Comparison
DesignDeck compared with Bolt
Bolt, made by StackBlitz, describes itself as an AI app and website builder: you type what you want, it writes the code and publishes the result, and there are starting points for dashboards, storefronts and portfolios to fork.2 Its free plan includes hosting.1 If you want to build something that does not exist yet, it is a capable place to start.
For a business website the trade looks different. A generated site is a draft, and every round of fixing it costs tokens, more of them as the project grows.1 DesignDeck removes the draft stage: the site is designed and animated already, and filling it in is a form.
What Bolt is
Bolt's own pricing page lists Free, Pro at $25 a month, Teams at $30 a month per member and a custom Enterprise plan, with annual billing saving up to 28%.1 The free plan allows 300,000 tokens a day and 1 million a month, shows Bolt branding on the published site and includes hosting for up to 333,000 web requests a month; a custom domain and removing the branding need Pro.1
Tokens are spent syncing the project to the AI, so the pricing page itself notes that larger projects use more tokens per message. Unused tokens on paid plans roll over for one extra month.1 Projects can sync to GitHub, with Bolt committing each working change automatically.3
The criticism that recurs in reviews is cost under iteration: Bolt often rewrites whole files rather than making a small edit, so fixing one bug can break something that worked and spend tokens on both.4 One review reported Bolt's Trustpilot score at 1.5 out of 5 across 202 reviews as of 1 September 2026, with complaints centred on tokens spent on the tool's own mistakes.5 Review sites overweight unhappy customers, so read that as a signal about how predictable the cost is rather than a verdict on the product.
What is different here
Nothing is generated for you on the spot, so nothing needs regenerating. Each deck is a finished site, designed and animated to one standard before it went on the shelf, and you can open it and scroll it before you decide. You fill in one form and it is live on a real address in under a minute, with your words and pictures in place of ours.
The price does not move with how much you change. A plan here is flat and monthly, hosting and upkeep included, and editing the site through its edit link costs nothing extra. What you give up is Bolt's reach: there is no code to take away, no database to design and no feature beyond what the deck already does.
From $9.99 a month, and the preview is free.
Side by side
| DesignDeck | Bolt | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the site comes from | Finished before you arrive, then filled in with your details | Generated from a prompt, or forked from a starting template2 |
| What changes cost | Nothing extra; the plan is flat | Tokens, more per message as the project grows1 |
| Free tier | Live and shareable before you pay anything | 1 million tokens a month, Bolt branding, hosting included1 |
| Custom domain | On the plans that carry it, see pricing | Pro and above, from $25 a month1 |
| Code | We host it and never sell the code | Syncs to your GitHub repository3 |
When Bolt is the better buy
- You are building an app, a tool or a prototype, and you want the code.
- You want to fork a dashboard or storefront template and turn it into something of your own.
- Your project needs a database, sign-in or logic that a finished website does not have.
- A free plan with hosting and a daily token allowance covers what you are making.
What you would actually be getting
Each of these is a running site, not a screenshot of one. Open it, then put your own name in it.
Questions people ask first
Why not just ask Bolt for a site like one of these decks?
You can, and you will get a site. Whether it moves like a deck, reads like one and holds together on a phone depends on how many rounds of prompting you are prepared to pay for in tokens.1 Here those rounds happened once, before the deck went on the shelf.
Is Bolt free?
It has a free plan with hosting, a daily and monthly token cap and Bolt branding on the site; a custom domain needs Pro at $25 a month.1 Here the site is live and shareable before you pay anything, and a plan is what keeps it.
Which one is better for a small business?
If the business needs software, Bolt. If it needs to be found, trusted and contacted, a finished site does that on the first day, and nobody has to maintain the code behind it.
Sources
Prices and features checked 2026-09-24. Every figure above about Boltcame from one of these pages. Where our research could not confirm a number against the vendor’s own pricing page, the sentence says so.