# MakewebAI

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/makewebai/ · added 2026-11-01 · updated 2026-11-01

**In short.** MakewebAI (AI chat-to-website builder, Not stated in the sources): Sold for US$60K, September 2024. Evidence grade D: reported, not verified. Team: 1 founder (Zishan Sami, who calls himself a solo founder); no employees mentioned. Launched July 2024; sold 2 months after launch.

AI chat-to-website builder · Not stated in the sources · AI-native · solo founder · sold · group: Build software with AI

- Outcome: Sold for US$60K, September 2024 (evidence grade of the headline number: D; headline in US dollars: 60000)
- Launch: July 2024; months from launch to the outcome: 2
- Team: 1 founder (Zishan Sami, who calls himself a solo founder); no employees mentioned
- Outside funding: None; AlternativeTo reported that the business was bootstrapped
- Main factor: Timing
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 2, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Solo founder, Bootstrapped, Exit, B2C

Links:

- Archived makeweb.ai, August 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240811150738/https://makeweb.ai/

**The product.** A website builder where you describe the site in a chat, or upload a screenshot of a page you like, and an AI model generates the page on an editing canvas. You can select a part and ask the AI to change it, publish the site in one click on a subdomain or your own domain, or download the HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

**Why it worked.** It joined the 2024 wave of interest in AI website generation with a small, cheap product built by one engineer. AlternativeTo reported that the founder listed it on Acquire.com at US$18,000 when it had about 30 paying users, and that competing buyers pushed the closed price to US$60,000.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

MakewebAI (makeweb.ai) was an AI website builder: a web application that writes the code of a website from instructions in plain language. The user typed what the site should show, or uploaded a screenshot (a picture of another page), and the tool used large language models, programs trained on huge amounts of text that can also write code, namely OpenAI's GPT-4o and Meta's Llama3-70b, to generate the page from HTML, CSS and the Tailwind CSS framework (a library of ready-made style classes). The result was a static website, pages with no server-side program or database, which MakewebAI hosted on its own subdomain or on the customer's domain.

It was built by Zishan Sami, who describes himself on the product's archived About page as an IIT Kharagpur graduate and a solo founder, and on its blog as a senior software engineer. On 5 September 2024 the software directory AlternativeTo reported, from the founder's own thread on X, that MakewebAI had been sold for US$60,000 about 50 days after launch. According to that report it had over 30 paying users and more than US$1,000 in net revenue, was first listed on the marketplace Acquire.com at an asking price of US$18,000, drew about 60 signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements that buyers sign before they see the numbers), 6 offers and 3 LOIs (letters of intent, non-binding offers with a price), and the founder sold because growth was slow and his money would not last.

Every money figure on this page rests on that one report, which repeats the founder's own post; no buyer, marketplace or payment processor has confirmed it, and the buyer is not named. The evidence grade is therefore D, "reported, not verified". The product pages that this page describes are copies kept by the Internet Archive, because makeweb.ai now redirects to a domain marketplace.

## Pricing

MakewebAI prices from Internet Archive copies of the home page: the launch prices of 11 August 2024 and the prices of 3 December 2024, after the sale (grade C). The site no longer exists, so there are no current prices.

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic, August 2024 launch offer | 2.83 (US$34 a year) |  | 1 site, 100 AI prompts a month, custom domain, code export |
| Pro, August 2024 launch offer | 4.08 (US$49 a year) |  | 10 sites, unlimited AI prompts (launch offer) |
| Basic, December 2024 |  | 14 | 1 site, 100 AI prompts a month |
| Pro, December 2024 |  | 49 | 10 sites, unlimited AI prompts |

In August 2024 both plans were sold only by the year, at an early-adopter discount: Basic at US$34 a year (shown as down from US$69) and Pro at US$49 a year (shown as down from US$99). The 70% offer was marked "0 Left" and the 50% offer "6 Left". The FAQ said there was no free trial and no refund. By December 2024 the page showed US$14 a month for Basic and US$49 a month for Pro with an option to pay yearly and "Get 2 months free"; the yearly amount was not in the archived text. The per-month values for yearly billing below are calculated: the yearly price divided by 12.

## How much did MakewebAI make, and what was it sold for? The numbers, graded

A one-person AI website builder with about 30 paying users, listed for US$18,000 and reported sold for US$60,000 in September 2024

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sale price, reported 5 September 2024 | US$60,000 | D | AlternativeTo news by Mauricio B. Holguin, 5 September 2024: "Makeweb.ai has been acquired for $60,000 just 50 days after its launch." The article names "Zishan Sami's Thread on X" as its official source. The buyer is not named. | [1] |
| Asking price on the marketplace | US$18,000 | D | Same article: "initially listed on Acquiredot.com for $18,000". Acquire.com is the marketplace meant. The listing page was not found. | [1] |
| Sale price compared with the asking price | about 3.3 times | calc | Calculated: US$60,000 divided by US$18,000. | [1] |
| Interest from buyers | about 60 NDAs, 6 offers, 3 LOIs above US$50,000 | D | Same article: "around 60 NDAs, 6 offers, and 3 LOIs with competing bids exceeding $50,000". | [1] |
| Paying users and revenue before the sale | over 30 paid users; more than US$1,000 net revenue in total | D | Same article. The revenue is a total since launch, not a monthly figure. | [1] |
| Sale price compared with total revenue | about 60 times | calc | Calculated: US$60,000 divided by the reported US$1,000 of net revenue. The buyer paid for the product, the code and the domain, not for profits. | [1] |
| Reason for selling | slow growth and limited financial runway | D | Same article. Runway is the time a founder can keep working before the money runs out. | [1] |
| Time spent building before the sale | about 6 to 7 months; the founder's first SaaS product | D | Same article. SaaS (software as a service) is software rented by subscription over the web. | [1] |
| Founder | Zishan Sami, solo founder | C | Archived About page, 20 September 2024: "Makeweb.ai is built by Zishan, an IIT Kharagpur graudate and a solo founder in the making." The archived blog signs the posts "Zishan Sami", "Sr. Software Engineer & A Solopreneur". | [4, 5] |
| AI models used | GPT-4o and Llama3-70b | C | Archived home page, 11 August 2024: "We use combination of powereful LLMs like GPT-4o & Llama3-70b under the hood"; screenshot cloning "powered with GPT-4o". | [2, 5] |
| Launch prices | US$34 a year (Basic) and US$49 a year (Pro) | C | Archived home page, 11 August 2024, at an early-adopter discount from US$69 and US$99. | [2] |
| Prices after the sale | US$14 a month (Basic) and US$49 a month (Pro) | C | Archived home page, 3 December 2024. The page then said "Trusted by hundreds of users around the world." | [3] |
| Launch date | about 17 July 2024 | calc | Calculated: 50 days before the 5 September 2024 report. The sale may have closed some days before the report, so the launch may be slightly earlier. The first blog posts are dated 9 June 2024, so the product existed before the launch that the founder counted from. | [1, 5] |
| Months from launch to the sale | 2 | calc | Calculated: July 2024 to September 2024. | [1] |
| Outside funding | none | D | AlternativeTo: "Despite being bootstrapped". | [1] |

How to read this table: a grade D value is reported by one secondary source (AlternativeTo) that repeats the founder's own post, and nothing else confirms it. A grade C value was read on the product's own archived pages. An X value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B.

## When did MakewebAI launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a blank app page in March 2024 to a reported sale in September 2024, then a domain for sale. Each entry carries its grade.

- **27 March 2024** (grade C [7]): The Internet Archive's first copy of www.makeweb.ai: an empty React application page, "Web site created using create-react-app".
- **9 June 2024** (grade C [5]): Zishan Sami publishes three posts on the product blog, including "Welcome to Makeweb.ai", which lists text-to-page generation with GPT-4o and Llama3-70b, screenshot cloning, AI editing of a selected part, one-click publishing and code export.
- **About 17 July 2024** (grade calc [1]): Launch, by the count of "50 days after its launch" in the sale report (calculated).
- **11 August 2024** (grade C [2]): The archived home page sells two yearly plans at US$34 and US$49. The 70% early-adopter offer is marked sold out and 6 places are left at 50%.
- **August to early September 2024** (grade D [1]): According to AlternativeTo, the founder lists the business on Acquire.com at US$18,000 and receives about 60 NDAs, 6 offers and 3 LOIs above US$50,000.
- **5 September 2024** (grade D [1]): AlternativeTo reports, from the founder's thread on X, that MakewebAI was sold for US$60,000, and that the service will keep running for its users.
- **3 December 2024** (grade C [3]): Under its new owner the archived home page has monthly prices of US$14 and US$49 and the line "Trusted by hundreds of users around the world."
- **April 2025** (grade C [7]): The last Internet Archive copies of the home page with the product, dated 7 and 28 April 2025.
- **2 November 2026** (grade C [8]): makeweb.ai answers with a redirect to a page that offers the domain name MakeWeb.ai for sale on the marketplace Atom.

## Why did MakewebAI work?

### Timing

Website generation from chat and from screenshots was one of the most visible uses of the new multimodal models in mid-2024; GPT-4o, which reads images, came out in May 2024. A product in that category was easy to explain to buyers on a marketplace, which may be why the listing drew about 60 NDAs, as AlternativeTo reported.

### A small, complete product

One engineer built the editor, the AI generation, hosting with SSL certificates and custom domains, templates, and code export. A buyer got a working product with paying users, not an idea. The founder said, as AlternativeTo reported, that his goal was to learn the whole business cycle from start to sale.

### Competition between buyers

AlternativeTo reported an asking price of US$18,000 and three LOIs above US$50,000. When several buyers bid for a small asset, the price follows the bids, not the revenue: the reported sale price is about 60 times the reported total revenue.

### Low running cost

The sites it produced were static pages, with no backend or database to run for each customer. The main cost per user was the calls to the AI models, limited on the cheaper plan to 100 prompts a month.

## How it was built

These details come from the product's own pages as kept by the Internet Archive. They are grade C.

- The marketing site was built with the Gatsby 5.13.6 static site generator (named in the archived page's generator tag); the editor ran as a separate web app at app.makeweb.ai.
- Generation used GPT-4o for text and screenshots and Llama3-70b, a model from Meta, to create components on a canvas.
- Generated components used HTML, CSS, Tailwind CSS and JavaScript. The FAQ said the tool could only build static websites, with no backend and no blog system.
- Published sites ran on a subdomain of makeweb.live or on a custom domain, with free SSL certificates and a CDN with DDoS protection, as the plan list said.
- Users could download the full code of a site, which the page sold as "No vendor lock-in".
- The page loaded the affiliate script of Lemon Squeezy, a payment and subscription service, with the store name "makeweb".

Sources: [2, 5, 3]

## Who tried this before MakewebAI, and why did they fail?

Four companies in our database of failed startups promised that anyone could build a website without a designer or a developer, one of them with AI. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### The Grid (2014 to 2020; funding US$4.7M; cause: Product/Tech Failure)

- Promise: An AI that designs your website for you, so you skip the designer.
- Why it died: The AI of the time could not design pages of consistent quality, and Wix and Squarespace offered polished, easy tools.
- Record: 

### Sosh (2012 to 2013; funding US$2.3M; cause: No Market Need)

- Promise: A drag-and-drop builder that produces professional websites without code.
- Why it died: Too complex for beginners and too limited for professionals; the code it produced was messy.
- Record: 

### WebCake (2013 to 2016; funding US$120K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: An all-in-one tool for small businesses to design and publish a responsive website.
- Why it died: Wix and Squarespace had more features, and WebCake had no money left to keep up.
- Record: 

### Infogami (2005 to 2008; funding US$12K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Rich web pages that anyone could create and edit without technical skills.
- Why it died: Too early for mass adoption of do-it-yourself web tools, and WordPress grew faster.
- Record: 

## What changed

The Grid promised in 2014 what MakewebAI sold in 2024: describe the site and let software design it. The Grid's designs were weak because the AI of 2014 to 2020 could not write good page code. By 2024 models like GPT-4o could write HTML and Tailwind CSS from a sentence or a screenshot well enough that one engineer could build the whole product in a few months on top of an API.

What did not change is the competition. Sosh, WebCake and Infogami lost to Wix, Squarespace and WordPress, and in 2024 those platforms, Webflow and many funded AI builders all added AI site generation. MakewebAI did not try to win that race. As AlternativeTo reported, the founder sold within weeks of launch because growth was slow and his money was limited, and he took the price that competing buyers offered.

## Can one person copy MakewebAI now?

**Verdict: The product is easy to copy. The sale price is not.**

An AI website builder of this kind is a few months of work for one engineer on top of a model API, and many now exist, so a new one has little to stand on. What a reader can copy is the decision to build a complete small product, list it early on a marketplace with honest numbers, and let competing buyers set the price. The reported price came from buyer interest in a hot category in mid-2024, not from revenue, and that interest may not repeat.

1. Build a complete product around one new model ability (here, reading screenshots), including hosting, domains and payment.
2. Charge from the first day, even a small yearly price, so the listing can show paying users.
3. List on a marketplace such as Acquire.com with a modest asking price, sign NDAs with many buyers and ask for written offers.
4. Keep the stack simple (static output, one payment provider) so a buyer can take it over without the founder.

**What is still open.** Small, complete AI products in categories that buyers already understand, sold early to buyers who want a working product with users rather than a revenue stream.

## What could go wrong for MakewebAI?

- **What is not verified.** The sale price of US$60,000, the asking price of US$18,000, the 30 paying users, the US$1,000 of net revenue and the 60 NDAs, 6 offers and 3 LOIs all rest on one source: an AlternativeTo news article of 5 September 2024 that repeats a thread on X by the founder, Zishan Sami. The thread itself could not be read (x.com needs a login). The buyer is not named, and no Acquire.com page, buyer statement or payment record was found. A reader could look for the buyer's own account of the purchase, an Acquire.com case study or a later interview with the founder.
- **Which launch the 50 days count from.** The article says the sale came 50 days after launch, which points to mid-July 2024. But the product blog has posts dated 9 June 2024, the founder worked on it for 6 to 7 months by the same article, and the full marketing page appears in the Internet Archive only on 11 August 2024. The launch date on this page is calculated and may be off by some weeks.
- **The price was for the asset, not the profits.** As reported, total revenue before the sale was a little over US$1,000, so the price was about 60 times revenue. A buyer paid for code, a domain, users and a place in a popular category. This is not evidence that the business could support a person.
- **The business later disappeared.** The new owner raised prices to US$14 and US$49 a month by December 2024. The last archived copies with the product are from April 2025, and on 2 November 2026 the domain redirected to a page that sells the name MakeWeb.ai. What the buyer did with the product is not known.
- **Unchecked testimonials.** The archived home page shows a "Wall of Love" of short quotes with names and job titles, some of them launch congratulations addressed to the founder. These quotes were not checked against their authors.

## Sources

1. AlternativeTo news, 5 September 2024, by Mauricio B. Holguin: MakewebAI has been acquired for $60K just 50 days post-launch — https://alternativeto.net/news/2024/9/makewebai-has-been-acquired-for-60k-just-50-days-post-launch (grade D). Read in full (downloaded 1 November 2026). Cites "Zishan Sami's Thread on X" as its official source; the thread itself was not opened. Source for every money figure, the user count, the listing and the reason for the sale.
2. Makeweb.ai home page, Internet Archive copy of 11 August 2024 — https://web.archive.org/web/20240811150738/https://makeweb.ai/ (grade C). Read in full. The founder's own page before the sale. Source for the features, the models, the launch prices and the FAQ.
3. Makeweb.ai home page, Internet Archive copy of 3 December 2024 — https://web.archive.org/web/20241203104701/https://makeweb.ai/?aff=mdXlY (grade C). Read in full and compared with the August copy. The page after the sale. Source for the later monthly prices.
4. Makeweb.ai About Us page, Internet Archive copy of 20 September 2024 — https://web.archive.org/web/20240920180305/https://makeweb.ai/about/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the founder's name and the solo-founder statement.
5. Makeweb.ai blog, 9 June 2024: Welcome to Makeweb.ai: Revolutionizing Website Creation with AI, by Zishan Sami; with the author page, Internet Archive copies of 20 September 2024 — https://web.archive.org/web/20240920163308/https://makeweb.ai/blog/welcome-to-makeweb-ai/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the first public description of the product, the post dates and the founder's title.
6. AlternativeTo: Makeweb.ai app page — https://alternativeto.net/software/makeweb-ai/about/ (grade C). Read in full (1 November 2026). Directory entry: "Developed by Zishan", since 2024, subscription.
7. Internet Archive CDX index of makeweb.ai captures, 2024 to 2025 — http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=makeweb.ai/&from=2024&to=2025 (grade C). Read the list of captures and the capture of 27 March 2024. Source for the first and last dates the site was archived.
8. makeweb.ai, HTTP response of 2 November 2026 — https://makeweb.ai/ (grade C). Read the response headers only: a 302 redirect to https://www.atom.com/name/MakeWeb.ai. The redirect target was not opened.
9. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.