Instatic, the Free Open-Source Framer: Claude Builds Your Pages, and You Own Every One
Describe a page, and Claude builds it on a visual canvas as real buttons, text and pictures you can drag around. Instatic does what Framer does for free, and every page it publishes is plain HTML you own. Why it can replace a $45-a-month Framer plan, how to set it up with your own Claude key, and how to host it anywhere.
Framer's Pro plan costs $45 a month on monthly billing, or $30 a month if you pay for the year, and you pay it for each site. That's $540 a year for one site. Instatic is a free, open-source visual site builder that does the same job: you design on a canvas, and it publishes your pages. It has passed 8,800 stars on GitHub in five months.
It has an AI agent built into the editor, and it works with your own Claude key. Describe the page you want, and Claude builds it right there on the canvas, as real buttons, text and pictures you can select, drag and restyle. Every page it publishes is plain HTML on a server you pick, so the pages are yours.
Why it can replace Framer
- Price: Instatic is free under the MIT license. Framer's paid plans are bought site by site: Basic is $15 a month and Pro is $45 a month on monthly billing. With Instatic you pay for your own small server instead.
- Claude builds on the canvas, not in a code box: everything it adds is a normal element on the page. Click it, move it, change the text, restyle it, exactly as if you had placed it yourself.
- Your own key: the agent runs on your Claude API key (or OpenAI, OpenRouter, or a local model through Ollama). There's no credit plan to run out of. You pay Anthropic only for what you use.
- You own the pages: Instatic publishes plain HTML and compact CSS, with no framework and no editor code left in the page. You can export the whole site as one ZIP file any time.
- Host it anywhere: one-click deploy to Railway, or run it on Render or on your own server with Docker. Your domain, your server, your files.
- It's a full CMS too: blog posts, custom collections, forms that save to your own database, and user roles.
One catch up front: it's early software, and you run it yourself, so hosting and your Claude usage cost a little. The details are in the setup and in the honest part at the end.
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