus custom Enterprise, billed annually: Free, Basic $10/mo, Pro $30/mo and Scale $100/mo, each raising the CMS cap differently. Free and Pro both allow 10 collections (1,000 and 2,500 items), Basic drops to 2 collections, and Scale reaches 20 collections and 10,000 items
- The Free plan publishes to a framer.website subdomain with a "Made in Framer" badge that cannot be removed or hidden; a custom domain and badge removal both require the $10/mo Basic plan
- Every plan bundles monthly AI credits for three built-in agents, a Design Agent that edits the canvas directly, a CMS Agent that organizes content, and a Code Agent that writes functional site code
- A May 2026 pricing update cut extra editor seats from $40/mo to $20/mo on Pro and Scale, and added a cheaper $10/mo Content Editor role limited to CMS and on-page edits without full design access
- Framer started in 2014 as a desktop prototyping tool from founders Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk, pivoted to a cloud website builder in 2022, and raised $100M in a Series D at a $2B valuation in August 2025
What it is
Framer is a visual website builder: pages are laid out on a canvas rather than assembled from fixed sections, and three AI agents work inside that same canvas. A Design Agent generates and edits layouts directly, a CMS Agent sets up and organizes content collections, and a Code Agent writes functional code and interactions, all editable afterward rather than handed over as a black box.
The company did not start here. Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk founded Framer in Amsterdam in 2014 as a desktop prototyping tool, the kind designers used to mock up interactions before handing a spec to engineers. Between 2021 and 2022 the company rebuilt itself around a cloud-based website builder instead, betting that designers wanted to ship the real site, not just a clickable preview of one. The bet paid off commercially: Framer raised $100 million in a Series D round in August 2025 at a $2 billion valuation.
Who should use it
Someone building a marketing site, portfolio or landing page who wants actual design freedom rather than a locked template, and who would rather describe changes to an AI agent that edits the live canvas than paste code into an editor. It suits a solo builder willing to learn a canvas-based tool instead of a form-based one.
What stands out
The four-tier pricing ladder is not linear in what it offers. Free and Pro both allow 10 CMS collections, but Basic, the first paid step up, actually drops that to 2, trading content flexibility for the custom domain and badge removal that come with it. Scale, at $100/mo, is the first plan built for a real content operation: 20 collections, 10,000 CMS items and 200GB of bandwidth, with pages, collections and bandwidth all available beyond that as metered overages rather than a hard wall.
The free plan’s limitations are specific rather than vague. A site built on it lives at a framer.website subdomain and carries a “Made in Framer” badge with no setting to hide it. Both go away on Basic, which makes the $10/mo plan less an upsell and more the point at which a Framer site becomes a real, branded site.
Framer priced its AI agents into the subscription rather than metering them separately from day one: every plan, including Free, comes with a monthly AI credit allotment for the Design, CMS and Code agents. A May 2026 change also made the team side of pricing cheaper, cutting additional editor seats on Pro and Scale from $40/mo to $20/mo and adding a $10/mo Content Editor role for people who only need to touch content, not the design canvas.
The verdict
Framer’s pitch holds up for what it is built for. On a marketing site, portfolio or landing page, visual control matters, and an AI agent that edits the canvas beats one that only describes changes in a chat window. The free plan is usable enough to judge the tool properly, as long as the badge and missing custom domain are read as the trial constraints they are, not a bug.
Where Framer runs out of road is scale, in both senses. A high-traffic content site outgrows Framer’s CMS collection and item caps faster than a blog-first platform built for exactly that job, and anything resembling an online store has to bolt on Shopify or Lemon Squeezy rather than check out natively. Price it against your actual usage before committing. Pages, CMS collections and bandwidth all carry overage fees, and a site that grows past its plan’s baseline can cost noticeably more than the advertised monthly number.
Honest verdict
Framer looks like a design tool and ships like one: the Design, CMS and Code agents work directly on the canvas instead of sitting in a chat sidebar next to a template picker. The free plan is a genuine way to try it rather than a lead-gen trap, though the unremovable watermark and missing custom domain mean it is a prototype, not a launch. Skip Framer if the site is actually a high-volume content publication or a store. The CMS caps out well before a large blog's needs, and there is no native checkout, so selling anything means wiring in Shopify or Lemon Squeezy. Budget past the sticker price too, since pages, CMS collections and bandwidth all carry overage fees once a site outgrows its plan.
Published 2 Oct 2026