A Bolt.new alternative built around getting the site live

Bolt.new is a well-known in-browser AI builder, and generating something impressive in a browser tab is genuinely the fun part. The awkward part comes after: the site is good, and now it has to exist at a real address, with a real domain, real meta tags and some way to know whether anyone visited.

That gap is where a lot of AI-built projects quietly die. Siteglade is organized around closing it. Publishing is not an export step bolted on at the end — it is a button in the same view as the preview, available on every plan including Free.

This page walks the whole distance from prompt to public URL, and is honest about which pieces are paid.

The distance between "it looks great" and "it is live"

A generated project has to clear several small hurdles before it is a website. Each one is trivial in isolation and collectively they are where momentum goes to die: somewhere to host it, a build that works outside the tool that made it, a domain, DNS records that propagate, HTTPS, a title and description that are not the framework default, a social preview image, and some measurement.

When you evaluate any AI builder, run the whole distance before you judge it. Generate a small site and try to get it onto a domain you own the same afternoon. You will learn more from that than from any feature grid, including this one.

• Does the free tier publish a real production URL, or only an internal preview?
• Can you attach a domain you already own, and does the tool generate the DNS records for you?
• Who ends up owning the domain — you at a registrar, or the platform on your behalf?
• Can you send a private link to a client before anything goes public?
• Are the title, description, favicon and social image editable without touching code?

Publishing is on every plan, including Free

Siteglade publishes projects to real hosting through Vercel, and production publishing is available on every tier. A Free deploy lives on the generated deployment URL and keeps a small Siteglade badge; Pro and Max remove the badge and unlock custom domains. Nothing about the deployment itself is a paid feature.

That decision is deliberate. A builder where the free tier cannot produce a public URL is a demo, not a tool — you cannot show a client, you cannot test on a real phone over cellular, and you cannot tell whether the thing actually works outside the preview sandbox.

Separately from production publishing there are share links: a tokenized public preview URL that lets you send work in progress to someone without deploying it. Useful for the "before we go live, does this read right to you?" round.

Domains, DNS and who actually owns the name

On Pro and Max, Siteglade searches domain availability and shows at-cost pricing through Cloudflare Registrar, then hands the actual purchase off to the registrar checkout. Siteglade is never the merchant of record for a domain, which means the registration sits with you at a registrar you can log into, transfer from, or point somewhere else entirely.

If you already own the domain — the more common case for anyone rebuilding an existing site — Siteglade generates the DNS records you need and verifies them automatically once they propagate. There is no manual copying of certificate challenge strings.

This is worth checking carefully with any platform. "Custom domain support" can mean the platform registers and holds the name, which is fine right up until the day you want to leave.

Builds that repair themselves

The most frustrating failure mode in browser-based AI building is a broken preview with no obvious cause: the agent edited four files, one of them is wrong, and now you are debugging code you did not write.

Siteglade runs a bounded automatic repair loop when a build breaks its own preview, and reports what it is doing while it works. It is not magic and it is not unlimited — it makes a fixed number of attempts and then tells you it could not — but it removes the most common class of interruption without you switching into debugging mode.

The preview itself is sandboxed server-side and updates live while files are being edited, so you see problems as they appear rather than at the end of a long run.

When Bolt.new is honestly the better pick

If you are exploring an idea rather than shipping a site — trying five approaches in an hour, throwing four away — a fast in-browser scratchpad is exactly the right tool, and the publishing pipeline you are not using is dead weight.

Same if your project is not really a website. Anything whose value is in server-side logic, background jobs or a package you intend to publish is not what Siteglade is shaped around, even though it supports app, workflow and presentation project types alongside sites.

Use Siteglade when the site needs to exist at an address and stay there.

Last updated: 2026-08-16