What If a Website Builder Intentionally Couldn't Do Most Things?
That question sounds crazy coming from a maker, right? I mean, we usually chase feature checklists. But a few years ago, while trying to throw together a simple landing page for myself, I hit a wall with every tool I touched. WordPress buried me in menus. Wix felt like a maze of templates and popups. Even those GitHub template repos required me to understand build tools. I kept thinking: there has to be a simpler way.
So I decided to build my own, and the first rule I set was that it would only do one thing. A single, beautiful page. No sub-pages. No blog posts. No e-commerce. The product's narrow focus would be its whole identity.
That became Carrd: a one-page website builder that's easy to use, responsive by default, and capable of cranking out a gorgeous site in under 5 minutes. If you can accept what it won't do.
Why I Started with the Generator (and Not the Fancy Stuff)
Early on, I sketched out the idea for what I called the "site spec", a simple mental model of how a page would be built. But I knew I couldn't just dream about it. I had to build something real to pressure-test that spec.
So I started with the Generator, the engine that takes elements and turns them into a real, live page. It was the heart of the project. If the Generator was slow, buggy, or confusing, the whole idea would fall apart. Building it first meant I could fire a real site onto the web and see if my assumptions held up. All looked great on paper, but how would it play out in practice?
That approach, build the engine before the polish, forced me to confront hard constraints early. For example, I had originally planned for a far more elaborate Links element. But when I actually tried to implement it, I realized it would break the simple stack pattern. So I stripped it down. But they could have a richer link system? Not if it ruined the user experience. I said no.
The Hardest Lesson: When Ambition Bites You (My CSS Optimizer Story)
Here's where I get embarrassingly honest. I wrote a CSS optimizer for Carrd early on that was, frankly, overambitious. It tried to merge, minify, and even inline critical CSS automatically. It was clever. And it was buggy as hell.
Before launch, I had to make a painful choice: ship with an imperfect optimizer or ship with nothing. I stripped out all CSS optimizations and launched with raw, unminified CSS. The sites looked exactly the same, just a few extra bytes in the source. Nobody noticed.
Only recently have I started re-implementing those optimizations, but this time much less ambitiously. The lesson stuck: it's better to ship something simple that works than something clever that breaks. Short of me royally screwing up the core builder, users care about speed and reliability more than elegant code.
Dogfooding Revealed What Actually Matters
After launch, I ported my own personal site to Carrd. That move, dogfooding my own product, surfaced the next must-have feature almost immediately. I wanted a gallery to show off photos, but the existing elements didn't support a clean image grid. So I built the Gallery element.
That's the pattern: instead of guessing what users want, I use the tool myself and feel the pain. Every feature added after launch, the form element, the button icons, the custom domain support, came from me or early users hitting a real need. The product's narrow focus meant I could only add things that fit the stack. No bloated widgets. Just what made sense for a one-page site.
Pricing That Reflects Simplicity
I've always believed pricing should be as straightforward as the product. So Carrd has three Pro plans, each defined by one number: how many sites you can publish.
- Pro Standard — $19/year for 10 sites. No branding, custom domains, higher-quality images. That's it.
- Pro Standard 100 — $119/year for 100 sites.
- Pro Plus — $999/year for 1,000 sites.
What You Really Get: A Simple Stack of Elements
Let me demystify how Carrd works. The entire builder is built around a simple "stack" of elements. You add blocks like text, image, button, video, or form, and they stack vertically on the page. You don't choose a layout; you are the layout. That makes it fast to create because there's no grid to learn. And because everything is vertical, every site is automatically responsive. It wasn't 2006. Mobile-first wasn't optional anymore.
Simply built. You pick a template, swap your content, publish. Customizable. You can tweak colors, fonts, spacing, and background images to make it yours. Responsive. It just works on phones, tablets, and desktops.
Much to my surprise, the results were good. Really good. People started using Carrd for event pages, wedding RSVPs, business landing pages, even simple portfolios. The feedback kept coming: "It's the only tool that didn't make me feel stupid."
The Bottom Line
Carrd isn't for everyone. If you need a 50-page website with a blog and a store, this isn't it. But if you want that one page, the one you've been procrastinating on because everything else feels like overkill, Carrd is the simplest path from idea to live site. A natural limit to its complexity is actually its superpower.
Ready to try? Pick a template, add your content, and hit publish. You might be surprised at how quickly you get a site that looks like you spent hours on it, when you really spent five minutes.