Carrd

Independently run by its creator AJ (handle ajlkn); a small two-person team per the maker's own public interviews, no separate corporate entity name published in official docs/terms.

Built starting 2015, publicly launched 2016 per the maker's own retrospective site.

Fully hosted, proprietary one-page (and simple multi-page) site builder; not a CMS in the blogging/collections sense.

Terms of Use: technology/software are Carrd's property; users may not copy, modify, reverse engineer, or access source code. Users get a limited license to use the service, not the software itself.

Free 'Basic' tier: build and publish up to 3 sites on a .carrd.co subdomain, with 'Made with Carrd' branding and reduced media/element limits.

Pro Standard is the cheapest tier with a custom domain, at $19/year billed annually (Carrd bills yearly only, no monthly plan) = ~$1.58/mo equivalent. Pro Lite ($9/yr, ~$0.75/mo) is cheaper but has NO custom domain support, so it doesn't qualify for this schema field.

Pro Standard ($19/year = ~$1.58/mo) is the tier most Carrd users need and is explicitly marketed as the 'Most Popular' plan: custom domain, forms (Mailchimp/Sendy etc.), widgets (Stripe/PayPal/Gumroad/Typeform/Facebook), analytics, meta tags, locally-served fonts. All Carrd billing is annual only.

Carrd has no native ecommerce/cart/checkout plan tier. Selling requires embedding a third-party widget (Stripe Checkout, Gumroad, PayPal, Lemon Squeezy) on Pro Standard ($19/yr) or higher; there is no Carrd-billed 'ecommerce plan' price to report.

No evidence of an introductory-vs-renewal price gap; Carrd's published Pro Lite/Standard/Plus prices ($9/$19/$49 per year) are flat annual subscription prices, not promotional first-term pricing.

No official refund/money-back policy window found on Carrd's pricing, plans, or terms-of-use docs; not stated either way in the Terms of Use page reviewed.

Sites are built from stacked sections (and elements within them) via a visual left-panel/canvas builder, not a fully freeform canvas and not a rigid block library like WordPress Gutenberg.

Sections and elements can be reordered via drag-and-drop in the builder.

Text and elements are edited by clicking directly on them in the live preview canvas.

No version history / revision rollback feature documented anywhere in Carrd's official docs (Sites or Building sections); only in-session undo within the current editing session is implied, not a saved history.

Changes save automatically while editing in the dashboard; a separate explicit 'Publish' step is required to push saved changes live.

No official native iOS/Android app for editing sites; Carrd is browser-based only (though its own editor is responsive).

Templates/starting points are a one-time starting layout, not a live theme; there is no documented feature to swap a built site's template afterward without manually rebuilding sections.

Editorial judgment. Carrd is explicitly designed as the simplest mainstream site builder: one core interaction model (sections and elements), no separate design/content modes, and most users are live within minutes per its own marketing and the founder's own account of its positioning versus Squarespace/Wix.

Total starting points shown on the official template picker (carrd.co/build), spanning Profile, Landing, Portfolio, Form, and Sectioned categories plus a Blank option. Free accounts can only use a subset; premium templates require Pro Lite+.

Built-in library served via Google Fonts API; Pro Standard+ can toggle 'Serve fonts locally.' Fully custom (non-Google) font files require a workaround via the Embed element and an externally hosted font file/CSS @font-face, not a direct upload.

Carrd sites are responsive by default with limited manual breakpoint-level tuning (e.g., hide-on-mobile toggles on some elements); it is not a full breakpoint-editing system like Webflow's Designer.

Custom CSS is added via the Embed element (HTML/CSS/JS), which requires Pro Standard or higher.

Custom JavaScript is added via the same Embed element, requiring Pro Standard or higher.

Built-in element-level animation/transition options (e.g., slideshow/animated elements) exist in the builder, though it's not a full timeline-based interaction/animation tool like Webflow's or Framer's.

Carrd supports 'Shared Styles' that apply a style definition across multiple elements/sections site-wide.

Editorial judgment. Sections/elements give real layout and style control (colors, spacing, custom CSS/JS on Pro Standard+), well beyond a rigid template-bound builder, but the one-page, section-stacking paradigm and lack of a true freeform/absolute-position canvas cap it well short of Webflow/Framer-level unconstrained design.

All Carrd sites (free and paid) are hosted by Carrd; there is no self-hosted deployment path while live on the platform.

No self-hosted/open-source version of Carrd exists; the only 'take it elsewhere' path is the Pro Plus static HTML/CSS/JS download, after which the site is no longer connected to or re-uploadable to Carrd.

Carrd's docs don't explicitly name a CDN provider or confirm CDN-backed asset delivery; unverifiable from official sources reviewed.

SSL is provided automatically for both .carrd.co subdomains and connected custom domains.

No published uptime SLA or guarantee found in Carrd's official docs or terms.

Exact upload size figures corroborated by search-derived Pro Lite feature summary; official docs page (carrd.co/docs/pro/plans) confirms tiered site counts but bandwidth is not a named line item, implying no separate bandwidth metering.

Pro Plus ($49/yr) or higher can download a site as a ZIP of unminified HTML/CSS/JS. Elements requiring Carrd's platform.(notably forms) are visibly present but non-functional in the export, and the export cannot be re-uploaded to Carrd.

Queried https://cdn.httparchive.org/v1/cwv?technology=Carrd&geo=ALL&rank=ALL directly (and lower-cased 'carrd') on 2026-07-08: both return an empty JSON array for every month, meaning Carrd is not a tracked technology in HTTP Archive's CWV Technology Report (verified the API itself works and returns full monthly data through 2026-05 for other technologies, e.g. Wix, using the same query shape). No combined pass rate, split, or origins count can be reported.

Carrd's docs describe manual image resize/crop during upload but don't confirm automatic responsive image serving (srcset/WebP conversion etc.) at publish time; unverifiable from official sources reviewed.

No official Carrd documentation found confirming or denying lazy-loading of images/media.

No cache-control settings exposed to site owners in Carrd's Publish/Settings docs (no headers, CDN cache purge, or TTL controls documented).

Site title and description are set/edited any time from Publish, available on all plans including free.

Redirects (Pro Plus) and section anchor/URL naming are configurable; the base published URL is the chosen .carrd.co subdomain or custom domain, which is fully owner-set.

Redirects (all served as true 301s, with wildcard/path-substitution support) require Pro Plus or higher.

Pro Plus includes explicit 'canonical URL' configuration per the official Pro features/plans documentation.

robots.txt (and ads.txt and other supporting site files) can be directly edited via Dashboard > Sites > Manage > Files, but only on Pro Plus or higher.

Every site (including free-tier) automatically gets a standards-compliant sitemap.xml (with Google's image/video extensions) at /sitemap.xml, no configuration required.

No built-in schema.org/JSON-LD generator; Carrd has no dedicated structured-data feature in its docs. A Pro Standard+ user can manually inject JSON-LD via the Embed element (which supports arbitrary HTML/CSS/JS placed in <head>).

No native multi-locale hreflang feature; a site has one Language setting (for lang attribute/RTL/translation-tool hints), not per-locale URL variants. hreflang could only be hand-added via the Pro Standard+ Embed/meta-tags features.

Custom social Share Image is available from Pro Lite ($9/yr); custom meta tags (which can include Open Graph name=content pairs) require Pro Standard.

Achievable via the Meta Tags feature (Pro Standard+) using 'robots=noindex' as a documented example; since Carrd sites are single-URL, this is effectively whole-site noindex rather than true per-subpage control.

No official Carrd documentation page found confirming an explicit alt-text field on the Image element; unverifiable from official sources reviewed.

Carrd's Building docs list no blog/post/article element or content type; the platform is explicitly a one-page (and simple multi-section) site builder with no publishing/blog engine.

No collections/custom content type system exists; sections and elements are manually placed per-site, not driven by a structured content model.

No categories/tags feature exists since there is no blog/collection content model to taxonomize.

No content/publish scheduling feature documented; changes go live immediately upon clicking Publish.

No version history/rollback feature found in official docs.

Sharing lets a Pro site owner grant Admin or Editor access to other accounts (including free-tier accounts) for collaborative editing of the same site; this is access-sharing rather than a true multi-author publishing workflow, but it does allow more than one person to edit.

No RSS feed feature; consistent with having no blog/post engine to feed from.

No public content/read API for site data is documented anywhere in Carrd's official docs.

No native cart/checkout/product-catalog system; selling works by embedding third-party widgets (Stripe Checkout, Gumroad Buy Button, PayPal, and Stripe-powered payment-enabled Forms) on Pro Standard+, with Carrd providing only the page design around them.

Fully supportable via the Gumroad Buy Button widget or Stripe Checkout, both aimed squarely at simple digital-product/one-off sales rather than physical-goods store operations.

Recurring billing is possible only through the connected processor (e.g. a Stripe Checkout session configured for a recurring Price ID); Carrd has no native subscription/billing feature.

Currency handling is entirely delegated to the connected payment widget (Stripe/PayPal/Gumroad); Carrd itself has no currency/localization settings for commerce.

No point-of-sale feature or integration documented; Carrd is web-only.

No cart concept exists on Carrd (each payment widget is a standalone buy button/checkout session), so there is no abandoned-cart recovery feature, native or otherwise.

Pro Plus's ZIP download includes the site's HTML/CSS/JS/media, but interactive elements requiring the Carrd platform.(notably forms) are non-functional once exported, and the export can't be re-imported to Carrd, so it's a one-way, partly-functional snapshot rather than a full structured export.

The visual design/markup itself is fully exportable as static files (Pro Plus), but any functionality that depends on Carrd's backend (forms, widgets tied to Carrd's rendering) breaks in the exported copy, so the site cannot be losslessly relocated off-platform and kept fully working.

Custom domains are registered with any third-party registrar and merely pointed at Carrd via A/CNAME records, so the domain itself is always freely portable, independent of Carrd.

While live, a Carrd site only runs on Carrd's own hosting; there is no self-host/off-platform-runtime mode. The Pro Plus static export is a disconnected snapshot with broken dynamic elements, not a portable running site.

No public content/read-write API is documented for programmatically accessing a site's content; the only extraction path is the manual Pro Plus ZIP download.

Editorial judgment. Low switching cost in effort (sites are simple, small, and cheap to rebuild elsewhere) keeps risk from being 'high,' but functional lock-in is real: static export requires the priciest tier, breaks all interactive elements (forms, widgets), can't be re-imported, and there's no API or CMS-style structured export; so 'taking the site elsewhere working' is effectively not possible, only 'rebuilding from a visual reference.'

No public API for managing sites/content programmatically is documented in official Carrd docs.

No native webhooks feature; outbound automation instead goes through the Pro Plus Custom Form integration with Zapier/Make/n8n, which are themselves the ones exposing webhook-style triggers, not Carrd directly.

The Embed element (arbitrary HTML/CSS/JS anywhere including <head>) requires Pro Standard or higher.

No CLI or developer tooling of any kind is documented.

Custom Forms (Pro Plus) can send submissions to a Zapier Zap, Make scenario, or n8n workflow.

No AI site-generation feature (prompt-to-site) is documented anywhere in Carrd's official docs or plans.

No AI writing/copy assistant feature is documented in the builder.

No AI image generation/editing tools are documented.

No AI-driven SEO suggestions/assistant feature is documented.

Two access levels only: Admin (full control) and Editor (content-editing access) can be granted per-site to another account via Sharing; no granular custom-permission system.

No documentation of real-time simultaneous multi-user editing (like Figma-style co-editing); Sharing grants access to edit, not simultaneous live co-editing safeguards.

No editorial/approval workflow (draft review, publish approval) is documented; any Editor/Admin with access can publish directly.

The builder shows a live preview of unpublished changes before the owner clicks Publish, but there's no separate staging environment/URL distinct from production.

No in-editor commenting/annotation feature is documented.

No activity/audit log feature is documented for tracking who changed what on a shared site.

Carrd is run by a very small team (the maker has publicly described it as a two-person operation); no 24/7 support commitment is documented.

Editorial judgment. Docs are organized, plain-language, and cover most features with short focused articles (carrd.co/docs), but coverage has real gaps for this research (e.g., no dedicated page confirming image alt text, lazy loading, or CDN specifics), and there's no searchable knowledge base depth comparable to WordPress/Shopify's documentation.

No SOC 2, ISO 27001, or other security certification is published anywhere in Carrd's official docs, terms, or marketing pages reviewed.

No backup/restore feature is documented for site data; the only safeguard against data loss is the user's own Pro Plus static export, which is a one-way snapshot, not a restorable backup.

A site has a single Language setting (affects lang attribute, RTL orientation, and non-editable element labels like Timers) but there is no feature for running multiple language versions of one site with separate content/URLs; that would require building and connecting entirely separate Carrd sites manually.

No translation-management workflow exists; the Language setting only helps external tools like Google Translate correctly detect the site's language.

No per-locale URL structure or hreflang generation exists; consistent with there being no multi-locale site feature at all.

Selecting a right-to-left language in the site Language setting correctly reorients text-containing elements.