There is a moment that catches nearly everyone out. You ask ChatGPT for a website. It writes one — properly, files and all. You ask it to publish, and it says it can't.
This is not a limitation of the model. The same model, in a different app, does it in one step. What differs is the app around it, and specifically whether that app can send a request to somewhere else on your behalf.
Reading a page and sending a request are different things
Every chat assistant can read. Most can browse — you can paste a link and ask what's on it.
Publishing is not reading. Publishing means taking your files, attaching your account credential, and sending them to a server. That is a separate ability, and the browser versions of most assistants do not have it. They will fetch our instructions perfectly, understand them completely, and then have no way to act.
The honest ones say so. If yours offers to walk you through it manually or asks you to paste something into a terminal, that is what it is telling you.
The four that can
All four run on your own computer. What they cost differs, and that matters more than anything else here, so it goes first rather than buried in a feature list.
Publishing with us is free. The tool you drive it with may not be.
Google Antigravity — free
Google's agent-first development environment — antigravity.google. Built around telling an agent what you want and letting it work, rather than editing files yourself.
This is the one to start with if you are not already paying for an AI tool. It is free to use, and it is the only one of the four where the whole path — build a website, publish it, point your domain at it — costs nothing at any step.
It is also the newest of the four, which cuts both ways: fewer rough edges smoothed off, but designed from the start around the way people actually work with agents now.
Cursor — free tier, then paid
A code editor with an assistant built in — cursor.com. There is a free tier with a limited number of requests, which is enough to build and publish a small site. Heavy use needs a subscription.
It looks like a professional developer's editor, because it is one. That is either reassuring or intimidating depending on where you are starting from. Pick it if you want to watch the files being made and expect to keep tinkering after launch.
ChatGPT with Codex — needs a paid ChatGPT plan
The coding side of ChatGPT, at chatgpt.com/codex. It works across a whole project rather than one reply at a time, and it can run commands and make requests.
There is no free tier: it comes with the paid ChatGPT plans. If you already pay for ChatGPT, you may already have it — worth checking before you install anything else, because the conversation will feel exactly like the one you are used to.
Claude Code — needs a paid Claude plan
A terminal tool from Anthropic — claude.com/product/claude-code. You type into a terminal window, which sounds worse than it is: you are still writing sentences, not commands.
Also no free tier — it comes with the paid Claude plans, or through API credits. It is the most direct of the four, with nothing between you and the work, which some people love and others find bare.
Which one should you actually pick?
Paying for nothing yet: Antigravity. Free, and built around describing what you want in plain sentences. Start here.
Already pay for ChatGPT: Codex. It is included, and it is familiar.
Already pay for Claude: Claude Code. Same reasoning.
Want to see and edit the files yourself: Cursor, on its free tier to begin with.
Nothing is locked in. All four talk to the same platform, so you can start in one and continue in another with the same site and the same account.
One caveat worth stating plainly: what these tools cost changes, and free tiers appear and disappear. The prices above were right when this was written. Check before you commit to one — and note that none of that affects your site, which stays live regardless of which tool you used to publish it or whether you still have it.
The other option: keep the chat you have
Some chat apps can add connectors — a way of giving the assistant abilities it did not ship with. If yours can, you do not need a new tool at all.
Point it at:
https://dashploy.com/mcp
with your DashPloy code as the authorisation. The chat you are already having gains the ability to publish. Whether your app supports this is worth thirty seconds of checking before you download anything.
What the setup actually looks like
Whichever you choose, the whole of it:
- Install the tool.
- Sign up at dashploy.com. A code appears on your dashboard immediately, with a copy button.
- Paste one line into the tool, with your code in it. It is on your dashboard, ready to copy.
- Say what you want. "A one-page site for my plumbing business in Leeds, with my phone number and hours."
There is no step involving servers, hosting plans, DNS, build commands or FTP. Your assistant reads what it needs from us and does the rest.
What you get without paying
Two websites. 100 MB of storage. 100,000 requests a month — requests rather than visitors, since one page view fetches the page plus its images and fonts. HTTPS on everything.
And one custom domain — your own yourname.com, not a subdomain of ours.
That is the bit people assume costs money, because at most hosts it does. If you
already own a name, you can point it at a free site today. If you don't, the
yourname.dashploy.app address you get works perfectly well and has a
certificate.
For a plumber, a photographer, a café, a wedding, a CV — that is not a trial that runs out. It is the whole thing, indefinitely.
The genuine limit is room rather than capability: a second custom domain needs a paid plan, and so does more storage or traffic. Code that runs on a server — a login, a form that stores what people send — is included on the free plan from the first minute.
If you are still in a browser chat
You are not stuck. Ask it to write the site anyway — the files are the valuable part and any assistant can produce them. Then install one of the four above, hand over the files and the same one-line instruction, and let it finish the job.
A conversation that ends with a working website and one clear next step was not a wasted conversation.