Wix Built an AI Builder for the Wrong Job
Wix has a new AI website builder. Plug in a prompt, get a polished site in ten minutes. The demo is great. The output is real. The pricing is fine for what it is.
It still solves the wrong problem for coaches.
If you run a coaching business in 2026, you don't ship a website. You ship pages. A webinar opt-in for next month's launch. A sales page for the new $497 group program. A replay page after the live event runs. A lead magnet for the email list that warms cold subscribers in the background. That's four pages from one launch. You'll do three or four launches a year. Twelve to sixteen pages, none of which need to know about each other, all of which need to be live within hours of needing them.
That's not a website. That's a stream of pages.
What Wix's tier structure actually says
Wix has four paid plans as of 2026, per Crafty Base's pricing breakdown and confirmed across Tooltester's review and Cost Bench's analysis:
- Light: $17/month (annual billing). No ecommerce.
- Core: $29/month. Where ecommerce starts. The minimum tier for selling anything.
- Business: $39/month. More ecommerce features.
- Business Elite: $159/month. Large-scale ecommerce.
If you're a coach selling a $497 cohort program, your floor is $29/month. That's $348 per year. For a single product. Where you use maybe 8% of the platform's surface area.
The pricing assumes you have "a site" with multiple pages and ecommerce inventory. You don't. You have one page selling one thing. Then a different page selling a different thing two months later. Then another. The platform is billing you for capabilities you'll never use because the underlying mental model thinks of your business as a website.
This is the drag-and-drop tax. You pay every month for capabilities you don't use because the product was built around a job you don't have anymore.
What the AI builder doesn't fix
The new AI builder generates the site faster. Generate, edit, ship. The output is real, the speed is real, the polish is fine.
It's the same product. Templates. Section libraries. Style controls. Storage allocations. SEO settings for the site you're building. The AI cuts the time from days to ten minutes. It does not change what the platform is selling. You're still buying "your website" billed monthly. Two months later you ship a new offer and you're back in the same editor, fighting the same template logic, paying the same $29/month for the same monolithic frame.
The build got cheaper. The job hasn't changed.
What coaches actually need
Page as the unit. AI as the builder. Publish layer as the hosting. Custom domain. Stripe takes the money. Email runs on its own list. Each page lives at its own URL. None of them know about the others. The platform doesn't bill you for "the site," because there is no site.
Carrd is an editor. HTML Pub is a description. They design. We build. Different category.
The platform that wins the next decade isn't the one with the better drag-and-drop. It's the one that treats the page as the unit and lets whatever AI you already use do the build.
What this means for you
If you're a coach paying $29 a month for Wix Core, look at what you actually used the platform for in the last 90 days. The "site" hasn't moved. Your homepage is the same as last quarter. The offer you're actually running this month either lives somewhere else, or it never got built because the editor friction killed it before launch.
Wix sold you the thing that solved the 2018 problem. They're still selling it. The AI builder is the same product wearing newer clothes.
Stop redoing the website. Ship the next page.
About the author
Michael Sacca is the CEO of Leadpages and HTML Pub. He writes from the founder's seat about the publishing stack solopreneurs actually need.