Hostinger Website Builder review: every charge, itemised

This Hostinger Website Builder review covers one product in one currency on one date, because that is the only way its pricing makes sense. The headline rate is $2.99 a month on the Premium plan. That rate requires a forty-eight-month commitment, arrives as a single charge of $143.52, and renews at $10.99 a month. Both numbers are real. Only the second one repeats.

The product itself is in better shape than its pricing presentation suggests. It is quick, the editor is pleasant, the store is genuinely usable, and there is now a documented way to get your text and images out — something that was not true of this category for years. The case against it is narrower than the usual complaints about cheap builders, and it comes down to three things: the renewal multiple, the design lock-in that no export fixes, and an AI allowance that is smaller than the marketing implies.

What you are actually buying in 2026

Two things changed recently enough that most published reviews still describe the old arrangement. First, the plan names. What used to be a two-plan line-up of Premium and Business is now three plans: Premium, Unlimited and Cloud Startup. Business was renamed Unlimited. If you are reading a comparison that mentions a Business plan, you are reading something written before the change, and its prices are likely stale too.

Second, and more substantially, Hostinger has folded its Horizons AI app builder into the website builder. The two are now sold as one product with two building modes. You are no longer choosing between a drag-and-drop site tool and a separate AI app tool; you get both under the same subscription, and the stated output categories run from portfolios and business sites through booking pages and online stores to membership sites and small SaaS tools. Whether the app-building side is any good is a separate question, but the packaging change is real and it makes the plans better value than they were.

The price, and the price after that

Here is the whole commercial picture in one place. All figures are US dollars on the forty-eight-month term, read from Hostinger's own pricing pages on 20 September 2026.

The renewal column is the one that decides whether this is a good purchase. Premium renews at 3.68 times its intro rate, Unlimited at 4.26 times, Cloud Startup at 3.25 times. Those multiples are steep even by the standards of a category that runs on first-term discounting. They are also not a trick — the discount badges say 75, 79 and 71 percent off, and a 79 percent discount mathematically must end in something close to a five-fold increase. The information is disclosed. It is just disclosed quietly, and in smaller type than the number people remember.

Shorter terms cost more per month and preserve more of your freedom, which is a trade worth taking seriously. The twelve-month rates are $3.99, $4.99 and $9.99. Month-to-month is $11.99, $18.99 and $27.99 — note that monthly Premium is more expensive than renewal Premium, so paying month to month is the single worst way to hold this product. The full grid, term by term, is on the plans and renewal page.

Three inclusions are worth pricing separately because they expire on a different schedule from the plan. A free domain comes with annual and longer terms — for the first year only, after which it renews at Hostinger's standard rate for that extension. Mailboxes work the same way: two per site on Premium, unlimited on the higher plans, free for year one. And the AI credits, discussed below, are a one-time grant rather than a recurring allowance. None of these is misrepresented, but all three are easy to read as permanent when they are not.

Two building modes in one product

Manual mode is the drag-and-drop editor: pick a template, move things, type. It is the mode most people will spend their time in and it behaves the way a modern builder should, with a grid that keeps elements aligned rather than letting you scatter them freely. Agentic mode is a chat window — you describe what you want and the builder assembles it, spending credits as it goes. The two are not sealed off from each other; you can generate in one and refine in the other, which is the right design. A longer walk through how the two modes differ in practice is worth reading before you spend credits on anything ambitious.

Hostinger says both modes can be tested without a card, and that you get five AI credits to try the conversational one. Reviews published earlier in 2026 state flatly that there is no free trial and that the 30-day money-back guarantee is the only risk-free route in. Both things cannot be true at once, so this looks like a recent change that the wider web has not caught up with. Either way, the refund window is the more dependable protection, and it is thirty days on every plan.

AI credits are a one-time gift

This is the detail most likely to disappoint someone who bought on the AI messaging. Premium includes five credits. Unlimited and Cloud Startup include fifteen, and Cloud Startup adds twenty credits for Hostinger's agent features. Those grants are one-time, not monthly. Hostinger's own guidance is that a simple project consumes roughly five to ten credits and a complex web app fifteen or more, which means a Premium subscriber can plausibly exhaust the entire allowance building one site and never see another free credit for the remaining forty-seven months of the term. Top-ups are sold separately; no top-up price was published on the pages checked, so budget for it as an unknown. The credit arithmetic is worked through here.

One caveat on the agent credits: Hostinger's own page gives Cloud Startup twenty, while an independent pricing table compiled in August lists fifty for Unlimited and one hundred for Cloud Startup. The sources disagree and the vendor's figure is the conservative one, so that is what is used above. Treat agent allocations as provisional.

Templates, and a number that does not reconcile

Hostinger advertises more than 400 templates. An independent hands-on review counts 180, across more than twenty categories. The most likely explanation is that the vendor figure includes AI-generated variations while the manual count includes only distinct designs. Neither number is dishonest; they are measuring different things. What matters practically is that 180 genuine starting points is a healthy library, and that the designs are contemporary rather than the dated grids this price bracket used to imply. One documented constraint is worth knowing before you start: you cannot switch templates mid-build without losing the content you have already placed. Choose carefully on day one.

Selling things: the store starts at Unlimited

Ecommerce is not on Premium. If you intend to sell, your entry price is Unlimited at $3.99 a month renewing at $16.99, and you should plan around the second figure. What you get for it is better than the price suggests: Hostinger charges no transaction fee of its own, so the only cut taken is your payment processor's, and there are more than a hundred supported payment methods including Stripe with Apple Pay and Google Pay, and PayPal — subject to your country and currency. Inventory tracking, low-stock alerts and appointment scheduling are included. A product ceiling of around 1,000 items is reported by third-party testing; it was not confirmable on Hostinger's own pages on the date of checking, so treat it as approximate. The store is reviewed separately, including where it runs out of road.

Do not confuse this with the separate product Hostinger sells under the name Hostinger Ecommerce, which has its own tiers and its own pricing. That is a different purchase from the store features bundled into the builder, and conflating the two is the most common error in write-ups of this product.

SEO: competent, with two documented gaps

The basics are all present and editable: page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, URL slugs, and an automatically generated sitemap. That covers what the large majority of small sites will ever need. Two absences are documented by independent testing and are worth weighing if you care about search: there is no control over canonical tags, and there is no built-in manager for 301 redirects. The redirect gap is the one that bites, because it is exactly what you need when you restructure a site or migrate one in and want to preserve the old addresses. The SEO panel is assessed in full here.

Leaving: what comes with you

For years the honest answer for every host-bundled builder was: nothing comes with you. That has changed. Hostinger now documents an export from the builder into WordPress that carries regular pages, text, images and other files. What it explicitly does not carry is the website's styles and layout, the online store, integrations, forms, collected form submissions, and SEO settings. So your words and pictures are portable; your site is not. The export procedure and its conditions are fiddly enough to deserve their own page — it needs WordPress 6.5 or newer, application passwords enabled, plugins deactivated and permalinks set to post name.

Moving to any other platform is blunter still. Hostinger's own instruction is to delete the builder site and start again on the new system, with the warning that a deleted site cannot be restored and its content is lost permanently. Export first, verify the export, then delete. In that order, with no exceptions.

Which plan, and who should skip it

If you want one site and will never sell through it, Hostinger's Premium builder plan is correct and $143.52 for four years is a good deal by any standard. If there is any chance of selling, or of a second and third project, go straight to Unlimited: the dollar-a-month difference now is trivial next to the cost of discovering the ceiling later. Cloud Startup is a resource tier, not a feature tier — if you cannot articulate a specific capacity reason for it, you do not need it. There is a longer version of this reasoning on the fit guide.

Skip it if your design is the product. Skip it if you need canonical control or managed redirects. Skip it if the site is a stepping stone you expect to rebuild elsewhere in two years, because the part you will most want to take — the look of it — is precisely the part that stays behind. And skip the four-year term specifically if you are not confident the project will outlive the second year; the twelve-month rate costs about a dollar more per month and buys back an enormous amount of optionality.

Scored at 7.4, then, and the score is mostly about price behaviour rather than software quality. The builder is a 8-and-a-bit product; the renewal curve takes the edge off it. Go in knowing the second number and it is hard to feel cheated by any of this.