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🧰 The Future of Websites is Here (No Coding Needed)
Published about 1 month ago • 6 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: AI website builders that are more than just hype.
I remember one of the first AI website builders I heard about was "The Grid." A promising idea that, in the end, didn't quite deliver on its revolutionary promise – that was a few years ago, and AI was more ‘artificial’ than ‘intelligent’.
But we all know that has changed, and AI is now way more developed. A new wave of tools has emerged that can genuinely create impressive websites and even complex web apps in minutes.
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If you’re looking to build something more complex than a simple portfolio website, Horizons (by Hostinger) is one of the most impressive AI tools I’ve seen. It’s not just a website builder; it’s a full-on web app builder.
Unlike traditional website builders that lock you into templates, Horizons generates unique, responsive designs based on your prompts – can even share screenshots for reference. But its real power lies in the backend. It can handle databases, set up payment integrations, so you can create fully custom membership sites without having to mess with code and/or plugins.
Additionally, it can connect with external APIs. This means you can build complex applications like a stock market screener (I’ve done this in the past). In the video above, I built a lead‑magnet app to capture contact details from potential Amazon store owners. It worked in the end, but took lots of back‑and‑forth – very typical of vibe‑coding, AI just won’t get it right on the first go.
In general, I prefer these types of website and app builders over traditional AI website builders, even for simple projects. They use more advanced AI, so the designs and copy feel much more personalized. Traditional builders often feel a bit too template-like to me and there is always a lot of manual tweaking needed.
If you’re a fan of WordPress but want to speed up your workflow with AI, 10Web is an interesting tool to consider. It’s an AI-powered platform that uses WordPress to power its AI Builder.
10Web’s AI can generate a complete, custom website with content and images in minutes. It then gives you a drag-and-drop editor, built on Elementor, to customize every detail. Beyond the builder, it offers managed hosting on Google Cloud, real-time backups, security checks, and performance optimization so you have to deal with less hassles.
But hey, you’re still left with a WordPress site, and keeping it running smoothly (updates, new features, and fixing whatever breaks) quickly becomes part of your day‑to‑day grind.
If you want to build an online store, you can do that with 10Web too. And yes, it runs on WooCommerce, the well-known WordPress ecommerce framework, which means your store can scale big time if needed.
🛠️ Alternative to: Manual WordPress development, Divi AI, Elementor AI
For tech-curious users who want the power of AI without taking a programming course, Google’s Firebase Studio is an interesting one. It’s a cloud-based, agentic development environment powered by Gemini, and it lets you create sites and apps in minutes, for free (at least for now).
Firebase Studio can generate a fully functional web app, starting with Next.js (you don’t even need to know what this is), from prompts, images, or even sketches. You can then switch into a full coding workspace if you want to refine the architecture or add more features. Since it sits inside the Google ecosystem, you get a huge range of tools to integrate with.
🤓 Geek alert: You don’t need to be a developer to use it, but you do need to be at least somewhat technical. If looking at a website’s source code makes you dizzy, this one might not be for you.
It’s a free alternative to Lovable and Horizons. I even used it to create a flip-card game for my niece and nephew in just a few minutes, although I did have to do a bit more debugging than with other tools. Still, it’s a great way to dip your toes into no-code and low-code development.
AnythingLLM is a brilliant open-source tool that lets you create your own private, customizable AI assistants. It works with text, PDFs, images, videos, and more, allowing you to build a chatbot that knows your business inside and out.
What’s truly powerful is its flexibility. You’re not locked into one AI provider. You can switch between different large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or even open-source models. It even includes a visual agent builder to create complex, multi-step workflows without writing any code. You can use it to build customer support bots, internal knowledge bases, or even a personal research assistant.
Lately, I’ve been using it intensively and figured out a way to have an AI Assistant for free. Check out this week’s hack (below) to find out how I did this.
In the off-topic tool section, we talked about AnythingLLM, a powerful tool for creating your own AI assistant. But what if you could run it for free, without paying for expensive API access from OpenAI or Anthropic?
Free ChatGPT alternative: step by step video
Enter OpenRouter. It’s a service that gives you access to a huge variety of large language models, including many powerful open-source options that are completely free to use (e.g. Llama 3.3).
By combining AnythingLLM with OpenRouter, you can create a completely free, self-hosted AI assistant. Here’s how it works:
Set up AnythingLLM on your computer. Download the app.
Get an API key from OpenRouter (register first).
Connect OpenRouter to AnythingLLM as your LLM provider – paste the API key under AI Providers > LLM.
Note: If you know someone who you think would be interested in having a free ChatGPT or Claude clone, I’d love it if you could share this newsletter with them!
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
A few months ago, Spain experienced a massive power outage, and the whole country went powerless. It started around noon, and the situation grew increasingly unsettling as the hours passed. As you can imagine, it caused quite a bit of chaos here, and effectively wrote off an entire day’s work for our Tooltester team, who are mostly based in Barcelona.
At my place, everything is electric. We couldn’t warm up the milk for our twins, and our lunch consisted of canned tuna and pickled onions – that was a sad lunch. I had a phone signal at first, but eventually, my battery died. I ended up in the car, charging my phone and listening to the news, trying to piece together what was happening.
By the next day, everything was back to normal, but that half-day felt apocalyptic. It was a stark reminder of how fragile our systems are and how dependent we’ve become on a constant flow of electricity. It definitely made me reconsider our emergency preparedness!
What caused the blackout? I've read summaries of the report, but I still don’t fully understand what happened. As usual, everyone is blaming someone else. However, it’s estimated that the country lost around €1.66 billion during the blackout, which lasted just under 16 hours.
Next week will be the Winter Holidays, so I won't be sending a newsletter. Happy Winter Holidays.
But the next newsletter will be a look back at 2025, and I'll be sharing my favorite tools — the ones I'll be using intensively in 2026.
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