AI
An honest answer from a dev shop: AI really can put together a solid brochure site today, and for a new venture that’s often plenty. The limit shows up where the website turns into a business tool: custom features, integrations, serious SEO, legal compliance. On its own AI falls short there, but in a developer’s hands it’s a great accelerator. Here’s what to expect on both sides.
AI-based site builders (the AI modules inside the big website builders, plus the newer tools that generate a page straight from a prompt) take your description and generate the page structure, a draft of the copy, and the design. A few hours of tweaking gets you something you can publish. There are three cases where this is a genuinely good route:
In these cases the AI tool isn’t competing with the developer. Honestly, this is exactly what we recommend to anyone who comes to us with a budget of 200,000 HUF (around 500 EUR): start with an AI site, and come back when the business can support custom development.
In our experience, things tip over at five points, and every growing business runs into these sooner or later.
A lot of people frame it as AI versus developer. The reality: good dev teams already work with AI tools, and part of that efficiency gain comes back to the client in the price. At ZNiTech, AI goes toward speeding up coding, drafting copy, and suggesting test ideas, but the decisions stay in human hands: what the site structure should be, what belongs on the homepage, how the analytics are set up. You can’t outsource responsibility to a model.
In terms of price, this means a custom-designed company site gets built faster and cheaper today than a few years ago. We put the specific price bands together in the website pricing article.
| Situation | Recommended route |
|---|---|
| Just starting out, budget of a few hundred thousand HUF (roughly 500 to 1,500 EUR) | AI site builder with a template |
| Running business, the site brings in customers | custom build, sped up with AI |
| Campaign page for a few weeks | AI site builder or template landing page |
| You also need features (booking, accounts, payments) | developer, because this is now an app |
| You want to rank for competitive keywords | developer plus content strategy |
Can I build a website with AI for free? Yes, several tools offer a free plan, usually on the platform’s subdomain and with ads or heavy limits. For business use the paid plan is the realistic option, starting at a few tens of thousands of HUF a year (from around 50 EUR).
Will an AI-built website do well on Google? At a basic level you get a page that’s indexable and technically fine. Ranking, though, is decided by how useful the content is and how the site is structured, and here generic generated copy falls short. For competitive keywords it won’t work without a strategy.
When should I switch from an AI site to custom development? When the site is already bringing in revenue and you hit the first real limit: you need a feature, an integration, or more serious SEO. At that point the switch isn’t a cost, it’s an investment, because you’re building on traffic that already works.
Is AI taking web developers’ jobs? It’s reshaping the market for simple brochure sites, that much is clear. But it’s actually growing the market for business systems, integrations, and custom needs, because more companies reach the point of needing a more serious tool, and they get there faster.
Stuck between the two? Show us what you have now, and we’ll tell you honestly whether the AI site is still enough or you already need a developer: get in touch.