Bolt.new Website Builder: Build, Publish and Host a Site

Bolt.new (Bolt) can take a website or landing page from a plain-language prompt to a live address without a separate host. You describe the page or open a template, adjust text and styling in the preview, then click Publish. The site goes live on a free bolt.host address on every plan, Free included. Free sites stay public, carry the Made in Bolt badge and share a hard cap of 10 GB of bandwidth and 333,333 requests a month. Your own domain, badge removal, private sites, SEO boosting and analytics need a paid plan, starting with Pro at 10M tokens a month for $25 per month billed monthly or $18 per month billed yearly ($216 a year) ^[1].

Getting a first draft: a prompt or a template

Bolt accepts several starting points: a blank prompt, a marketplace template, uploaded files, a Figma frame, a Google Stitch design or an existing GitHub repo. For a site, the first two carry most of the work. A good prompt names the page's job, its sections and where leads should land. Bolt's landing-page guide suggests storing form leads in Bolt Database or sending them to email, a CRM webhook or a spreadsheet through an integration or a server function. The output is JavaScript-based code you can open and edit, not a frozen page layout.

Marketplace templates are free to start, but customizing one spends tokens like any other project, and your copy is no longer tied to the template afterward. In July 2025 Bolt published five templates, a landing page among them, pitching templates as a way to spend fewer tokens than a blank start. Bolt says its templates ship with SEO defaults such as semantic markup, meta tags and Open Graph tags. Treat that as a checklist, not a finish line. Check each tag before launch.

Each prompt draws on your token balance, and the cost per change rises as the site grows, because Bolt reads project files with every message; the pricing guide explains how that plays out per plan. For a bigger restructure, Bolt recommends Plan Mode first. It plans without touching code and uses fewer tokens than Build Mode, though not zero. Free accounts get 1M tokens a month with a 300K daily limit, so the daily limit can be reached on at most three full days a month; Bolt's help center sample app used about 204K tokens for a first build and about 70K for a small change.

Images, uploads and heavy media

Anyone can upload jpg, jpeg, png, gif, webp or svg files. Bolt resizes attached images to about 1,500 pixels on the longest side and cannot process images over 16 MP, so crop hero photos first. Uploads are accepted up to 10MB on Free and 100MB on paid plans, but Bolt reads attachments only up to 5 MB each: a larger attachment is rejected when you send the prompt. AI image editing and generation are paid-plan features, off by default until you switch them on in account settings. Generation uses significantly more tokens than text prompts and saves WebP files. A large 3D model can exceed the upload limit; Bolt's blog workaround places the file in the project's public folder.

Polishing the page without spending tokens on every tweak

Click Select in the preview, on any plan, and you can change text and styling directly on the page. Making those edits is free. Tokens are spent only when you save, and saving every change on a page as one batch costs fewer tokens than describing each one in chat. The limits are real: no dragging, no rearranging layout, no bulk change across many elements, and no moving between pages while Select is on. Layout changes still need a prompt. A saved batch cannot be undone on its own, only through version history.

For a typo, a phone number or a color value, Code view is cheaper still. Edits in the in-browser editor and terminal use no tokens, though Code view is read-only on Safari and on mobile, and version history does not cover direct code edits. Bolt saves a version after every processed prompt, and restoring one costs nothing, which beats asking the agent to undo its own work. One trap matters for sites with forms. Restoring a version rolls back code, never the database. Export your lead data first.

Going live on bolt.host

The Publish button puts the project on a bolt.host address with no third-party account, and it uses no tokens; typing a publish request into the chat does spend them ^[2]. After the first publish, edits stay in the editor until you click Update, and a deployment takes about a minute. Only the owner, Editors and Co-owners can publish. Viewers cannot. A project must stay under 100MB of combined file size, or the deploy stops with a project-too-large error.

Public sites can be found and listed by search engines. Private published sites, shared with invited emails, need a paid plan; on Free every published site is public, even when the project behind it is private. Teams adds whitelisting a whole email domain and lets admins force every team site to Private only or Public only. One rule catches people out: a site on a custom domain can only be public, so a private client preview means disconnecting the domain first.

Free sites and previews show the Made in Bolt badge, and any paid plan removes it after a refresh or a re-publish. Paid plans also get a security audit in the Publish menu that reviews code and database, fixes most issues automatically and spends no tokens; the narrower database security check runs on every plan. A static brochure page has little to audit. A page that stores sign-ups does. Run the audit before you share the link.

Hosting limits belong to the account, not the site

These allowances cover the whole Bolt account, so every published site draws on one pool ^[3]. Three small Free sites do not get three caps. Bolt estimates that Free hosting handles around 10,000 to 15,000 monthly visits and Pro often 100,000 or more, depending on page size. That is Bolt's estimate, and image-heavy pages burn bandwidth faster than text. Bolt publishes no pay-as-you-go rate, so decide on a spending cap before a launch or an ad campaign sends traffic.

Paid-plan polish: your own domain, SEO Boosting and analytics

Custom domains need a paid plan, and a domain connects only to a published site. You can buy one inside Bolt once billing is set up, or point an external domain at Bolt with a www CNAME and a root ALIAS, ANAME or flattened CNAME to site-dns.bolt.host, using an A record as the fallback. Domains bought in Bolt usually connect in 5 to 10 minutes; external DNS can take up to 24 hours. SSL is automatic, but it fails if a Cloudflare proxy sits on Bolt's records. Set them to DNS only.

Buying through Bolt comes with terms worth reading before checkout ^[4]. Purchases are final and non-refundable. A new domain is locked for 60 days. Auto-renew is on by default at the renewal cost shown at checkout, and the card is charged 1 month and 5 days before the renewal date, with a retry 5 days before; stopping auto-renew takes a support request. After a project transfer, a Bolt-bought domain cannot be reconnected until it expires. A .ai name needs a 2-year first registration, WHOIS privacy is included where the extension supports it, and each account can buy up to 10 domains at the start. Bolt publishes no domain prices. Checkout shows them.

Search visibility and traffic numbers

Public sites are indexable on any plan. SEO Boosting, a paid feature, goes further: it pre-renders a ready-made HTML version of each page so search engines receive the full page at once. Bolt's landing-page guide says the SEO title and meta description can be set inside Bolt. The built-in skills library also carries a curated SEO/GEO skill, off by default, that you can switch on; skills work on every plan, and turning more of them on uses no tokens.

Built-in hosting analytics come only with paid plans: visitors, pageviews, top pages, bandwidth, traffic sources, locations and 404 pages, for up to the last 30 days. Read them with care. Crawler and bot visits are counted, and there is no built-in way to filter them out, so totals can run above real human traffic. For longer history or campaign attribution, Google Analytics or Matomo can be added by embedding their tracking code in the site.

When Netlify is the better home

Bolt hosting is the default; Netlify is an optional host for people who want deployment history, logs and advanced configuration. It fits only sites that run entirely in the browser. Netlify cannot host a database or a traditional backend, so a landing page that stores leads in Bolt Database has to stay on Bolt hosting. Bolt states no plan gate for Netlify publishing itself, while editing the generated netlify.app address is Teams only. A build can also be dropped onto Netlify by hand without linking a Bolt account.

Switching hosts works at any time once the project is unpublished, but custom domains do not carry over and must be added again in the Netlify dashboard. Team admins can set a default deploy provider of Bolt Cloud, Netlify or user-specified for every team project. If the site will grow into sign-ups, file storage or payments, our Bolt Cloud guide covers the database and auth side.

The bottom line

Bolt fits a founder, marketer or small agency that wants a landing page or small business site live the same day, with room to add a form, sign-in or database later in the same project. Free is enough to publish and test a public page, under the badge and an account-wide traffic cap that switches sites off when reached. A real launch, meaning your own domain, no badge, SEO Boosting and analytics, starts on Pro. Before choosing, check how far Free stretches in our Free plan breakdown, and cap pay-as-you-go spending once you upgrade.