Ask HN: Free Website Builders in 2023?

Nothing is free, however, in YouTube you can host gigabytes of video for free, we take that for granted, that's crazy. A personal website doesn't take any space in the web, and builders like Wix, Squarespace, Cargo charges several dollars per month from the moment you want to connect your domain or remove their ads. I know that Youtube contains ads, and your videos are inside their platform, but from a business point of view a YouTube channel is way more expensive than hosting a simple website. So, in theory, my conclusion is that the price you pay is actually your space in internet.

I'm a dev and know how to build and deploy a website, but I have some friends that ask me how to or if I'm available to do it, and this is still a very crafty thing to do, at least if you want to make it for free. Sometimes, I want to help, but if you have some years programming, you know there are a lot more interesting things to learn rather than building a portfolio website. Also, I wish they could have the freedom to do it themselves.

Maybe my friends are too stingy that don't want to pay for it, having all their social profiles for free.

You might say I should associate my friend's credit card to a server hosting and deploy some Wordpress instance with Cloudflare cache on front. However, I find myself making a website from scratch, trying out Astro, writing HTML, JS, a bulk of Tailwind classes, and exposing some fields in DecapCMS so that my friend can tweak some parts without pinging me. The site is git-hosted and gets statically built and deployed in Vercel/Netlify/whatever.

Despite I'm experienced, it takes a lot of time! and customization is limited. I think that website builders should be as accesible as social media platforms these days. I guess Tumblr used to provide that experience, it had themes, a HTML template editor for your posts, and even let you connect your own domain.

I'd separate hosting from builder. Hosting is cheap and free, the problem seems to be the builder/CMS, which doesn't even need to be a cloud service. What alternatives are out there? What do you think good old Frontpage/Dreamweaver users?