Framer Hosting Costs $290/Year — Here's How to Pay $0

Framer is a powerful design tool — but its hosting pricing has become a major pain point for freelancers, agencies, and startups. Let's break down the real numbers.

What Framer Actually Charges for Hosting

Framer bundles design and hosting together, which means you pay every month just to keep your site live — even if you never touch the design again.

• Mini plan: $5/month ($60/year) — no custom domain
• Basic plan: $15/month ($180/year) — 1 custom domain
• Pro plan: $25/month ($300/year) — advanced features
• Scale plan: $49/month ($588/year) — multiple domains, analytics

The Alternative: Export Once, Host Free Forever

Static HTML sites are universally supported by free hosting platforms. Once you export your Framer site to clean HTML, you can host it on:

• Vercel — Free forever for static sites, global CDN, custom domains, SSL
• Netlify — Free tier with 100GB bandwidth/month, instant deploys
• Cloudflare Pages — Unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month, free
• GitHub Pages — Free, directly from your repository

The Real Cost Comparison

• Framer Basic hosting: $180/year per site
• Self-hosting on Vercel after export: $0/year
• Cost of export with FullExport: $9 one-time (or free for HTML preview)
• Year 1 savings: $171 per site
• Year 2 savings: $180 per site (export already paid for)

What You Don't Lose

When you self-host your exported Framer site, you keep:

• Your exact design — pixel-perfect HTML/CSS output
• All fonts, images, and assets bundled locally
• CSS animations and transitions preserved
• All SEO meta tags, Open Graph data, and structured markup
• Your custom domain and SSL certificate (free on Vercel/Netlify)

What You Do Lose

To be transparent, self-hosting does have trade-offs:

• Framer CMS (dynamic content) — becomes static
• Framer Forms — need a third-party form service (Tally, Typeform — both free)
• Automatic Framer updates — you'd need to re-export if you redesign