AI Website Builder Credits: What Actually Runs Out

Name: Web60
Address: Block B, Maynooth Business Campus, Straffan Rd, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, W23 W5X7, IE
Price range: €60/year

The AI comes free with the plan. That is the assumption almost everyone brings to a modern website builder: describe your business, get a website, then keep asking the assistant for changes for as long as the subscription runs. It was close enough to true a couple of years ago. It is not how the biggest builders price their AI now.

Most of them run it on credits. A credit is a unit of AI work: one request to an agent, one drafted campaign, a slice of a phone call answered by a bot. You get a ration. When the ration is gone, the AI stops until it refills or you pay for more. None of this is hidden, exactly. The help centres spell it out quite clearly. It just is not on the page where you type in your card details, and in my experience almost nobody reads the help centre before they sign up.

That gap matters. The CSO's latest enterprise survey, published in February, found roughly one in five Irish enterprises used AI in any form during 2025, and closer to one in six among small firms (the survey's smallest band, which starts at ten staff). Most business owners are new to this. New buyers are exactly the people least likely to go looking for a credit policy. So let me take the myths apart one at a time.

Myth One: The AI Is Included in the Price

Wix is admirably plain about how its credits work, and its help centre deserves credit (sorry) for that. On a free plan you can use up to 30 credits a day, capped at 120 a month. All new premium plans include credits, renewing monthly from the date you bought the plan. Wix even publishes an estimate of what they buy: somewhere around 150 agent actions a month on its entry Light plan, rising to roughly 1,000 on Business Elite, with a warning that complex requests use more and that the counts are not guaranteed.

Then come the two lines I would underline. Unused credits do not roll over. And it is not currently possible to buy top-up credits on a premium plan. Need more in a busy month? You upgrade.

To be fair to Wix, chatting with Aria, its main assistant, is free and uses no credits. The meter applies to the agents that do work for you: the custom agent, Smart Chat on your site, the marketing agent and the AI phone agent, which charges by the length of the call.

Included Is Not the Same as Unlimited

So the AI is included. A fixed amount of it is included. "Included" and "unlimited" are different words, and only one of them tends to appear on a pricing page.

What does that mean in an ordinary working month? An owner on an entry plan who leans on the agents for site chat, a couple of marketing drafts and the odd page rewrite can plausibly run dry in the second or third week of a busy month. From there the choices are simple and none of them are great: wait, pay for a bigger plan for the rest of the term, or do the work by hand.

Credits are a unit of AI work. Most plans hand out a fixed number each month.

Myth Two: Once the Site Is Built, You Have Stopped Paying for AI

GoDaddy's Airo AI Builder runs on the same principle, and its help page draws the boundary neatly. Credits are spent whenever you use the builder's agents, including its chat. Previewing, publishing, connecting a domain, uploading media, restoring an earlier version and making non-AI edits cost nothing. You get a free monthly allowance. When it runs out, a message tells you when the allowance resets and offers an upgrade. Credits you buy expire a year after purchase and only work inside the GoDaddy account where you bought them.

Read that list of free actions again. Building and publishing are the cheap bit. What the meter tracks is the conversation, the ongoing back and forth where you ask the AI to change your opening hours, rewrite a service description or add a page for the new van.

That is the part a non-technical owner actually wanted the AI for. The metered product is not the website. It is your ongoing ability to change the website without learning an editor.

When the Ration Runs Out Mid-Month

Consider a composite case, built from the kind of thing that turns up more often than you would expect. A canoe-hire outfit on the Shannon-Erne Waterway in Leitrim is winding down for the season in late October. That means cutting daily departures to weekends, pulling the summer family offer and adding a line about winter group bookings. The owner built the site by chatting to an AI and has made every change that way since.

Halfway through the month the credits are gone. The site still says daily departures. A family drives an hour on a wet Tuesday and finds the slipway locked and nobody answering the phone.

That is not a software fault. It is a one-star review with a photo of a padlock attached, and it happened because the cheapest way to fix a sentence on the site was suddenly behind a meter.

Myth Three: Unlimited Prompts Means Unlimited AI

WordPress.com took a different route with its AI builder. When it launched in April 2025, TechCrunch reported that it gave you 30 free prompts before you had to choose a hosting plan, that paid plans included unlimited prompts, and that an AI-built site needed the Premium plan (USD 96 a year at launch) or the Business plan before it could go public. Terms may have shifted since, so verify the current plan page before relying on those figures.

I would rather see that model than a ration. It is more honest, and the output is WordPress, which you can take elsewhere later.

But notice where the meter moved. It did not disappear. The plan tier became the meter, and that tier is where the platform decides everything else you get. Unlimited prompts on a plan you have to keep upgrading is still a meter. It just has a nicer face.

Myth Four: When Credits Run Out, You Can Just Edit It Yourself

This one is half true, which makes it the most dangerous of the four. Wix's own advice for owners running low is to switch to manual edits for smaller tasks. GoDaddy's non-AI edits are free. So yes, you can always fall back to the editor.

The question is which editor you are falling back to.

A Closed Editor Versus One You Keep

On a closed builder, the skills you pick up in its editor stay inside that platform. So does your content, in most of the ways that matter. If the platform changes its prices at renewal, as Squarespace customers discovered with Squarespace's renewal price rises this summer, the time you spent learning its editor is part of what keeps you there.

WordPress is different because it is not one company's editor. As of this morning, W3Techs reports WordPress running roughly four in ten of all websites, and closer to six in ten of the sites whose content system it can identify. An afternoon spent learning the WordPress block editor is an afternoon you never have to repeat, whoever hosts you next and whoever you hire to help.

When the first AI builders arrived I told a few people the credit systems were a launch-phase quirk that would fade as computing got cheaper. I was wrong about that. Computing did get cheaper and the credit systems spread anyway, which tells me they have as much to do with pricing tiers as with the cost of running the models.

The Meter, Platform by Platform

Set side by side, the three builders above compare with Web60 like this on the one question that matters: what happens when you need the AI and the allowance is gone. Figures come from each platform's own help pages or launch coverage and will change, so treat this as a snapshot from October 2026.

Platform	What the meter counts	When it runs out
Wix	AI credits for its agents (Smart Chat, marketing agent, phone agent). Aria chat is free.	Wait for the monthly renewal or upgrade. No top-ups on premium plans, no rollover.
GoDaddy Airo AI Builder	Credits for agent actions, including the builder chat.	Wait for the monthly reset or buy credits, which expire after a year.
WordPress.com AI builder	30 free prompts at launch, then a paid plan is needed.	Prompts are unlimited on paid plans. The plan tier is the meter.
Web60	No per-feature charges. One price covers the platform.	Nothing to run out. Everyday edits happen in standard WordPress.

When the allowance runs out, what matters is the path you are left on.

What a Fair AI Website Deal Looks Like

Strip the brand names out and a fair deal on an AI-built website has four properties.

The limit is visible before you pay. If the AI is rationed, the ration is on the sign-up page, not three clicks deep in a help article.
Running out never freezes your own content. You can still change your prices, hours and offers the same day, for nothing, without waiting for a monthly reset.
The fallback editor is one you keep. Whatever you learn, you learn once, and it travels with you if you ever leave.
You own the result. The site, the content and the data are yours to export, move or hand to anyone.

Web60 was built to that standard. The AI Website Builder does the heavy lifting at the start: you describe your business and get a fully designed WordPress site in under a minute. From then on it is full WordPress, with the entire plugin and theme ecosystem, edited in the same block editor that runs a huge share of the web. There is no per-feature charge sitting behind the AI, because Web60's €60/year all-inclusive price covers hosting, SSL, nightly backups, security and analytics, with no hidden fees and no upsells.

The backups matter more here than they might seem. An owner editing by hand for the first time will eventually break a page. Without a backup, that means rebuilding the page from memory while customers look at the wreckage. On Web60, automatic nightly backups with one-click restore mean the worst case is a rollback to last night's version, and a safety snapshot is taken automatically before updates and restores.

If you want to see where AI credits sit inside the wider bill, this breakdown of the full cost of a small business website in Ireland puts every line item side by side.

Where a Metered Builder Genuinely Wins

There is one case where I would not argue. If what you actually want is an AI that answers your phone, books callers in and replies to website chat at midnight while you are out on a job, the all-in-one builders with metered phone and chat agents are selling something Web60 does not. A busy two-chair barber who misses calls all afternoon might find a metered phone agent worth every credit. That is a real product for a real problem. It is just not a website problem, and it is worth pricing separately from the site itself.

The Honest Limitation

Web60's AI builds the site. It is not a chat agent you instruct for every later change. Day-to-day edits happen in the WordPress editor, and getting comfortable there takes an afternoon, not a minute. For most owners that afternoon is a one-off cost that pays back every week afterwards. Anyone who never wants to open an editor under any circumstances will find it a genuine cost, and I would rather say so here than have you find out after sign-up.

Read the Meter Before You Read the Price

The headline monthly fee on a website builder tells you less than it used to. The more useful question is what the AI allowance covers, what happens on the day it runs out, and which editor you are left holding when it does.

Ask those three things of any platform you are considering, Web60 included. If the answers are clear, the AI is a genuine help. If they are buried, budget for the meter as well as the plan, and choose the editor you are willing to fall back on before the day a sentence on your site needs fixing in a hurry.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are AI credits on a website builder?

AI credits are a monthly allowance of AI work included with a website builder plan. Each request to an AI agent, such as drafting a page, running site chat or answering a phone call, uses some of that allowance. When the credits are gone, the AI features that use them stop until the allowance renews or you pay for more. Ordinary manual editing usually stays free.

Do Wix AI credits roll over to the next month?

No. Wix says unused AI credits do not roll over to the next credit cycle. Credits on premium plans renew monthly from the date you bought your plan, and Wix says it is not currently possible to buy top-up credits on premium plans, so the way to get more is to upgrade. On the free plan you can use up to 30 credits a day, up to 120 a month.

What happens to my website when the AI credits run out?

Your website stays online. What stops is the AI work that uses credits, such as agent chat, marketing drafts or AI phone answering. Both Wix and GoDaddy still let you make manual, non-AI edits for free, so you can change content by hand while you wait for the allowance to reset, upgrade, or, on GoDaddy, buy extra credits that expire a year after purchase.

Is the WordPress.com AI website builder free?

You can try it free. When it launched in April 2025, TechCrunch reported 30 free prompts before you had to choose a hosting plan, unlimited prompts on paid plans, and a paid plan needed before an AI-built site could go public. Check the current WordPress.com plan page, as terms may have changed since launch.

Does Web60 charge for AI credits?

Web60 costs €60 a year, all-inclusive, with no per-feature charges and no hidden fees. The AI Website Builder creates a fully designed WordPress site from your description in under a minute, and from then on you edit it in the standard WordPress editor, so changing your content is never tied to a monthly AI allowance.

AI Website Builder Credits: The Meter Nobody Mentions When You Sign Up