The short version

All figures captured from carrd.co (homepage) and carrd.co/pro on 2026-09-21 in a proxied Chromium session; the complete plan DOM was dumped, so the site-count ladder below the visible cards is quoted from the page’s own text layer. This is a terms check — no account was created and no site was published.

Carrd is a one-page site builder, and its pricing page sells an unusual idea:

“Go Pro from just $19 / year (yup, per year)”

— while the card underneath that headline is Pro Lite at $9 / year. The $19 is not the cheapest paid plan; it is the cheapest plan that does the two things people actually buy a website builder for. That framing choice is the single most useful thing to understand before trusting any Carrd price summary.

Plan Base price Sites What unlocks at this rung
Free $0 3 Core editor; carrd.co subdomain; “Made with Carrd” branding
Pro Lite $9/yr 3 Removes branding, big images, video upload, site transfers — no custom domains, no forms
Pro Standard $19/yr 10 Custom domain URLs, Forms, Widgets/Embeds, Analytics, Meta tags, Local fonts
Pro Plus $49/yr 25 Advanced Forms, Download Sites, Redirects, Password protection, Variables, canonical/SEO controls

Every paid tier scales into a site-count ladder — $14/$29 (Lite 10/25), $39/$69/$119/$249/$399/$599 (Standard 25→1,000), $89/$159/$349/$599/$999 (Plus 50→1,000) — 16 SKUs in total, all read from the same page DOM on 2026-09-21.

The $9 vs $19 line: what $10 actually buys

The homepage banner links “Go Pro from just $19/year” to a feature list (custom domains, forms, widgets, analytics, no branding). Cross-reading the two plan cards on /pro shows what is missing from the $9 Lite card:

  • Custom Domain URLs — the Lite card lists “Premium URLs” but not “Custom Domain URLs”; that line item first appears on the Standard card. Publishing to a domain you own starts at Standard.
  • Forms and Widgets — contact forms, signup forms (the page names 20 email providers by brand, from ActiveCampaign to Sendy) and embeds (Stripe, PayPal, Gumroad, Typeform) are Standard-and-up.
  • Analytics and Meta tags — Google Analytics/Plausible/Matomo hookup and custom social meta also start at Standard.

So the honest reading: $9 buys a clean-looking free-tier site; $19 buys an actual marketing page. Third-party roundups routinely quote “Carrd from $9/year” — technically true, practically misleading for anyone who needs a custom domain, which is most of the audience the $19 headline is aimed at.

Annual-only, and a 7-day no-card trial

Two mechanics worth knowing before comparing Carrd to the site builders we’ve already checked:

  1. There is no monthly billing at any rung. The /pro page’s own renewal language reads “Automatically renew yearly or simply pay as you go” — yearly is the only commitment printed, and there is no $/mo toggle anywhere on the page. (Framer and Webflow both meter per month — see our Framer pricing check and Webflow pricing check. The full side-by-side, including what the $19 buys across 10 sites, is in Framer vs Carrd.)
  2. The Pro trial is 7 days with no card. Printed verbatim: “Test drive Pro’s top features (like custom domains and advanced forms) free for a full 7 days – no payment or credit card required.” We have not verified Framer/Webflow trial mechanics first-hand (our automated signup attempts on both were blocked, documented in their reviews), so we only note that Carrd’s trial language itself requires no card.

Where Carrd sits against $15–25/mo builders

The price delta is almost comical when put next to the two site builders already on this site (both captured with their own check dates):

Carrd Framer Webflow
Cheapest paid custom-domain rung $19 / year (Pro Standard) $10 / site / month (Basic, yearly) $15 / site / month (Basic, yearly)
Free tier 3 sites, branded subdomain Free plan (Framer subdomain) Free Starter (2 pages)
Card required to try Pro? No (7-day trial) Signup blocked automated tests (server-side) Email signup

Year one with a custom domain on Carrd can sit under $30 all-in (plan + a ~$10 domain); the same year on Framer Basic is $120 per site and on Webflow Basic $180. That is not a quality comparison — it is a scope comparison: Carrd builds one-page sites. The moment you need a blog, CMS, or multi-page product site, the cheapness stops being relevant, and that’s exactly where the Framer vs Webflow breakdown takes over.

What we did not verify

  • No account was created and no site was published — feature behavior inside the editor (element limits on free, real export quality) is quoted from plan text only.
  • The site-count ladder rungs ($14–$999) live inside carousel slides; we read all 16 SKUs from the page’s DOM text dump rather than screenshotting each slide. The visible default state shows only the three base cards.
  • Refund terms: /pro prints no refund language; we did not go looking in help docs for this check, so treat “annual-only, renews yearly” as the stated commitment and refunds as unknown. (Update 2026-09-25: the full terms document has since been read — see Does Carrd Refund? for the clause-level findings.)
  • SSL is listed as included on custom domains (via Let’s Encrypt); we did not verify issuance behavior.

Verdict (terms-level, no score)

No star rating — we did not build anything on Carrd. What the terms support: it is the cheapest credible custom-domain landing page in our entire index by an order of magnitude ($19/yr vs $120–180/yr), with a genuinely no-card trial, and the $9/$19 split is the one number most roundups get wrong in either direction. What it cannot answer without a hands-on: whether a 3-site free tier with full core editor is enough to validate a landing page before you ever pay anything.

Methodology & sources

  • carrd.co (homepage) — captured 2026-09-21 (UTC) in a real Chromium session via proxied exit; free-tier claims (“up to three sites”, “$19 / year”, “Made with Carrd”, 7-day trial) all hit in the rendered text layer. Screenshot above.
  • carrd.co/pro — captured 2026-09-21; visible cards + full 8,138-char plan DOM textContent dump (eval-ops/runs/2026-09-21-carrd-review/), source for every number in this article including the 16-SKU ladder. Note: carrd.co 301s to carrd.com mid-session; same pages either way.
  • Framer and Webflow figures cross-referenced from our own dated captures documented in framer-pricing (2026-09-10) and webflow-pricing (2026-09-12).
  • Checked 2026-09-21. Pricing pages change; re-verify before citing.

More of our Carrd guides: