DreamHost Thinks AI Website Creation Should Cost Less Than Your Netflix Subscription

Over the past couple of years, AI website builders have started showing up just about everywhere in hosting. A lot of them work in similar ways: “Add a menu up top. No, to the left.” And, honestly, why wouldn’t they be? They have customer needs to meet, and a lot of them want the same thing.

Hostinger launched Horizons last year; Wix has been the daddy of SaaS builders for nearly two decades; 10Web created one of the market’s first AI WordPress builders; and Squarespace introduced AI Blueprint in 2023, which sketches out the site’s pages and layout before users fill in the content. (See table below.)

Now, DreamHost is joining in with its new AI website builder, Remixer, launched on March 10. But this approach hints at something slightly different. It incorporated its brand-new AI website builder directly into the base hosting experience starting at the ad-tier price of a Netflix subscription.

Remixer is interesting considering DreamHost offers both traditional web hosting and managed WordPress hosting. At first glance, that makes the builder look a little contradictory — why would a company known for WordPress hosting build a tool that might bypass a CMS entirely?

WordPress still powers more than 40% of the web and shows no signs of slowing down, especially since it just created an official AI development team and is actively working on Gutenberg Phase 3.

So the CMS ecosystem isn’t disappearing anytime soon; developers and agencies will likely always want control over their environments, and the flexibility that platforms like WordPress provide.

But like many tools in today’s ecosystem, it’s also catering to a broader audience where even simple sites are expected to look as sophisticated as the fully customized ones.

Still, the audience the modern web was built for keeps expanding. For many new site owners, installing software and configuring a dashboard was never the appealing part of building a website. They’ve always been after the fun part.

It’s probably the same reason people once built GeoCities pages and personal homepages. It was fun to put stuff online, and it still is.

Some companies pitch AI builders as premium creative tools layered on top of existing platforms. Others are bundling them directly into hosting plans to simplify onboarding, perhaps even pitch it as a main selling point.

DreamHost appears to be leaning toward the latter approach. Remixer is included with hosting plans that renew at around $7.99 per month four years after promotional pricing, putting it among the more affordable AI-powered site builders currently available.

The $1.99-to-start, $7.99-in-four-years pricing is not unheard of, of course. Similar promotional pricing fueled the shared hosting boom about a decade ago. The difference is what the user is getting.

DreamHost is one of many platforms building its own portfolios and foundations, staking a claim in this market that will become so saturated in a few years.

It joins many others — Hostinger, Wix, 10Web, and more — experimenting with ways to turn website creation into the easiest thing to do. (So easy a caveman could do it!)

DreamHost is interesting in its own right because of how cheap and bundled it actually is. If more hosts start doing this, the AI builder may start to look less like an add-on and more like something that simply comes with hosting.

It’s reminiscent of what happened with SSL certificates; many hosts charged extra SSLs when they were a monthly add-on. But as encryption became a standard part of running a website, charging extra for SSL stopped making sense.

And so providers began including them directly in their plans — without charging extra or raising base prices.