Someone offered to build your website free. What's the catch?

The four places the money actually is

Most free website offers in Malaysia use one or more of these four models. None of them is dishonest by nature. They just put the cost in very different places.

• 1. The build is free, the brand is theirs. Ad-supported and freemium builders. You get a working site quickly, with their name on it and their subdomain in the address, and you pay to remove both. Prices move around a lot between providers and plan tiers, and the headline rate is often an introductory one — read the renewal price on their current pricing page, not the sign-up price. What makes this model easy to deal with is that the upgrade conditions are published in advance.
• 2. The build is free, the hosting is recurring — and the site may not be portable. The design costs nothing and the hosting is billed on a cycle. Some proprietary platforms have no meaningful export, which is usually a property of the platform rather than anyone's scheme. The effect is the same either way: if you can't take the site with you, the recurring fee stops being a price you can compare, because the alternative is rebuilding. Ask one question, in writing: what files and data can I export if I leave?
• 3. The build is free because it's the opening move. A simple site given away to start a conversation about the bigger project — the system, the app, the retainer. Perfectly legitimate, and often good value, as long as you know that's the shape of it and you're comfortable saying no to part two.
• 4. The build is free and paid for on approval. The vendor carries the build as a sales cost and is paid only if you approve deployment. This is our model, and its catch is real too — it's further down, in its own section.

A free offer isn't risky because it's free. It's risky when the part you'll actually pay for is the part nobody has quoted yet.

Five questions that sort them out

Ask before anyone starts work, and ask by message rather than on a call, so the answers are written down:

• "Whose name is the domain registered in?" This is the big one, because whoever the registrant is controls the address. A site that can't be exported may have to be rebuilt; a domain registered to someone else can mean delay, a fee, or a dispute before you get it back. Ask about both, and get the answer as text you can keep.
• "What do I pay in year two?" Free covers the build. Domains and hosting are recurring for everyone, though the billing cycle and the amount vary a lot — some Malaysian business hosting packages land in the RM 250–RM 750 a year region, others well above it, and first-term and renewal prices are often different numbers. A quote that doesn't name a year-two figure isn't finished.
• "Can I move this site to another host?" Not will you — whether you can. The answer tells you whether the monthly fee is a price or a rope.
• "Can I edit my own hours and prices?" If every change is an email and a wait, the real cost of the site is the changes you'll skip making.
• "What's the number if I want out, and what happens to what I've prepaid?" Every arrangement should have an exit with a price on it, and you want both halves — a fee you can live with is a different thing from a fee plus forfeiting the rest of your term. "There's no need to think about that" is an answer.

Five plain questions, and a vendor who has thought about them should be able to answer all five in one message. A slow or partial answer isn't proof of anything on its own — it's a reason to get the missing part in writing before you commit, rather than after.

One timing note, because it's where free offers legitimately differ. For a fixed-price website you can get all five answers before anyone starts. For a custom system there often is no price yet — the point of building a demo first is to find out what the thing actually needs to be. That's fine, as long as two things are true: the demo really is free and carries no obligation, and you get the complete written quote and accept it before anything goes into production or onto an invoice. The risk was never seeing something free before the price exists. It's being asked to commit before the price exists.

Our catch, stated plainly — the same five answers

We'd be doing the exact thing this article warns about if we didn't answer our own five questions. One thing to separate first, because the deal genuinely differs:

• A website — including one we generate from your Google Maps listing — has a fixed published price.
• A custom system — booking, ordering, membership, inventory, an internal tool — does not. We build a working demo free, and the price is quoted and agreed in writing only after you've seen it running. That's now the bulk of what we do, and its catch is a different one: there is no list price to check in advance, so the thing to insist on is the written quote before you commit to anything. Nothing is payable until you've accepted it, and anything added later is quoted separately rather than appearing on an invoice unannounced.

With that split in mind, our five answers — for the website side, where the numbers are fixed:

• Whose name is the domain in? Ours. The .com included with a plan is registered to MINETECH PLT and held in our registrar account. You have the use of it while the subscription is active; it is not transferred into your name, and letting the plan lapse does not transfer it either. If you'd rather own the address outright, register it yourself and we'll point it at the site — it stays in your name and never passes through us. That option costs nothing extra and we'll say so rather than let you find out in year three.
• What do you pay in year two? On the annual plan, RM 188 for each further year. On the three-year plan, nothing in years two or three — the RM 500 covers all three, and the next renewal is RM 500 for the next three years. Either way your rate is locked to what you signed up at for as long as you keep renewing the same plan without a gap, and there is no separate hosting invoice.
• Can you move the site elsewhere? Ask us and we hand over the files. There's no self-service export button; what we build is ordinary HTML, CSS and images, and on request we give you those and your data in an agreed format. Our editor, its history and the hosting are our platform, so those don't come with you — worth knowing before you compare. Portability differs a lot by product and it's worth checking the provider's own documentation rather than a review site: as at 28 August 2026, Wix states a Wix site has to run on Wix infrastructure and can't be hosted elsewhere, and Squarespace offers an export of specified content as a WordPress XML file rather than a whole site. "Can I export my content" and "can I take the site" are two different questions; ask both.
• Can you edit it yourself? Yes. Text, prices, opening hours and photos, through the editor, with a version history and one-click revert if you change something you didn't mean to. You don't have to email us and wait.
• What's the number to get out? RM 80, minus what you haven't used. Releasing the included domain to your own registrar is a one-off RM 80 and ends the subscription for that site. The unused part of your term isn't forfeited — it's credited against the fee pro rata, and if the credit comes to more than RM 80 we refund you the difference. Leave halfway through an annual plan and the credit covers the fee outright.

And the part that isn't a question: we build first, at our cost, and you owe nothing until you approve the deployment. No deposit, no scoping fee, no hourly billing during the build. If you look at what we've built and pass on it, there is no invoice — we absorb it. That is the whole model, and it only works because enough people say yes.

All of the above is in our Terms of Service, which is where you should check it rather than taking a blog post's word for it — and which we publish for exactly the reason this article exists.

When free is the wrong answer

Three cases where you should expect to pay properly, up front, and be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise:

• Custom systems, past the demo. Booking engines, inventory, anything touching payments or customer records. The working demo is genuinely free — ours included — but the production system, its hosting and the ongoing work are real engineering, and they get scoped, quoted and accepted in writing before they become payable. Treat "free" as covering the demo, never the delivered system.
• Anything with a compliance obligation attached. Invoicing that has to satisfy LHDN's e-Invoice rules, for instance, is a specification to meet rather than a design to like. To be explicit: we do not sell, and do not claim certification for, a MyInvois product — our e-Invoice write-up is general information and an offer to scope, nothing more. Whether and when the rules apply to your business depends on the current HASiL timeline and your own circumstances, so check those rather than take a vendor's word for it.
• When a launch date is contractual. If missing a date costs you money, that deadline needs to be agreed and quoted as part of the job rather than assumed. Ask for it in the scope; don't infer it from goodwill.

The short version

Free is a business model, not a favour, and there are several of them. Find out which one you're being offered, get the domain answer in writing, and make somebody name the year-two number. Do that and a free build is simply a vendor taking the risk instead of you — which is the right way round, and the whole reason we do it this way.